As Cameroon nears a historic presidential election, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, a man whose career has been steeped in the noxious stew of breathtaking hypocrisy and betrayal, has now emerged, astonishingly, as a self-proclaimed savior of Cameroon. Tchiroma, for decades, was Biya’s most shameless apologist, the regime’s voice-box and ideological attack dog, who now seeks to unshackle himself from the very chains he spent years tightening around the Cameroonian people. Tchiroma did not merely serve the despotic Biya regime. He defended it with unmatched zeal, rationalizing repression and denying atrocities with unflinching composure. He wasn’t merely complicit; he was instrumental. He did not seek truth; he spun brazen lies. He did not serve the people; he served power. Now, with Biya’s dynasty on life support -its 93-year-old patriarch facing creeping senility, hidden behind curtains of frailty, health comorbidities, and palace intrigues – Tchiroma seeks to disown the house he helped burn, by rebranding himself before the regime’s final collapse.

After decades as the poster child of Biya’s oppressive regime, Tchiroma resigned his ministerial post in Biya’s ossified government and now seeks the highest office in the land. But make no mistake: this is not repentance – it is repositioning. Tchiroma is not a man who made mistakes. This is a man who made a career out of betrayal and political treachery. So, let history record it plainly: Issa Tchiroma Bakary is not a reformer. He is not a rebel. He is not the antidote to Biyaism. He is Biyaism’s final mutation! He is not the answer to Cameroon’s problems. He is the echo of its betrayal. Most importantly, he is not the man to bury Biya’s legacy. He is Biya incarnate – just seventeen years younger and infinitely more vicious and cynical. He who dined with the devil for decades cannot declare himself a priest at the devil’s funeral.

A Life Built on Betrayal

Tchiroma’s career has been one long performance of vaulting ambition without conscience. In a stunning display of arrogance, rife with irony and audacity, the 75-year-old former Minister of Labor and Vocational Training, began his campaign for the October 2025 presidential elections, cloaked in the language of change. But let us be clear: Tchiroma is the past pretending to be the future. His cynical political metamorphosis is not a profile in courage, speaking truth to power. It is political choreography. This is not a new dawn; it is the desperate rebranding of a loyal architect of repression; the voice of a man choking on the smoke of his own arson. His 24-page manifesto, promising federalism, jobs, and reform, is not a vision. It reads like a national obituary; an epitaph for his long-dead credibility. He calls the regime “broken.” But he was its spine. He says the people were betrayed. But he wielded the dagger. He says Cameroon needs healing. But he poured the poison. To hear Tchiroma speak today is to watch an arsonist lecture on fire safety. The hypocrisy is simply mind-boggling, incomprehensible, and devoid of any perfunctory exaggeration.

Tchiroma was the velvet voice of a brutal state. From 2009 to 2018, he served as Cameroon’s Minister of Communication; a post he wielded not to inform, but to distort. As a spokesman for Biya’s regime, Tchiroma did not merely obscure truth – he rewrote it. He legitimized repression, and glorified tyranny. He trafficked in propaganda with clinical detachment, rationalizing the regime’s failures, human rights abuses, and corrupt excesses. His every press briefing was a master class in sycophancy and state-sponsored deception. This was not ignorance; it was strategy. Tchiroma did it for power; he did it for the money! Yet, in a brazen contempt for the people, Tchiroma has offered no remorse or apologies. Not for the blood-soaked years. And in perhaps the most egregious display of moral bankruptcy, Tchiroma has never explained the embezzlement of the compensation for the victims of the 2008 Kenya Airways Flight 507 crash at Mbanga Pongo. To rob the dead is to lose any claim to the living.

The Grand North Remembers

Strategically, Tchiroma’s pivot to the Grand North – his home turf – is no accident. For decades, the region – battered by poverty, battered by Boko Haram insurgency, battered by deliberate neglect – has been treated not as a constituency, but as a voting reservoir to be drained at will. Among its principal architects of economic ruin and stagnation is none other than Tchiroma. With succession battles simmering within the ruling CPDM, the Grand North, long a loyal CPDM voting bloc, is now splintering and looks ripe for political realignment. Tchiroma hopes to position himself as its new patriarch, displacing Biya loyalists and rival power brokers like Bello Bouba Maigari. Tchiroma seeks to rebrand himself as a savior of the North, even as his legacy there is one of abandonment, elitism, and duplicity. Tchiroma is a man who stood guard while his region was turned into a militarized wasteland. His appeal to the Fulbe and northern electorate is not rooted in love; it is rooted in a cynical calculation, a desperate gamble for political oxygen in a region where his name stinks of political opportunism.

But the Grand North remembers; the Grand North remembers how Garoua, Tchiroma’s hometown, remains underdeveloped while he hobnobbed in Yaoundé. The Grand North remembers Tchiroma’s cold indifference to Boko Haram’s terror and how its youth were left to die in fields of war. It remembers Tchiroma’s silence. It remembers his complicity. Tchiroma did not merely serve under Paul Biya – he bent the truth until it broke for him. He became the regime’s most fluent mouthpiece, defending crimes against the people with a pathological liar’s cadence and a sycophant’s conviction. And where did this defense echo loudest? In the Grand North; where his silence on Boko Haram’s onslaughts and his complicity in Yaoundé’s starvation of the region became thunderously damning.

The Political Math Doesn’t Add Up

So, let the record scream: Tchiroma’s candidacy is not a rupture. It is residue. Tchiroma is not a leader; he is a chameleon, changing colors to survive. Sensing the collapse of Biya’s fortress, he crawls from the ruins, painting himself in the colors of dissent, and whispering to the wind that he has changed – that he now hears the cries he once ignored, sees the suffering he once mocked, and seeks to fix the very nation he helped mutilate. Even if Tchiroma were to secure a fractured northern bloc, it is unlikely to yield enough momentum to push him past more widely accepted opposition figures like Maurice Kamto, although Kamto’s shadow is fossilized in the architecture of Biya’s failed regime.

In truth, even if he fractures the northern vote, he cannot unite it. Even if he utters the language of change, he cannot embody it. You cannot ask for trust from a nation you helped silence. Tchiroma is not the future; and does not represent change. He represents a final, desperate mutation of the old order – a regime ghost draped in the fabric of reform. His candidacy is not a rebirth. It is a warning.

Cameroon Deserves Better Than an Unrepentant Traitor

Let us not mistake opportunism for courage. Tchiroma’s departure from government is not an act of defiance – it is an escape route. The ship is sinking, and the rats are fleeing, out of survival instinct. The youth, the Anglophones, the jobless millions – they are not waiting for a man who defended dictatorship until it became inconvenient. They are not waiting for a fossil of the old regime. Tchiroma’s gambit may inject volatility into the election, but let no one mistake his candidacy for a national rebirth. It is the final act of a consummate political chameleon, who knows only how to adapt to survive, never to serve.

Cameroon must remember, and the Grand North must remind itself: not all who speak the language of change carry its spirit. Tchiroma’s candidacy is a mask stretched over a scarred face. To hand he the presidency would not be to escape the Biya regime. It would be to extend its life by other means. Let the Grand North rise – but let it rise with clean hands and clear vision, not under the banner of a man whose loyalty was always for sale, and whose conscience always arrived too late.

Cameroon is at an inflection point. The imminent end of Biya’s four-decade dictatorship presents a rare opportunity for national renewal. But let us not confuse opportunism with bravery. Let us not confuse Tchiroma’s departure from government with dissent. This is not a man who saw the light. This is a man who felt the heat. Tchiroma does not carry the spirit of change. He is the echo of betrayal seeking redemption. But there is no redemption without reckoning. And there is no reckoning led by traitors. There is no future built by the hands that helped destroy the past. So let it be said in every region, repeated and shouted in every dialect: Cameroon deserves better than an unrepentant recycled political hack and CPDM enabler. Let the nation remember him. Let the Grand North remind him. Let the ballot box reject him. Issa Tchiroma cannot lead the future. He must answer to the past.

By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai