Paul Biya 23 Years After: He has Elevated Graft into Statecraft

By Bate Besong
(Playwright, Poet and Literary Critic: Dept of English, University of Buea)

There has been a serious dereliction of responsibility on the part of his leadership. He has privatized the state and handed it over to his Essingan kinsmen and the Khalifas of the North. This has led to a manifestation of a most perverted form of governance that flourishes under conditions of social injustice, economic inequality and political opportunism. The fettered past has taken its toll on a Presidency that is afraid to face the facts. He has transformed himself into a Presidential Deity- courtesy of the puppet-masters at the Quaid’ Orsay. Mr. Biya imagines, like Appolo of Delphi, that Cameroon history can turn at his beckoning.

We see an absolute Monarch in the mould of a Hastings Kamuzu Banda or a Mobutu Seseseko who is terribly reluctant to lose power. The fact of the matter, however, is that his New Deal regime has been, for a long time, a nation only on paper.

He has, therefore, neither shown determination nor resoluteness in the pursuit of the goals of national unity. Besides ignoring the call for dialogue on true federalism, Mr. Biya is also running a country full of contradictions.

His exclusionary style of leadership, for instance, has led to the corrupt ogredoms of the Ondong. Ndong’s and the Cinderella rags to riches Synergie Chantal Biya’s albatross of squander mania. We have now arrived at an effete bourgeoisie that revels, in 23 years of a road to nowhere, in an uninhibited display of filthy wealth, while the mass of the people wallow in destitution and are stupefied by ignorance and disease.

Political culture should be the product of the totality and continuity of our economic and political struggles; it should also be a contributor, a reflection and a measure of the success of those struggles.

Unfortunately, however, President Biya has been noted for his sickening profligacy, his passion for foreign travel, his proconsular mode of governance and his elevation of graft into a statecraft.
He has also failed, most tragically, to admit that what he has believed for many years has been wrong.

Comments

[Galabe Aloysius]

Dear post. I really agree in 'BB's writing. I am a Cameroonian student currently taking a master's programme in International Accounting in Sweden. I came out here and realise that we have been in an actual 23 years of nowhere governance. We have useful resources wasting out here. Able managers of about 3 master,s degree each busily distributing newspapers for the whiteman. Afraid to return home as there is no place for them back there. There is actual braindrainning between the 'cameroon-europeano gulf. We need to find a place for all this our resources. We can build our country up to Europe and even more than that if we just only try to maintain integrity. I want to ask this single question to Mr Biya and his regime. Did they study abroad and if so on a scholarship base? They all violate the morals of higher learning as they continue in bad governance. Lets keep our heads up!