Quite predictably, the Constitutional Council missed another manifest rendezvous with history after it rejected the petition by Barrister Akere Muna, seeking the disqualification of the 93-year-old Paul Biya from contesting the upcoming presidential election. Akere Muna, anti-graft crusader, eminent jurist, former Bar Council and Pan-African Lawyers Union (PALU) president; and presidential candidate in the October 2025 election, had asked the Constitutional Council to declare Paul Biya ineligible to run. Citing Article 118 of the electoral code, Akere’s argument was simple but devastating: nemo dat quod non habet – one cannot give what one does not have – a president who has become a ghost, absent for weeks abroad, ruling through “high instructions” relayed by unelected proxies, incapable of fulfilling his constitutional duties, lacks the requisite capacity to credibly seek re-election. This was not merely legal reasoning but a moral imperative to prevent the grotesque spectacle of a nation held hostage by a phantom ruler, hell-bent on dragging Cameroon to his grave. That the petition foundered at the Constitutional Council is beside the point. That much was expected from a captive institution that has transformed itself into a spineless, uncircumcised appendage of the ossified regime.

Akere’s petition had sought to rescue Cameroon and restore sanity to a nation drowning in absurdity and international ridicule – a nation where fawning sycophants pledge their support to a picture running for president! Akere spoke truth to power with courage. And for that, he stands not alone, but with every patriotic Cameroonian who dares to still dream of a country worthy of its name. Of course, such patriotic Cameroonians will not include Dr. Theodore Ashu Nyenty, aka “Teddy Boy” who saw in Akere’s petition, an opportunity to showcase his obsequious boot-licking credentials and endear himself to the corridors of power. In a rambling critique of Akere’s petition, Ashu Nyenty was contortionist, twisting law and logic until they collapse beneath the weight of their own contradictions. He begins with a semblance of intellectual honesty and rigor – he admits Akere has locus standi, and concedes the Constitutional Council has jurisdiction. Yet, he dismisses Akere’s argument of “shadow governance” as “specious.” He argues that no statute limits presidential travel, and scoffs at Biya’s prolonged absences. He contends that delegation of powers is constitutional, and sneers at Akere’s appeal to the mischief rule as “hocus pocus,” as though interpretation were not the lifeblood of jurisprudence. His rhetoric is not that of a jurist but that of a griot, skilled not in law but in the art of gilding decay with pedanticism.

Dr. Ashu Nyenty – The Scholar as Griot

Ashu Nyenty’s analysis reads less like a serious juristic dissection and more like the rhythmic panegyric of a palace griot, dutifully plucking the strings of sophistry to serenade a crumbling autocratic regime on life support. Cloaked in the verbosity of academia and the pretensions of legal rigor, his jibberage is nothing more than an obtuse and dim-witted justification for the continued desecration of Cameroon’s democratic conscience by a 93-year-old incumbent whose advanced age, health comorbidities and failing faculties, now stand as a national embarrassment and international disgrace. This incantation at the altar of power is self-centered pedestrianism. Consider Ashu Nyenty’s core arguments:

Come to Equity with Clean Hands: Ashu Nyenty argues that Akere lacks “clean hands” because he accepted to run in an election convened by the same “ghost president” whose incapacity he denounces. This is sophistry in extremis. Akere’s participation is strategic engagement, not complacence. The act of running under a phantom decree is not a ringing endorsement of its legitimacy but a courageous defiance of a broken system. One cannot on one hand acknowledge that Paul Biya has been an absentee president; that Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh effectively runs the country by proxy, and then on the other hand insist that this is constitutionally pristine. That is not law – it is griotic gymnastics, the kind of intellectual prestidigitation one expects from court jesters, not legal scholars or public intellectuals.

On Biya’s Prolonged Absences: Ashu Nyenty insists no law restricts presidential travel. True, but constitutional logic must consider ratio legis. While no law prescribes travel limit, the constitution presupposes presence, vigilance, and personal exercise of executive power. Data from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reveal Biya spent at least 5.5 years abroad between 1982- 2018. To claim this comports with constitutional fidelity is to reduce the presidency to an absentee landlordship – an absurdity reductio ad absurdum exposes as untenable. Law is not blind to reason; cessante ratione legis, cessat et ipsa lex—when the reason for the law ceases, the law itself collapses. This is a literalist refuge that offends both logic and justice because Summum jus, summa injuria – strict law applied rigidly may become the greatest injustice. To aver the contrary is to mock the very essence of democratic accountability.

On Governance by Proxy: Ashu Nyenty conflates limited statutory delegation with permanent abdication. He appeals to Article 10(2) of the 1996 Constitution, arguing delegation of presidential authority is permissible. But delegation, by nature, presumes temporary necessity, not permanent abdication. Delegata potestas non potest delegari – delegated authority cannot be re-delegated ad infinitum. Delegation of authority assumes the principal retains ultimate agency. Biya does not. His “high instructions” are scripted whispers, his decrees the product of proxies who wield his signature like a ventriloquist’s dummy. Delegation cannot substitute leadership itself; it was conceived as an occasional necessity, not as the architecture of a phantom presidency. The framers of the constitution never intended delegation of authority to ossify into governance by unelected proxies. To defend this perversion and normalize this absurdity is to legitimize the grotesque.

On the Mischief Rule: Ashu Nyenty sneers at Akere’s invocation of the mischief rule as “hocus pocus.” Yet if ever there was mischief crying out for judicial remedy, the mischief here is glaring: a president too enfeebled to govern has reduced national sovereignty to the whims of unelected groveling courtiers. Ubi jus ibi remedium-where there is a right, there must be a remedy. If interpretation cannot address this absurdity, then law itself becomes an accomplice to tyranny and dictatorship. To dismiss Akere’s interpretation of Mischief rule as “hocus pocus” is to strip law of its teleological essence and its very purpose. For Ashu Nyenty to pretend otherwise is not ignorance – it is intellectual self-masturbation.

On Hierarchy of Norms: Ashu Nyenty retreats to the hierarchy of norms to shield Biya, claiming the Constitution trumps the electoral code. But the electoral code is not peripheral – it operationalizes constitutional norms. And this is precisely the point Akere’s petition presses: when the spirit of the Constitution is violated by a president who has effectively abdicated his duties to unelected proxies, the electoral code must be invoked to rescue the nation from becoming a geriatric monarchy. The principle lex non cogit ad impossibilia (the law does not compel the impossible) invites purposive interpretation: candidacy implicitly requires functional capacity. Cameroonians cannot be compelled to accept governance by a phantom. A system that tolerates a nonagenarian absentee candidate seeking an eighth term is not law – it is organized national suicide.

The Griot’s Betrayal

There is, in truth, nothing new in Ashu Nyenty’s performance. Cameroon has always had its chorus of intellectual boot-lickers willing to play the griot for the palace. At bottom, Ashu Nyenty performs the ancient role of griot – singing praises before the palace gate, perfuming decay with pseudo-juristic incense, and rationalizing the tyranny of an aging monarch he dares not name unfit. Let’s be very clear: Biya is no longer fit to govern. His age has hollowed his body. His prolonged absences, government by remote control, his visible mental and physical decline betray his incapacity. His governance by proxy, through the perpetual “high instructions” of Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, have transformed the highest office in the land into a grotesque parody of leadership. A nation cannot be ruled by a ghost president. This is not governance; it is political necromancy – governance of the living by an absentee mummified despot. All Cameroonian, except those blinded by self-interests, will agree that Biya is showing more wear and tear in the form of his creeping baldness, his wrinkled carbuncular face; the declining swagger of his gait; the deterioration in his husky voice, the diapers, uncontrollable flatulence, and protracted anal blasts. At 93, Biya cuts the figure of a frail, distracted relic, more object of pity than leader. And yet Ashu Nyenty dares to call this normal, lawful, even constitutional. Cameroon deserves better.

Akere’s petition was not only legally sound; it was morally urgent – salus populi suprema lex esto: the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law. The petition is not “legal brigandage” (to borrow Ashu Nyenty’s clumsy expression); it is a necessary moral intervention against the ongoing abuse of an inebriated nonagenarian held captive by a cabal of unelected political jobbers. Ashu Nyenty’s analysis is a sycophantic prostitution of law; the choreography of a man who has exchanged his critical faculties for the baubles of proximity to power. He seems a man too enamored with servitude. He calls Akere’s arguments “legal masturbation.” Yet it is he who engages in intellectual self-masturbation. The pitiful spectacle of Dr. Ashu Nyenty, parading his academic credentials like a griot’s kora, plucking sophistries in defense of a decrepit system is shameful, pathetic, disgraceful and devoid of any perfunctory exaggeration. Cameroon does not need spineless charlatans and court jesters serenading a ghost president. It needs men of character with the courage of their convictions. The tragedy is not merely Biya’s refusal to relinquish office, but the complicity of intellectual griots and sycophants, who, in the twilight of his reign, chose to sing lullabies to tyranny, instead of sounding the alarm for liberty. Ashu Nyenty’s commentary is law in service of power rather than justice. Jurists should uphold fiat justitia ruat caelum – justice even if the heavens fall.

By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai

Ah! What a grand spectacle of democracy turned into pilgrimage, where citizens no longer travel to Jerusalem or Mecca, but to Etoudi—armed not with rosaries or Qur’ans, but with envelopes of pledges and pockets emptied of 5 to10K contributions. The Presidency has become a shrine, and Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh its high priest, who, like the Pope’s emissary, receives all delegations on behalf of the invisible God-King.

Here is the paradox: to meet the Head of State, one must never see the Head of State. His presence is too divine, too sacred, too holy for mortal eyes. Instead, portraits hang like sacred icons on the walls, absorbing prayers, oaths of allegiance, and the groveling of chiefs. Some even went further: dragging a lifesize statue as if Israel’s golden calf had found a rebirth in Yaoundé. Indeed, Biya is no longer a president; he has been canonized into an idol, an untouchable effigy, the Fon of Fons, the deity of marble and ink.

The absurdity glitters like a carnival: chiefs who once commanded warriors now parade as errand boys; student leaders and academics, who ought to grade truth and knowledge, now grade their own loyalty before the altar of the portrait; women examiners, included for “gender balance,” chant in chorus, proving that even equality can be prostituted to idolatry. And for this grand pilgrimage? Each member must pay their own offering—2,000 CFA—like indulgences in medieval Europe, except here it is not for salvation, but for a photo-op with a frame.

What greater hypocrisy! A regime so petrified of its own mortality that it hides behind paper portraits and lifeless statues, yet insists the nation believes the ghost still breathes, still rules, still reigns. The people are told: do not look for the man, only believe in the image. It is politics turned into a cargo cult—where the mere sight of a statue, a portrait, or a signature photocopied a hundred times is enough to summon the aura of authority.

If irony were oxygen, Cameroon would have long suffocated. For in this land, the living leader is absent, the absent leader is omnipresent, and the portrait of the absent leader rules more firmly than the man ever did.

So what’s the purpose of leaving all the way from Bamenda, Garoua etc to Yaoundé when you will still end up talking with a portrait? Millions of whose copies are available nationwide? Let the Chief priest save people the inconveniences by telling them to pledge loyalty at all district levels, just like local congregations worshipping the almighty God!

By Wepngong Moses

Ahead of the 2004 presidential election, SDF’s Hon. Joseph Mbah Ndam (RIP) told me, boastfully and happily, that the SDF candidate Ni John Fru Ndi, would come second ahead of opposition coalition candidate Adamou Ndam Njoya. That implied Mbah Ndam knew and was comfortable that incumbent president Paul Biya would win. That was my first direct experience with political half-aim.

I was a young political reporter and editor at The Herald newspaper then. Fru Ndi had walked out of an opposition coalition effort because Ndam Njoya had been chosen as the “consensual candidate”. Though the political and civil society leaders involved concluded that Ndam Njoya was the man with the profile for the job at the time, Fru Ndi’s entourage said it was inconceivable for Ndam Njoya, leader of a “small party” to clinch the coalition ticket over Fru Ndi, leader of the biggest opposition party at the time.

Not everyone running for President really means to be President. Or rather, many run for President to “win” as little as nowhere near elective office even at the lowest level. By the way, only one out of the lot makes it at any election. For many, it is beyond being able to win. They know they really cannot win. Ostensibly, the most selfless of them run to set an agenda by floating their ideas for more serious candidates to adopt them for the wellbeing of citizens. Matter of fact, many only step into the fray to seek for notice. They engage the race for other purposes.

Take the trouble to count presidential aspirants around the world across human history and possibly less than one percent of names on ballots have ever won anything, not even significant votes. The man called Apostle Ambe Valentine Ngwa might just have avoided that, but for his troubles with an early declaration, and smart calculations, he might have secured a political future.

Dr Nick Ngwanyam, a current affairs commentator, might have captured – with apparent marksman precision – what could have been the calculations of this eloquent TV personality who is also a Pentecostal preacher. Ambe declared to run early but, falling short of fulfilling the conditions to appear on the ballot, he announced he was withdrawing from the race to throw his weight behind SDF’s presidential candidate, Joshua Osih, whom he says embodies the vision he has for Cameroon.

Ambe said his bid for the presidency has been frustrated by the impossibility of obtaining the signatures of personalities (senators, first-class traditional rulers, etc) across the ten regions to make up the required 300 to be eligible as an independent candidate.

Who is surprised? Who, except no one, not even Ambe himself really thought he would be an eligible candidate without a political party nomination? He clearly knew he would not be on the ballot. He obviously declared to run for other purposes than to actually run for president. Ambe says he made phone calls to personalities across the regions of the country to obtain their signatures. Just phone calls! Not as much as field tours to meet – not just call – personalities around the country!

Nevertheless, Nick Ngwanyam says, with that act of endorsing Osih, Ambe might have secured a political future, and thus gets elevated to the high stage to travel, eat, lodge, speak and commune at the same level on the campaign trail as Osih, a non-negligible presidential candidate.

And, Ngwanyam adds, after the election, should Osih win, Ambe may stand a chance to become minister or should Osih fall short, Ambe might hope to be propelled to a high-profile political career from the top in the SDF and may eventually run for mayor of Bonaberi in Douala where he lives. Hence, he might have declared to run for president to end up as mayor.

I recall how humorist, Koukam Narcisse used Ni John Fru Ndi’s traditional appellation “Ni” to mock him. (The word “Ni”, used to refer respectfully to an uncle or any senior in the Ngemba languages spoken in several villages in Bamenda and its environs, means “neither/nor” in French.)

Koukam mocked Fru Ndi for all his political bravado and achievements with a massive political party SDF, as being “Ni John, Ni Fru, Ni Ndi, Ni Maire, Ni Député, Ni Président.” (Neither Mayor, nor MP, nor President.) At least, by Nick Ngwanyam’s projection, Apostle Ambe could reap the benefits of his early announcement of a run for the Presidency by grabbing a mayoral seat. Ambe won’t be the first.

In 1997, UPC’s Henri Hogbe Nlend and NUDP’s Bello Bouba Maigari secured ministerial positions under Biya; the one by running for president perhaps to lose, the other by not running to inconvenience Biya and be rewarded. In that election boycotted by the three most vibrant opposition candidates at the time (Fru Ndi, Bello Bouba Maigari and Adamu Ndam Njoya), one of them, Bello, tiptoed backwards and worked his way into the Government as Minister of State. Fifteen years earlier, he had been made prime minister in the first government after Biya became president in November 1982.

Across decades of Cameroon’s political history, politicians and civil society actors have reaped political benefits by their posturing either by running or not running, either by endorsing candidates or offering to be counter-forces or nuisances to potential winners to the benefit of the incumbent.

Such was the case of certain early UPC militants in the 1970s who were lured into the government by pioneer President Ahmadou Ahidjo after the revolutionary party had been subdued with the execution of its last leader, Ernest Ouandie, in 1971. (Um Nyobe and Felix Moumie had been eliminated earlier.)

As a result, Augustin Frederick Kodock was appointed to several positions including Director General of Cameroon Airlines and at the African Development Bank, sponsored by the Ahidjo government. Mayi Matip was elevated to Senior Vice Speaker of the National Assembly under long-serving House Speaker, Solomon Tandeng Muna.

After the 2018 presidential election when MRC’s Maurice Kamto gave President Biya a real run for his money and even claimed stolen victory, Barrister Jean de Dieu Momo was appointed into the government as reward for his spoiler job alongside the G-20. Momo, a Bamileke like Kamto and himself a presidential candidate in 2011, did not run in 2018. He was rather among 20 or so spoiler political and civil society actors who declared they were supporting Biya. Of them all, Momo got appointed into the government thereafter.

In 2022, Nkongho Felix Agbor “Balla” turned down his announced co-opting into the SDF Shadow Cabinet by then leader, Ni John Fru Ndi, with the obvious backing of then Vice Chairman, Osih. Now, with Balla’s endorsement of Osih for president earlier this year, the SDF presidential candidate said upfront that Balla would be his Minister of Justice should he win the Presidency.

Several other candidates in this 2025 presidential race are obviously not running to win but to position themselves for eventualities. They thus use the election as a positioning test, whereby candidates size their bite by their percentage score which is the equivalent of territory captured by armed groups in an armed struggle to weigh their negotiating position during eventual talks.

With 83 individuals submitting files this year to the elections management body, ELECAM, Cameroonians had before them individuals with different motives from doing a dress rehearsal to testing their potentials for future elections by demonstrating their political weight to secure a place on the negotiating table in case political deadlock necessitates a consensus government or a “government of national unity”. Or even just to get their public service debts paid like Leopard Bessiping.

Some presidential aspirants are under pressure from party militants to berth ministerial portfolios for them to have their own “chop farm” like UPC Kodock loyalists or like Charly Gabriel Mbock under Hodge Nlend or like the entourage of Bello Bouba and Issa Tchiroma enjoying privileges at their ministries. Such is the mindset when chances of regime change appear bleak to supporters and they resort to “wetin man go do” (or a sense of resignation), settling for less than the presidency.

By Franklin Sone Bayen