By Grace Audu (HEALTH CORRESPONDENT)
After months of unproductive negotiations with government authorities to overturn a restriction on its operations, medical organization Doctors Without Borders, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have decided to withdraw its services from Cameroon’s anglophone zone.
The organization was seeking approval to resume providing healthcare to thousands of people affected by a disease that had been suspended for nearly eight months.
MSF, on the other hand, announced on Tuesday that it was withdrawing its teams from the North West, one of two anglophone regions of Cameroon that has been wracked by violence since 2017.
Emmanuel Lampaert, MSF’s operations coordinator for Central Africa, said, “We cannot stay any longer in a region where we are not authorized to provide care to people here.”
MSF’s activities in the region were banned in December after Cameroon accused it of assisting local armed groups. The medical charity has disputed the allegations on numerous occasions, claiming that its operations adhere to the values of independence, neutrality, and impartiality.
MSF said it has engaged continually with Cameroonian authorities for months in order to find a solution to overturn the ban, taking every available opportunity to provide transparency and clarity on all the allegations that have been issued against them, but that the efforts have been unfruitful.
The conflict began in earnest after government of President Paul Biya, 88, responded to an initial industrial protest against perceived marginalisation of minority English speakers in the country with a military crackdown in 2017.