After being held at the Unity Palace for years because of the Southern Cameroons crisis and the global pandemic (Covid-19), Cameroon’s ailing president, Paul Biya, left Yaoundé today for Washington D.C. to attend the US-African Leaders Summit scheduled to take place from 13-15 December 2022.

As usual, Mr. Biya will be stopping over in Geneva, Switzerland, not to condole with Switzerland following the country’s trouncing in the World Cup, but to undergo a special steroid session which will enable him to operate in the highly demanding conference in the American capital. 

Over the last decade, Mr. Biya has been surviving on steroids given his poor health. He is currently a colony of diseases which require huge consumption of steroids.  According to a source close to the Unity Palace, Mr. has been psychologically depressed in recent times and the trip to the American capital is an opportunity for him to step out of his palace and demonstrate to the world that he is still in charge in Yaoundé.

Before boarding the airplane for Geneva, the Cameroonian dictator made sure that his collaborators had to bow to him like angels do to God. The country’s Prime Minister, Joseph Dion Ngute, who is out of favour with the ruling cabal almost prostrated in front Mr. Biya to demonstrate that he was still very loyal to the man who has been anything but effective when it comes to running the country. 

While in Washington, the senile Biya who is suffering from amnesia will meet with the American President in private to seek the North American country’s help in the insurgency which has been playing out in Cameroon’s two English-speaking regions for more than six years.

According to some unknown Cameroonian diplomatic enthusiasts like Billy Eko, whose father was arrested with drugs on an airplane more than 35 years ago, Mr. Biya’s ineffective diplomacy seems to be delivering some good results. He based his logic on the indictment of three Southern Cameroonians in the United States on grounds of exporting terror to another country. 

The indictment was deposited by the FBI, but in the United States, an indictment is nothing. The three co-accused are not guilty until proven guilty by a legally constituted court of law in the United States. The US is not a country where the president can just order people to be locked up. The law works in the United States, and it is incumbent upon the FBI to prove its case in court.

Currently, the suspects have already lawyered up and there are more celebrity lawyers lining up to join the team of lawyers who want to prove that the problem in Cameroon is not the suspects but a man whose rank incompetence and corruption have left a once prosperous nation in the depth of abject poverty, creating massive pockets of opposition in the country.

There is also a fundraising campaign in the United States for the three Southern Cameroonians to enable them to hire the best international lawyers who can easily prove that the Yaounde regime clearly belongs to the past and if a regime change is not engineered, more people will be sent to an early grave.

Lawyers in the United States have already gathered lots of video and cable communications evidence between Cameroon’s military officials who intentionally planned a massive genocide in the two English-speaking regions of the country. The lawyers have enough evidence. Videos of Ngarbuh, Kwakwa, and Muyenge as well as multiple reports by the International Crisis Group have been shared with American Senators who are urging Joe Biden not to receive Mr. Biya who is now seen as Cameroon’s “merchant of death”.  

The Senators hold that if the US identifies with a man who has mowed down his own people, it will be calling into question its claim that it is a beacon of hope and democracy. Biya is no democrat! He is an iron fist in a velvet glove. It is hard to weave his name and democracy in the same sentence, an American human rights activist said. 

Currently, there is a massive demonstration being organized to receive the dictator in Washington. Southern Cameroonians want to prove to the Biden Administration that it is having political intercourse with a murderer, a man who has killed many women and children in Southern Cameroons, and still has thousands of Southern Cameroonians in East Cameroonian jails.

Mr. Biya is also being blamed by his fellow compatriots for corruption, financial impropriety, and incompetence. Since coming to power in 1982, Mr. Biya has transformed the country into a one-man show, where his word is the law.

By Soter Tarh Agbaw-Ebai