In July 1994, Yahya Jammeh stormed into power in The Gambia with a soldier’s swagger and the usual promises of salvation. He vowed to restore democracy; instead, he converted the country into a private chamber of fear. His opponents were jailed, tortured and many vanished. Elections were jokes. After twenty-two years of tyranny, Jammeh was voted out in December 2016. For a moment, he conceded defeat on live television only to rescind his concession a week later, claiming irregularities in the vote. But when ECOWAS, the UN and AU called his bluff and his own soldiers refused to die for his delusion, Jammeh fled to Equatorial Guinea. The dictator fell not through divine intervention, but through the exhaustion of a people who had finally remembered they were free.

In Cameroon, its 92-year-old president, Paul Biya, has been in power since 1982. On 12 October 2025, he presided over yet another election, the sort of ritualized farce designed to reassure foreign donors that democracy is alive in that part of central Africa. Biya himself was comfortably in Switzerland during the campaign, surfacing once about five days before the election perhaps to remind everyone he was still among the living. Yet, as surely as night follows the day, the country’s constitutional council declared him victor with 53% of the vote.

Cameroon’s tragedy feels unique in its endurance, because for forty-three years, Paul Biya has perfected the art of state capture. In Cameroon, elections are not civic drills but rituals to gain legitimacy, and everyone from Yaoundé to Paris participates in the fiction. In 2025, due to the miracle of the internet, social media and smart phones, dictators no longer need tanks on the streets, all they require are ballot boxes on television and nodding international observers.

The decay beneath Mr Biya’s state capture is appalling. According to the World Bank, over 50% of Cameroonians live on less than two dollars a day. A few months ago, I travelled to the country to visit family and it was a dreadful experience. Roads are disintegrating death traps, hospitals operate with candles, and medicines are as rare in the country as justice is. This, in a country blessed with fertile soil, minerals, oil and natural gas. A nonagenarian in any rational society would be tending his grandchildren while waiting to meet his maker. In Cameroon, he is in charge of the treasury. Around him, parasitic elite invoke his name as both shield and excuse with phrases like-We Thank the Head of State.

The Anglophone crisis of 2017 was the first genuine crack in Biya’s glass fortress. The English-speaking regions, long neglected and ridiculed, finally rebelled, declaring independence from a state that had treated them as an afterthought. The regime responded with predictable brutality, arrests, executions, imprisonments, abductions and burned villages. During the Anglophone crisis, French Cameroonians (the country’s 80% majority) watched in loud silence and complicity.

Cameroon’s institutions serve not the public but the man and his ruling class. The judiciary is an obedient choir and military courts are now a norm. The police and gendarmes are a network of ruffians while the military is a militia in uniform. The national broadcaster, the CRTV and other state-owned newspapers are theatres of absurdity praising the government’s ghost accomplishments with such fanaticism that even Joseph Goebbels may have found some of their positions preposterous.

To blame Biya alone is to study only half the portrait. His rule endures because Cameroonians by fear and lethargy have surrendered their agency. Bribery has become the national dialect and Cameroonian shave learned to navigate the system rather than confront it. Even the diaspora has perfected digital protests where intelligent people are mighty on WhatsApp forums and Facebook, but politically impotent in reality. AI-generated videos circulate frequently, often intended to stimulate laughter on forums about the ruling elite. It is truly a fascinating experience, and it would be funny if it were not so tragic.

After four decades of economic and moral decay, Biya’s most enduring legacy may be the industrial-scale production of alcoholics. The national pastime is no longer football but the consumption of lager. Men, women, and adolescents toast their hopelessness in pints. The country has found its anesthetic in booze.

Dictatorships do not thrive on cruelty alone; they flourish on the quiet complicity of the governed. For over four decades, Cameroonians have learned to live with their chains, with some, particularly French Cameroonians, even decorating their shackles with pride. The laughter and emojis on social media, the jokes about “We Thank the Head of State” are coping mechanisms and confessions of powerlessness. To speak of collective responsibility is not to vindicate Mr Biya and his ruling elite, but to indict the moral inertia that keeps him in power. A people’s silence is the dictator’s favourite hymn. Each shrug at injustice, cynical joke, emoji to arouse laughter at the depressing situation in the country is complicity.

Mr Biya himself, frail and fading, incapable of controlling his anal flatulence in public can barely walk unaided. Yet his image looms large and he is like an ancestor who refuses to die. To blame this relic alone for the nation’s rot is convenient but dishonest. Cameroonians may say they did not choose tyranny, but by adapting to it, they have normalized it and are therefore collectively responsible for the insanity.

Cameroon’s deliverance will not arrive by foreign rescue or spiritual intervention. It will begin the day Cameroonians grow tired of their amusement at their abuse. Dictators grow old; nations do not. Biya will one day pass, as all mortals must. The fall of Yahya Jammeh, is a reminder that the walls of fear, however ancient, are made of air. They collapse when enough people stop pretending they are rocks. No regime, however ruthless, can outlast a people that decide dignity is non-negotiable. Despots can jail, execute their opponents, kill protesters, jail journalists, burn villages, and rig elections but they cannot win against a determined people.

The story of Yahya Jammeh offers a mirror to Cameroon. For twenty-two years, Gambians endured a reign of fear, killing, torture, and electoral farce, convinced that Jammeh was unshakable. Yet in 2016, when the people refused to accept a stolen election and the army withdrew support, the dictator fell as the courage of the Gambian people met opportunity. Jammeh’s departure is a cautionary tale written in blood and determination. It is a fact that tyranny endures only as long as the people allow it. This may just be time for Cameroon to say enough is enough.

By Isong Asu

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, Cameroon’s Constitutional Council has proclaimed the re-election of 92-year old President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state, for an eighth successive term.

Amid rumours of a close result and claims of victory by his main challenger, former government minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, excitement and tension had been building in the run-up to Monday’s declaration. Hopes for a shock result were briefly raised.

Consequently, despite it being part of the long-term pattern, the official outcome, victory for Biya with 53.7%, ahead of Tchiroma Bakary on 35.2%, came as a disappointment and an anti-climax for many Cameroonians.

Biya’s decision to stand for another seven-year mandate, after 43 years in power, was inevitably contentious. Not only because of his longevity in power, but also because his style of governance has raised questions.

Extended stays abroad, habitually at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva or alternative more discreet locations around the Swiss lakeside city, have repeatedly triggered speculation about the extent to which he is actually governing Cameroon – or whether most decisions are in fact taken by the prime minister and ministers or the influential secretary general of the presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh.

Last year, after making a speech at a Second World War commemoration in the South of France in August and attending the China Africa summit in Beijing the next month, the president disappeared from view for almost six weeks without any announcement or explanation, sparking speculation about his health.

Even after senior officials appeared to indicate that he was, once again, in Geneva, reportedly working as usual, there was no real news until the announcement of his impending return home to the capital, Yaoundé, where he was filmed being greeted by supporters.

And this year it was not really a surprise when he squeezed a further pre-election visit to Geneva into his schedule just weeks before polling day.

Biya’s inscrutable style of national leadership, rarely calling formal meetings of the full cabinet or publicly addressing complex issues, leaves a cloud of uncertainty over the goals of his administration and the formation of government policy.

At a technical level, capable ministers and officials pursue a wide range of initiatives and programmes. But the political vision and sense of direction has been largely absent.

His regime has shown itself sporadically willing to crack down on protest or detain more vocal critics. But that is not the only or perhaps even the most important factor that has kept him in power.

For it has to be said that Biya has also fulfilled a distinctive political role.

He has acted as a balancing figure in what is a complex country, marked by large social, regional and linguistic differences – between, for example, the equatorial south and the savannah north, or the majority of regions that are French-speaking and the English-speaking North-West and South-West, with their different educational and institutional traditions.

In a state whose early post-independence years were marked by debates over federalism and tensions over the form that national unity should take, he has assembled governments that include representatives of a wide range of backgrounds.

Albeit sometimes under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and international creditors, his administrations have averted debt disaster and, in recent years, gradually consolidated national finances.

Moreover, the past decade or so has seen Biya appear increasingly almost like a constitutional monarch, a symbolic figure who may decide a few key issues but leaves others to set the course on most policy areas.

And his continuation in this role has been facilitated by the competitive rivalries between senior figures in the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). While he is there, the succession does not have to be decided.

However, with no designated or preferred political heir apparent, and with some one-time “next generation” CPDM figures themselves now getting on in years, Biya’s perpetuation in office has fuelled a constantly turning rumour mill about the succession.

Increasingly, the name of his son Franck has been cited, even though he shows little interest in politics or government.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of either development or security challenges for the president despite Cameroon’s rich natural resource diversity.

Is it possible that today we are seeing a decisive erosion in popular tolerance of Biya’s self-effacing version of semi-authoritarian rule?

Are Cameroonians tiring of a system that offers them multi-party electoral expression but little hope of actually changing their rulers?

Has the bloody crisis in the English-speaking regions exposed the limits of the president’s cautious and distant approach?

When protests demanding reform first erupted there in 2016 Biya was slow to respond. By the time he did offer meaningful change and a national dialogue, the momentum of violence had accelerated, eroding the space for real compromise.

Meanwhile, so low-key in style, he has failed to really sell an economic and social development vision for Cameroon or instil a sense of progress towards a goal.

Biya was already testing the limits of popular tolerance with his decision to stand for a seventh successive term in 2018.

But ultimately he managed to face down a strong opposition challenge from Maurice Kamto, leader of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) – and when Kamto disputed the official results awarding him only 14% of the vote, he was detained for more than eight months.

But this time around, Tchiroma’s candidacy shifted the mood and sense of possibility in a way that no previous challenger has managed, at least since 1992, when even official results credited John Fru Ndi, of the Social Democratic front (SDF), with 36% of the vote, only just behind Biya on 40%.

And this time it is not just that Biya is seven years older and even more hands-off than before.

It is also that, in contrast to Kamto – who struggled to reach far beyond his core electorate – Tchiroma, a Muslim northerner, has attracted support from a wide cross section of society and of Cameroon’s regions, notably including the two anglophone regions.

This one-time political prisoner who later compromised with Biya and accepted a ministerial post, had the guts to go to Bamenda, the largest English-speaking city, and apologise for his role in the government’s actions.

And over recent days, as tensions grew in the run-up to the result declaration, Tchiroma shrewdly stayed in Garoua, his home city in the north, where crowds of young supporters had gathered to shield him from the risk of arrest by the security forces.

Now, after expectations that had built so high, there is intense frustration and anger among opposition supporters at the official result, however expected it may have been.

The security forces were already reported to have shot protesters in Douala, the southern port city that is the hub of the economy. And shooting has now been reported from Garoua too.

For Cameroon, Biya’s determination to secure an eighth presidential term has brought high risks and painful costs.

Culled from the BBC

There are currently massive military raids across Cameroon as the country prepares for the declaration of falsified presidential election results.

In Douala, Anicet Ekane, a leader of UPC Manidem, was arrested in his home without a warrant of arrest. Many say it was a kidnapping orchestrated by the Minister of Territorial Administration, Paul Atanga Nji, who thought threats could cower the people of Cameroon into submission.

Since the arrest of Mr. Ekane, other politicians are being picked up in night raids. The writing is on the wall. The 43-year-old dictatorship is crumbling. Many Biya regime hawks are desperate. The tides are turning and power is slipping through their fingers.

But the arrest will not change much. Monday will reveal the extent of the people’s determination to bring down a system set up by the country’s president, Paul Biya, to oppress his people and spread corruption and nepotism across the country like an out-of-control fire.

Cameroonians across the world have made up their minds to stand firm. Biya and his group of kleptocrats must leave power for Issa Tchiroma, a man who has promised to clean up the Augean Stable created by the brain dead dictator, Paul Biya.

Mr. Tchiroma also known as Hurricane Tchiroma beat Mr. Biya in the 2025 presidential elections, exposing the incompetence of regime hawks to even fraud thought they claim they are expert at it. Polling station after polling station revealed how Cameroonians hate Mr. Biya and his regime which has brought death and hardship to the population.

The Biya regime noted for its exceptional manipulative and corruption ability is not convincing anybody, not even the international community which has seen the fall of a man who had the best opportunity in the world to immortalize his name by developing his country but decided to elevate corruption and intimidation into a political system.

Today, the ruling party manipulators are at work, demonstrating and calling for peace as if there is war in Cameroon. They claim they have won the presidential election but they are shutting down bars, banning gatherings and arresting ordinary citizens as part of their intimidation strategy. How do you win elections and you are afraid of war? How do you shut down bars and night clubs when your victory is supposed to be celebrated?

The die is cast. Mr. Biya has lost the election and his time at the Unity Palace is up. The arrests and intimidation are simply the kicks of a dying horse.

The people are determined and they are standing with Issa Tchiroma every step of the way. The government’s intimidation is not diminishing the people’s determination to call for change. The time for change is now. The government has a choice. Acknowledge defeat and make the transition smooth or keep on playing old tricks and incur the people’s wrath. The trend of change is irreversible.

For Mr. Biya, he has an opportunity to clean his image or whatever is left of it. He should call Tchiroma and congratulate him and work towards a peaceful transition or stick to his old ways which will only lead to a disgraceful exit from the political scene. Mr. Biya has hurt Cameroonians and many have been pushed into an early grave by the Biya-engineered poverty.

For 43 years, he has unleashed poverty and death on people he is supposed to serve and protect. Death is a common occurrence in Cameroon today. Many Cameroonians are dealing with financial stress. Their kidneys are blowing up due to stress. Their livers are being boiled in alcohol due to frustration.

The people need change. The era of the Internet has brought enlightenment to the people and Atanga Nji’s intimidation cannot reverse the movement that is currently underway.

Biya must salvage something. He has lost trust. He has lost his reputation. He has lost his dignity. Under him, Cameroon has become an Augean Stable. He could however help himself by demonstrating that he is a man with the fear of God in his mind by doing the right thing that might change perceptions in his favor. A word to the wise is sufficient.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai