After 43 years of zombified rule, Biya’s candidacy at 93 years, is a declaration of war on Democracy

There are tyrants – and then, there is Paul Biya, the nonagenarian necromancer of Yaoundé, who has shamelessly decided to plunge the grotesque theatre of Cameroonian politics into yet another farcical act of brigandage-the world’s oldest head(ache) of state has announced his intent to cling to the presidency once more, seeking an eighth term at the antediluvian age of 93; when most men kneel before memory and prepare for judgment. There are tyrants – and then there is Paul Biya, the decomposing sun-king of Mvomeka’a; who has made a mausoleum of the Cameroonian presidency, embalmed in arrogance, hubris and mummified in deceit. Like a moth drawn to the flame of self-deification, Biya stumbles forward, blind to the rot he has sown across 43 years of zombified rule. Biya’s candidacy is not courage. It is not continuity. It is not service. It is vanity wrapped in delusion; a final insult hurled at a people he long ceased to care about. Let no one be fooled by his empty phrases and digital proclamations. The emperor has no vigor, no mandate, no soul. Only a seat he refuses to vacate. He rules not as a leader, but as a fossil clinging to the illusion of motion, while the nation stumbles from one avoidable tragedy to the next. It is not only time for Biya to step down. It is time for his memory to be expunged from the pantheon of history. Let future generations learn of him only as a political poltergeist, who mistook a nation for his armchair, and ruled until time itself rejected him. And let the Cameroonian people, especially the youth, rise up at last, to bury this era of gerontocratic tyranny and claim the national rebirth and new dawn they have long been denied.

This is no longer governance. It is taxidermy in motion – the marionette-like twitching of a regime so old, so ossified; it has forgotten the difference between life and performance. And yet, the frail, aged despot shamelessly dares to whisper on social media: “Rest assured that my determination to serve you matches the urgency of the challenges we face,” adding sarcastically that: “…The best is still to come.” No, Mr. Biya. You are now the challenge; you have nothing more to offer. This latest insult to national dignity – a 93-year-old autocrat seeking an eight extension of his personal kingdom – is not an act of ambition. It is a declaration of war on youth, on democracy, on the very idea of national renewal. The justification is laughable: “numerous and insistent” calls by people from all regions in Cameroon and the diaspora. Which people? The hungry, poor and destitute masses who are scavenging for survival? The displaced IDPs and victims of Boko Haram? The war-orphaned Anglophone children? Or the cabal of sycophants fattened on patronage and corruption; the same parasites,greedy for another drop of the poisonous nectar the regime offers them? Which people? He dares to call it “service.”But his service is not to the nation; it is to the great altar of self-preservation, where he burns time, dignity, and present and future generations for the sake of his own shadow.

The Cadaver in Chief

There is a cruel poetry to the sight of a man who has become a waxwork of his former self; a living corpse and walking relic presiding over the funeral of a nation, under the guise of leadership. Paul Biya, has mutated from president to pharaoh entombed in the presidential palace, ruling through silence, absence, and “on-high instructions” whispered decrees. He governs not from Yaoundé but from his Mvomeka’a palace, or the marbled suites of Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel, while Cameroonians sleep in darkness, choke on dust, and bleed in the streets of Buea and Bamenda. His rare public addresses are relics, his political instincts reduced to mechanical repressions. If governance is an act of presence, of listening, of sacrifice; then Biya has not ruled Cameroon in decades. He has haunted it. Under Biya’s gaze, Cameroon has not lived. It has endured. The country has become a mausoleum of squandered opportunities, shattered dreams, and broken promises – a land where roads dissolve like sugar in rain;

where hospitals resemble war zones; where students graduate into despair; where the Anglophone regions smolder in genocidal silence, and innocent blood is the mother tongue. Forty-three years of corruption, embezzlement, tribalism, nepotism, poverty, bad governance, and fatalism – and now he is asking for seven more?

Biya’s governance is an entrenched dictatorship kept alive by bureaucracy, brutality, and ritualized elections and nourished by apathy, silence, and the poisoned loyalty of cowards in tailored suits and agbada. He has never truly led; only loitered. He has not presided; only sat, slept, and signed useless decrees, appointing his Beti kith and kin to all commanding heights of authority positions in the army and public service. What began in 1982 as a hopeful transition from Ahidjo has festered into a monarchical parody, where term limits were abolished, institutions hollowed out, and elections turned into ceremonial endorsements of despotism. In Biya’s Cameroon, ballots do not measure the peoples’ will. Biya imagines himself eternal, and sees the presidency as his personal inheritance, not a trust of the people. He has turned Cameroon into a caricature of post-colonial failure; a textbook example of how a nation dies – not by war, but by the glacial tyranny of tired old men who mistake power for purpose.

A Dynasty of Decay: this Is Necrophilia

Biya’s 2025 re-election bid is not an act of patriotism. It is a necromantic spectacle – the dead ruling the living; a grotesque attempt to stitch eternity into the skin of one man, while 27 million Cameroonians decay under the weight of his denial. What man seeks to rule until he is a centenarian corpse propped up by protocol and improvisation lies and official deception? Which country of sound minded people will allow such a mockery to continue? This is no longer tyranny; it is senile theocracy, with Biya as its high priest, chanting decrepit slogans over a nation in chains.

Biya’s legacy is a nation betrayed with abusive patronage and ethnic-inspired clientelism as the official currency of governance. A bilingual state fractured into violent conflict due to his lethargic indifference to Anglophone grievances; a youth majority strangled by unemployment and hopelessness; a judiciary in chains, a legislature emasculated, a cabinet neutered, a press gagged. Over $300 million in public funds looted annually, according to various watchdogs, while hospitals rot and schools crumble. He has not merely misruled; he has institutionalized failure. Cameroon under Biya is a living contradiction: rich in resources, poor in purpose; blessed in geography, cursed in leadership. His CPDM co-travelers have also perfected the art of doing nothing, besides looting the public treasury. This is not stagnation. This is national asphyxiation.

The End of the Farce

Biya fancies himself immune to the fate of Ali Bongo, toppled next door by a fed-up military after a fraudulent election propped up another decrepit dynasty. He believes his regime is eternal. But power decays faster than flesh, and no throne lasts forever. Paul Biya is not the president of Cameroon; he is its plague, its undertaker, its oldest curse, which doesn’t deserve to be eulogized. Let his statues fall like ash, let his portrait rot in moldy government offices, let history remember him not as a statesman and father of the nation, but as a human vampire.

So, let his 2025 re-election bid be the final insult. Enough is enough! Let the youths, awakened from forty-three years of coma, rise like rivers after drought, and nail the coffin of this regime shut. Let the bell toll not for Biya, but for the rebirth of a republic that was never allowed to breathe, never allowed to dream, because one man refused to die – or quit the stage even after the curtains were down. The sword of history is unsparing. And when it falls, it does not ask for clarifications. To the elites of CPDM, to the doddering politburo of geriatrics who toast champagne while the people drink from dry taps -take heed. There comes a day when even the most docile nation remembers how to roar. Even termites know when to abandon a collapsing pillar. And so, we say: Go, Paul Biya. Go – not with thanks, not with fanfare, but with the full weight of our rage, our grief, and our judgment. Go before the wind of history blows you away like the dust of all failed emperors. Your time is not just over. It is damned.

By Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai