So, the day has finally come, hasn’t it, Mr. Biya?
The day you convinced yourself would never arrive. The day you staved off with rigged elections, iron-fisted decrees, disappearing opponents, and the quiet, clinical efficiency of prisons that swallowed men alive. You lie in Geneva now, 93 years old, in a hospital bed that the people of Cameroon are paying for, as they have paid for everything that sustained you — while your family keeps vigil and the world waits—fifty days and counting. The country you claimed to love so deeply that you couldn’t let anyone else lead it is back home, headless, holding its breath.
Mr. President, do not mistake the silence for grief. It is anticipation. Cameroonians are not mourning. Cameroon is warming up the drums.
Let the record show who you were to the country. Not the Paul Biya of the CPDM posters. Not the elegantly suited head of state photographed beside European heads of state. The real one. The one your people know in their bones, in their empty stomachs, in their darkened homes, and in their unmarked graves.
Mr. President, you took office in 1982, and you never gave it back. Forty-three years. The Guinness World Records crowned you the longest-serving non-monarch leader on earth. A title you collected not through service, but through suffocation. A record built not on the prosperity of your people, but on their subjugation.
You outlasted democracies. You outlasted revolutions. You outlasted technologies. You outlasted men half your age who tried to unseat you and paid with their freedom or their lives. You stayed because leaving was never part of your calculation. Office was not a responsibility you held in trust for Cameroon. It was property you owned. And you guarded it like a man who knew exactly what he had stolen.
Mr. Biya, you are well aware that Cameroon is among the world’s most richly endowed nations. Oil. Timber. Cocoa. Gold, bananas, palms. Rivers powerful enough to light a continent. And yet, under your stewardship, half your population sank below the poverty line. Citizens went to bed without electricity in cities that should have been blazing with it.
Mothers buried children from diseases that cost pennies to prevent. Graduates fled the country by the thousands because the nation you governed for four decades offered them nothing — no jobs, no infrastructure, no future. The roads collapsed. The hospitals became rumours. You decreed “Government Schools” all over the country. Before they crumbled, parents built classrooms, hired and paid teachers out of their own pockets. And you, you spent 30,000 euros a night on a villa in Geneva. Your vacation bills exceeded those of the American president. The treasury was your personal account, and the people of Cameroon were its involuntary depositors.
And then came the war. Your war. The one you launched on Southern Cameroonians — on Ambazonians, who dared to ask for dignity, for freedom, for a place at the table of their own country. You answered their protest with bullets. You answered their marches with prisons. You answered their lawyers and teachers and students with a military that burned villages, murdered civilians, and reduced entire communities to ash.
Tens of thousands are dead. Hundreds of thousands displaced. Some children have never known a classroom because you chose war over dialogue. And when the world asked you to talk, you turned your back. You refused. Because negotiating with your own citizens would have meant acknowledging them as citizens, and that was a concession your ego could not survive.
Those who raised their voices against you were fed to the guillotine or buried in cells where they age without grace. Some are still there tonight while you lie in your Geneva bed. And those of us you could not cage — you scattered us into exile, across continents, where we have watched from a distance the slow ruin of a country that deserved so much better.
What Will Not Happen When You Die
Mr. Biya, here is what will not happen when you die. There will be no high mass. Purgatory will certainly object to the redemption of your soul. There will be no candlelit wake-keep. There will be no weeping processions, no eulogies that make a people choke with sorrow. Your casket will not be received by a nation in mourning.
You will be lowered into the ground while, across Cameroon, in every beer parlour, nightclub and dusty street corner, your people will be doing the only thing that makes sense — celebrating. The drums will roll. The cold drinks, including matango, will flow. Men and women who have spent their entire adult lives under the boot of your presidency will step into the streets and breathe, some of them for the first time, freely.
You thought this day would never come. We know you did. You ran for an eighth term at 92, frail and absent, because the thought of releasing this country from your grip was simply inconceivable to you. But the body has a vote too, Mr. Biya. And it has cast it.
Paul Biya’s Epitaph
So here it is — your epitaph, written not by the sycophants who built careers flattering you, but by the people you failed:
“Here lies Paul Biya, a man who could have transformed a nation but chose instead to loot it. A man who sat atop abundance and delivered misery. A man whose name will be remembered not with reverence, but with relief. He had every resource, every opportunity, every year he needed, and he squandered all of it on himself.”
Goodbye, Paul Biya. The celebration is already being planned. And I wish, God, how I wish you were here to see it.
