CAMEROONIAN FEYMAN FIRED ON HEAD IN KUWAIT
CAMEROONIAN FEYMAN FIRED ON HEAD IN KUWAIT
He was 47 years old and his name was Meli Mustapha. Of Cameroonian origin, the man is said to have lost his life in troubled circumstances in Kuwait. According to the sources, he was shot and killed by a Kuwaiti he tried to defraud. The Arab, having already been the victim of the scammers commonly called “feyman”, this time took his measures by setting a trap for the compatriot.
This is how he brings him to the desert for business. On the spot, he lodged two bullets in his forehead and in his chest. Later he will go to the police to confess his murder. According to the source, the body of the Cameroonian was later found in “advanced decomposition”.
Meli Mustapha would not be on his first operation with the Arab. “When the Mougou becomes “WISE”, the “Wiseman” becomes the “Mougou”. our compatriot Meli Mustapha, thought it was good to go tchop the mougou again for a second time, except that this time there, the Mougou was no longer mougou, it was wise which was fatal for him!!!” indicates the Lucky Lion whistleblower.
Feymania studied in a French university
The Science Po International Study and Research Center conducted a study on the scam phenomenon in Cameroon called feymania. The work directed by Dominique Malaquais is presented in a document entitled “Anatomy of a scam: feymen and feymania in Cameroon”
The CameroonWeb editorial staff presents some extracts from the study carried out on feymania in Cameroon
PORTRAIT OF A FEYMAN
There is, of course, feyman and feyman. The best known of all was Donatien Koagne, alias the king. 1994, Pretoria. Cameroonian journalist Pius Njaw is in South Africa to carry out a series of interviews with the team preparing Nelson Mandela’s accession to power. He has an appointment that morning at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In an article published in 1998 3 , he reports the following. He expected to ask the questions, now the minister has an unusual one for him: “Is there a king in Cameroon above the President of the Republic? Njaw says no and asks why the question is.
The minister’s office has just received a fax from Sandton, an upscale district of Johannesburg, where it is reported that the King of Cameroon has arrived in a five-star hotel in the area. The management of the establishment wishes to know what protocol provisions should be adopted. Inquiries taken, Njaw e establishes that not only is it not a question of a king or even a chief – he will toy for a moment the idea that the one we are talking about is Joseph Ngnié Kamga, leader of a powerful chiefdom of West Cameroon – but of an ordinary Cameroonian citizen, a certain Colbert Nya. Not without difficulty, Njaw e manages to get an appointment with the mysterious Mr. Nya. In August 2000, he recounted, still amused, his meeting with the man who was said to be king. In the hotel, we direct him to the presidential suite. At the door stands a young woman covered in gold.
The journalist takes a few steps forward; his shoes disappear into six inches of carpet. In front of him, a small Louis something lounge, point of entry into a huge apartment. Young people are busy there. One of them struggles with a remote control supposed to remotely control the curtains of the row of rooms. Success: a curtain rises, revealing a mezzanine where stands a man dressed all in gold – a golden dressing gown, gold-coloured slippers and dazzling jewellery. Neither Ngnié nor Nya, it is in fact Donatien Koagne. Njaw e had never met him, but knew him by name. In the country, we talked a lot about him. We knew he was very rich; the origin of his fortune was said to be illegal, even mafia-like, but little else was known. Delighted to have surprised Njaw e,
For forty-five minutes, Njaw e tried to pull the worms out of him: what was he doing in South Africa? What business was he doing there? More generally, what business was he doing? He learned nothing specific. Koagne said he had recently taken over CAPME (an aid structure for SMEs, now defunct). This, he said, was his field of activity; he was in Johannesburg to buy a plane, a boat. Njaw e left the suite of the “king” little more informed than when he arrived, but convinced that something was wrong. Subsequently, the journalist learned that Koagne had forged close ties with the ANC: “He had completely taken over Mandela’s party; a whole section of the presidential entourage had been corrupted”.
Mandela himself had certainly been fooled, although the we do not know exactly how: to Njaw e, as to others subsequently it seems, Koagne showed photos in which he appeared alongside the illustrious head of state, which suggested, if not the existence of a friendship, at least that of a relationship allowing him to have access to the great man. Worse, Donatien would have been present at Mandela’s inauguration as an official guest 4 . It turned out that Mandela was not the only African head of state with whom Koagne had established ties.
In a photo album that he liked to leaf through in public, he could be seen alongside many personalities, including Marshal Mobutu and the President of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. Koagne showed photos in which he appeared alongside the illustrious head of state, which suggested, if not the existence of a friendship, at least that of a relationship allowing him to have access to the great man. Worse, Donatien would have been present at Mandela’s inauguration as an official guest 4.
It turned out that Mandela was not the only African head of state with whom Koagne had established ties. In a photo album that he liked to leaf through in public, he could be seen alongside many personalities, including Marshal Mobutu and the President of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. Koagne showed photos in which he appeared alongside the illustrious head of state, which suggested, if not the existence of a friendship, at least that of a relationship allowing him to have access to the great man. Worse, Donatien would have been present at Mandela’s inauguration as an official guest 4 . It turned out that Mandela was not the only African head of state with whom Koagne had established ties.
In a photo album that he liked to leaf through in public, he could be seen alongside many personalities, including Marshal Mobutu and the President of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. a relationship allowing him to have access to the great man. Worse, Donatien would have been present at Mandela’s inauguration as an official guest 4 . It turned out that Mandela was not the only African head of state with whom Koagne had established ties. In a photo album that he liked to leaf through in public, he could be seen alongside many personalities, including Marshal Mobutu and the President of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso. a relationship allowing him to have access to the great man. Worse, Donatien would have been present at Mandela’s inauguration as an official guest 4 . It turned out that Mandela was not the only African head of state with whom Koagne had established ties. In a photo album that he liked to leaf through in public, he could be seen alongside many personalities, including Marshal Mobutu and the President of Congo-Brazzaville, Denis Sassou-Nguesso.
While Koagne did not fall out with Mandela, his relations with Mobutu, Sassou and others were rocky. It was because he played a very bad trick on themº We know today that Donatien, since the end of the 1980s at least, was involved in all sorts of illegal activities: counterfeiting (a business in which he shared the risks and profits with a brother with a predestined name, Gutenberg), drug trafficking and, even more lucratively, uranium, control of illegal gambling circles in Doualaº He shone in particular in a field which he had made his specialty: that of fraud financial. Journalist Jean-Moïse Braitberg describes the Koagne scam, now legendary in Cameroon, as follows: “The specialty [of Koagne and his] clan [Donatien,
Before [his] arrival, the Koagnes take care to slide a real dollar between two sheets of white paper and repeat the operation until they form a thick pad of so-called “blank” paper, pre-cut to the correct size. When the victim shows up, these new kind of sandwiches are solemnly coated with a “miracle liquid” (actually an acid used in photography), then immersed in a bath of iodine tincture. [Celle], placed in the presence of acid, has the property of dissolving the paper [ º] of the Koagnes, but not the ultra-resistant paper used in the manufacture of dollars. After a few minutes [ º] one of the Koagne grabs his tongs and comes out of the “magic bath” of fistfuls of dollars. If the victim [º] rushes to his bank to check the
The prey is ready. She is ready to buy, very expensive (on average 5 million francs), the “magical process” . More than one fell for it: Mobutu, from whom Koagne is supposed to have extracted 15 million dollars in this way; Blaise Compaoré, President of Burkina Faso, who would have lost 40; Etienne Eyadéma, leader of Togo, his Congolese counterpart Sassou-Nguesso, several ministers, including a Gabonese, a Tanzanian, a Spaniard, several Kenyans and a former member of the Israeli secret services. Still others will be caught, including several personalities in Djibouti and a senior Yemeni official.
But Yemen, the place of his last “smoldering blow” (an expression that Le Messager is fond of), did not bring Donatien luck. Koagne’s Yemeni setbacks are worth dwelling on, because they highlight an important aspect of feymania: the panic it sowed in certain political and diplomatic circles as well as in the secret services of several countries, both African and Western. At the end of 1994, Koagne arrived in Sanaa, where he bamboozled a member of the Yemeni secret police. A few months later, he made a brief stopover in Paris. His mode of transport: a Falcon 50 which he rented following an unfortunate collision between his own Falcon (cost: 12 million FF) and a gazelle lost on the runway of Nairobi airport . While the rental aircraft is
He discovers there some two thousand million dollars in notes. He refers to his superiors, who confiscate the loot and imprison the Cameroonian. This one will be released five hours later, following a somewhat mysterious call. The money stays with the customs officers; it’s about establishing whether the dollars are real or fake. Authentic, answer the Americans, after inspecting the cuts. But the affair has only just begun: “The Americans [have] not told everything [to the French]. While the notes are good, research conducted in Washington on the serial numbers reveals that they are part of a donation made by the United States to the Yemeni Treasury as bilateral aid”7. Before the US tax authorities or customs can do anything, Yemen takes action.
The Yemeni police are waiting for him there. The feyman is arrested and put incommunicado. Things might have ended there, were it not for one detail: a notebook in which Donatien had noted the identity of those he had defrauded and the sums he had extracted from them. This notebook, everyone wants it: the “big ones” trapped by Koagne, who do not wish to see their name dragged through the mud by political enemies to whom he would have provided ammunition; the French government, which is keen to protect its African “friends”; the Americans, who are quite interested in Donatien’s dollars and whom the French suspect of being on the lookout for information harmful to the interests of the metropolis in Africa.
The Quai d’Orsay is getting its hands dirty. It will take several months for one of his senior officials, a certain Catherine Boher, to establish exactly where Koagne is. In June 1996, this lady flew to Sanaa, where she learned that she could recover Donatien and the famous notebook if the crook returned the money he had stolen, some three million dollars. Back in Paris, Boher discusses the case with a colleague, Jean-Michel Beaudoin.
This one builds a plan: camouflaged on board a pleasure yacht, a team of “specialists” will surreptitiously land in Yemen to recover the notebook, the hoard and, incidentally, Donatien (the operation will not be done). There is also talk of a ransom that a group of African heads of state would be ready to pay to obtain the release of Koagne, whose “presence is essential to withdraw funds deposited in Monegasque banking establishments belonging to the said heads of state. State ” .
Boher continues to negotiate with the Yemeni authorities. Then she turns to Donatien’s family. A third chapter then opens. There too, according to some, it is feymania, but of a somewhat different kind: the Koagne clan would become the turkey of the farce. Karl Laske, journalist at Liberation, reports the facts as follows: “[Boher, who] asserts that one of his friends is among Koagne’s victims, negotiates with [the latter’s sister] reimbursement to the Yemenis, and receives certain payments. Nothing comes of it.
“Koagne’s family suspects [Boher] of embezzlement [and] files complaint in Paris”. What happened to Donatien? We don’t really know. He was not released, but is believed to be still alive, suggesting that his package money was not has still not been recovered. In Douala and Yaoundé, the rumor runs that he would have had both hands amputated by his Yemeni sensors. As for the notebook, some think that the French have it, others, in the wake of President Biya, that the Cameroonian government has it.
