Sunday, November 6, 2022 will mark 40 years since our guy Paul Biya took over the instruments of political power in Cameroon.
A self-confessed staunch believer in the religion of Christ whose dream of becoming a priest was cut short at the age of 16, our friend, as the inimitable Onyango-Obbo would put it, has been in these things for pretty good time.
While we wish him all the best with his failing health, here at The Kenya Times we equally wish Biya would accept, as one realises late in life, that everything has a limit.
During his first decade in office, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed in the moon, researchers at Pasteur Institute in France isolated and identified HIV, the famous Berlin wall fell and Africa lost Thomas Sankara and Steve Biko.
Biya, the world’s oldest “democratically elected” political leader, had served as prime minister for seven years before becoming president under President Ahmadou Ahidjo. When Ahidjo unexpectedly resigned in 1982, Biya, bejeweled by trappings of power, staged a coup, eliminated his opponents and assumed office with pomp, like nothing unusual had happened.
He has consistently “won” elections since 1992 with extraordinary margins in what observers have described as official coronation rituals. In 1984, for instance, a sole candidate, he “won” the presidential election by 99.98 per cent.
But Biya is not just the longest serving head of state in Africa; he holds other less impressive records as well. He is known for his dislike for journalists and human rights activists. In him John Acton’s dictum “power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely” finds a safe home.
Cameroonian journalist Mimi Mefo Takambou is definitely note a Biya fan, few are – few does not include retired footballer and current president of Cameroonian Football Federation Sameul Eto’o who recently changed the federation’s constitution to allow him run for extra two 7-year terms. She (Takambou) had the following to say last year about the longest serving non-loyal head of state in the world:
“For decades, the country had been a living nightmare. Bad governance, corruption and total disregard for human rights were the hallmarks of Paul Biya’s government. When lawyers and teachers in the two Anglophone regions began staging peaceful protests, the public looked on with indifference. The general assumption was that this was just another flare-up in Cameroon’s tempestuous history.”
In Tyrants, The Worlds 20 Worst Living Dictators, popular historian David Wallechinsky reports that, in 2004, annoyed by the criticisms of international vote-monitoring groups, Biya paid for his own set of international observers, six ex-U.S. congressmen, who certified his election as free and fair.
Not the one who makes regular appearances in public, Biya has centralised his administration, monopolised all instruments of violence and captured key state independent institutions. In 2017, when separatists in Southern Cameroon called for self-determination, Biya’s government responded with violence and extrajudicial killings that United Nations confirmed amounted to genocide.
“For decades, the country had been a living nightmare. Bad governance, corruption and total disregard for human rights were the hallmarks of Paul Biya’s government,” Takambou writes in Hounded: African Journalists in Exile.
If human beings can achieve some level of satisfaction, contrary to what Abraham Maslow taught us, we really, really wish Biya gets there.
