Ballots, Bullets, and Hypocrisy: Three Elections in Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire and Tanzania That Shattered The West’s Democracy Myth

How the United States, France and the West were exposed in Africa. The Smokescreen Is Burning.

They said it was about democracy. They lied. What unfolded across Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania were not elections but autopsies of freedom each more brazen, more bloodstained than the last. Ballot boxes stuffed in daylight. Opposition leaders barred, arrested, or disappeared. Protesters beaten, shot, silenced. And through it all, Washington and Paris applauded politely, pretending not to see the corpses beneath the rhetoric.

This is the West’s real export to Africa not democracy, but denial. A theatre of ballots without choice, stability without justice, sovereignty without power. For the United States and France, “democracy” is a tool of trade, a diplomatic currency spent only on compliant governments that guard Western contracts and military footholds. Cameroon’s sham, Côte d’Ivoire’s coronation, Tanzania’s bloodied landslide all of it tolerated, even blessed, so long as the pipelines run and the ports stay open.

The tragedy is not that these elections were stolen. It’s that the thieves were cheered on by the very powers that claim to be the guardians of liberty.

Great Lie of “Democracy”

Let’s burn the hypocrisy to the ground. The so-called collapse of “Western democracy” in Africa is not a tragedy of African failure; it is the deliberate, self-serving exposure of a bankrupt foreign policy. The recent elections in nations like Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, and Tanzania were not compromised; they were meticulously managed theatre, ugly in their conduct, and revealing in the Western reaction.

The orchestrators? The tired, predictable tandem of the United States and France, still clinging to the moral high ground while their hands are stained with the oil of transactional obedience.

Tanzania: The Punishment for Choosing China and Russia

The case of Tanzania is the clearest, most vicious example of this calculated moral fraud.

President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s administration delivered a 97 percent “landslide” through a familiar playbook of barred rivals, arrests, and intimidation. This was a grotesque, manufactured mandate. When citizens protested, the security forces responded with ferocious brutality—hundreds, possibly more, killed, their bodies reportedly hidden to mask the scale of the massacre.

But the Western response was not righteous outrage. It was calculated silence.

Why? Because Tanzania’s crime was not autocracy; it was autonomy. Tanzania dared to seek genuine alternatives, daring to court major strategic and investment partnerships with China and Russia. This, in the paranoid, zero-sum worldview of Washington and Paris, is the unforgivable sin. The moment Dar es Salaam deviated from the Western commercial and military script, it was immediately branded an adversary and subjected to the freezing chill of diplomatic isolation.

This is the rotten core of the Western narrative: Obedience is rewarded with applause, but independence is punished with quiet ruin.

The Compliant Clients: Applauding the Theft

Contrast this venomous treatment with the gilded praise heaped upon the Western client states:

• Cameroon: Paul Biya, the ninety-two-year-old custodian of forty-three years of plunder, was “re-elected” with an impossible 53 percent. The process was a literal joke: opposition figures jailed, ghost ballots deployed, and observers barred. Yet, Washington extended its congratulations. Why? Because Biya, frail but utterly obedient, remains the pliable guard dog protecting Western ports and allowing the quiet continuation of French and American military interests.

• Côte d’Ivoire: Alassane Ouattara’s near-ninety percent victory was not a show of popularity, but a display of perfected engineered control. Heavyweight opposition was exiled or imprisoned. The election was a ritual of legitimacy for Paris’s benefit. The real story—disgust, despair, and rock-bottom turnout—was ignored. Why? Because the cocoa flows, the military cooperation endures, and French firms sign every essential contract. For the West, this is “stability.” For Africa, it is subsidized submission.

The message could not be clearer: We will ignore any fraud, any bloodshed, any cruelty, so long as you remain a reliable vessel for our corporate and geopolitical needs. But dare to speak to Beijing or Moscow, and we will turn your autocracy into a moral crisis.

The Sahel: The Unspoken Fight for Dignity

This hypocritical fury becomes a full-blown farce when compared to the Sahel states like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

These nations, who have chosen to shed the crippling, dysfunctional security presence of France—a legacy of colonial failure—and who have actually initiated military coups, are now the target of constant, high-decibel condemnation from the very Western capitals who applaud Biya and Ouattara.

Why the double standard? Because the Sahel states are not acting out of a desire for personal gain; they are visibly and unapologetically fighting for the actual welfare of their people. They are attempting to:

Dismantle the toxic economic dependency enforced by the Françafrique model.

Restore genuine security in the face of escalating terrorism that French intervention failed to contain.

Forge new, sovereign security partnerships to protect their citizens, not foreign assets.

The West condemns these Sahelian leaders as 'junta,' 'anti-democratic,' and 'Russian puppets' because they are committing the ultimate sin: they are prioritizing their nation’s security and dignity over Western influence. The coups in the Sahel are a desperate, necessary correction against two decades of elite capture and foreign-backed failure. They are the sound of a people demanding self-determination.

The West’s defence of "democracy" in Africa is not a commitment to freedom; it is a geopolitical lever, a tool of market control, and a veil for neo-colonial punishment.

The Lie Is Dead

The youth of Africa are not blind. They have watched Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire rewarded for obedience, and Tanzania targeted for independence. They see the frantic, hostile reaction to the Sahel's bid for true sovereignty.

The myth has dissolved. The West does not fear dictatorship; it fears a continent that controls its own resources, chooses its own friends, and charts its own destiny.

The age of borrowed permission is over. The sermons from Washington and Paris are now nothing more than the background noise to Africa’s awakening. Let them condemn and critique; their words have lost all authority.

We are witnessing the defiant birth of self-determination, and no empire, however subtly disguised, will survive that reckoning.