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

In the long, bloodstained ledger of Africa’s democratic betrayals, few chapters are as pungently shameful, or spectacularly tragic, as the travesty recently staged by Cameroon’s Constitutional Council; a body that now stands as a consecrated altar and mausoleum of cowardice and injustice, where the will of the people is ritually sacrificed. The unconstitutional and cowardly exclusion of Maurice Kamto, the most credible opposition leader and MANIDEM’s rightful candidate for the 2025 presidential election, is not only naked provocation and an insult to voters; it is state-sponsored electoral banditry – a daylight mugging of democracy itself. Let’s be clear: this Council is not a legal institution – it is a shriveled coven of Beti tribal jingoists and partisan cronies, comprising one menopausal matriarch and a cabal of tired old men tottering between senility and servility. Lacking spine, vision, or honor, these Judas-hearted charlatans, traded principle for privilege, betraying their solemn oaths with the audacity of sycophants groveling for scraps and crumbs of power. These soulless merchants of betrayal are not judges; they are scribes of a dying regime, dressing Paul Biya’s dictatorship in the robes of law and stamping tyranny with the seal of legitimacy. Their loyalty lies not with the constitution they swore to uphold, but with the decrepit throne of an aging autocrat. Drunken on greed and self-centered pedestrianism, they bent over backwards to crawl where conviction and character demanded they stand tall. The arbitrary rejection of Kamto is shameful, pathetic, disgraceful and devoid of any perfunctory exaggeration. History will brand those traitors as footnotes in the annals of treason and judicial brigandage.

In rejecting Kamto’s candidacy amid the overwhelming evidence of conspiracy and fraud by ELECAM and MINAT, the Council did not just err in law – its members defecated on democracy; trading jurisprudence for sycophancy, and law for lèse-majesté; while reinforcing its image as an uncircumcised appendage and spineless puppet of the ruling CPDM party. What manner of justice crawls on its belly to serve the whims of power? What kind of court builds its rulings not on precedent, but on illegality and political expediency? The Council has now become what every dictatorship requires: a rubber-stamp chorus of cowards, cloaked in legality, but reeking of fear. With counterfeit authority, they mutilated the voters’ right to choose. These court-jesters are not guardians of the republic; they are the undertakers of the republic’s dying breath. This decision will be remembered as a national curse; a scar gouged into the face of Cameroonian democracy.

History Will Name Them

History has never been kind to those who mortgage the future of nations for the fleeting comfort of a tyrant’s approval. The names of these traitors- Clément Atangana, Florence Rita Arrey, Émile Essombe,

Paul Nchoji Nkwi, Jean Baptiste Baskouda, Sanda Bah Oumarou, Charles Étienne Lekene Donfack, Ahmadou Tidjani, Adolphe Minkoa She, Aaron Logmo Beleck, Monique Ouli Ndongo – shall be recorded, not with honor, but with the indelible ink of shame. Their legacy will not be that of learned jurists, but of accomplices to repression, the assassins of a people’s dream. Let them know: robes rot, titles fade, power expires, but betrayal is immortal. No amount of legal contortion will erase the truth. The Council did not interpret the law; they strangled it. They did not deliver judgment; they delivered complacency. They did not uphold the constitution; they cremated it, and then danced around its ashes like jesters in a haunted palace.

The ossified Biya regime is terrified – not of Kamto’s politics, but of his popularity -his ability to mobilize the nation, articulate the frustrations of a destitute people, and to present a vision of a new Cameroon. Instead of defeating him at the ballot box, they have chosen the path of the despot: eliminate the challenger, muzzle dissent, and rig the race before it begins. This is the logic of tyrants. Cameroon today is ruled not by law, but by fear dressed in constitutional disguise. Let us be absolutely clear: Kamto did not lose the 2018 presidential election – he was robbed like Fru Ndi in 1992. And now, the regime is ensuring that he does not even get a chance to contest. This is not just an electoral hold-up. This is a premeditated assassination of Cameroon’s already battered democratic system.

With Kamto removed from the ballot, October 12 is not an election – it is an anointing. A theatrical coronation of an already-entrenched regime, cloaked in the illusion of popular choice. This insult to democracy will not go unnoticed. Cameroonians are not blind. They see the charade and know what is happening. They smell the rot. They feel the betrayal. From Maroua to Bamenda, from Yaoundé to the Diaspora, they know that without a credible challenger like Kamto, the upcoming election is a pageant, not a poll – a coronation masquerading as choice. The message is clear: there is no ballot in Biya’s Cameroon; only bullets, bans, and betrayal.

In a country already buckling under multiple crises, from armed conflict in the Anglophone regions, to spiraling poverty, to corruption so rampant it is practically government policy; this decision is a match tossed onto a powder keg. Already, tensions are rising. Protests are breaking out. People are boiling with rage. The authorities are pushing the country dangerously close to the edge of chaos, and when the violence comes, let no one feign surprise. A government that crushes ballots will eventually meet bullets. Kamto has long stood for peaceful resistance and dialogue. But even his patience cannot pacify a generation that sees no future under a regime that treats their dreams with scorn and arrogance.

Where is the international community that claims to defend democracy and human rights? To remain silent in the face of such blatant democratic sabotage is to be complicit. To accept this travesty is to betray every Cameroonian who still believes in a better tomorrow. Sanctions must be considered. Visa bans on members of ELECAM and the Constitutional Council should follow. And international election observers must not lend legitimacy to a charade they know is rigged.

This Is Not Over

There is a river swelling in the hearts of Cameroonians. It is fed by anger, suffering, and stolen choices. When that river bursts its banks, it will wash away not only the symbols of oppression but those who enabled them with gavel and gown. The Constitutional Council may think itself safe within the marble chambers of privilege. But marble cracks, and chambers echo. When the people rise – and rise they will – no robe will be thick enough to shield them from the storm they helped sow. Kamto may be off the ballot, but he remains the face of the resistance, the voice of a silenced majority, and the nightmare of a regime on life support.

To the Constitutional Council: You have traded truth for tyranny, justice for a bowl of stale porridge, and history will not forgive you. You may silence one man. but you cannot silence a nation that has awakened to its own power. To Biya and his clique: you may block Kamto from the race, but you cannot block the tide of history. The hour is late. The mask has fallen. Every tyrant believes they can cheat time. But every regime that silences its people will, eventually, be silenced by them. The fight for Cameroon’s democracy is not over – it has just begun.

By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai