Paul Nji Atanga, Paul Biya’s Rasputin and Useful Idiot Doing The Regime’s Dirty Work

My father once told me a story which goes like this: Once upon a time, a man walking in the woods found a wounded chimp—beaten, hungry, near death. He carried it home, cleaned its wounds, fed it, gave it shelter. Day after day he tended the creature until the scars faded and a bond formed, deep and mutual. The man loved the chimp; the chimp loved the man. One afternoon the man dozed on the porch. A fly landed on his forehead. The chimp shooed it away. The fly returned. Again the chimp swatted. The insect persisted. Irritated, the chimp fetched a boulder and, with all its might, smashed the fly—and the man’s skull.

In Cameroon today the man is Paul Biya, the chimp is Paul Nji Atanga, and the fly is the Cameroonian people.

Biya, now in his fifth decade of rule, wants to continue to rule, but has never governed. He has a manic desire to tear down history and write his own, oldest president ever. His CPDM is a one-trick pony, completely out of ideas; it can’t breathe without cheating. Yet the evidence for the theft of the October election is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leaves no room for doubt. Rather than face the verdict of the ballot, Biya has handed the boulder to his Rasputin, his useful idiot—an ex-convict who, like the Mad Monk of St. Petersburg, slithered from the shadows of a prison cell into the palace by whispering the right incantation into the right ear.

Paul Nji Atanga—Minister of Territorial Administration, bearer of outsize emergency powers—indulges any crazy impulse and nobody is able to check him. He has threatened to arrest Issa Tchiroma, widely believed to be the winner of the October vote, he has ordered the arrest of other opposition leaders, like Georges Anicet Ekane and Djeukam Tchameni and barred still others from visiting Tchiroma in his Garoua residence. At last count more than sixty citizens lie dead in post-election protests, most gunned down by military snipers perched in nests, picking off unarmed citizens—peaceful marchers, chanting youths, bystanders with empty hands—who posed no threat to anyone, least of all men hiding behind scopes. Trigger-happy militias under Nji Atanga’s sway prowl the Northwest and Southwest, implicated in killings that blur the line between counter-insurgency and massacre. Paul Nji Atanga, an Anglophone by birth, has publicly mocked Anglophones that there is no Anglophone problem. His insufferable hubris far exceeds his intellect.

As a member of a government that can’t organize a two-car funeral, fortunes are made the old-fashioned way: influence peddling. Unsurprisingly, Atanga is rumored to be erecting a private university in the South Region for billions of CFA francs while the country drifts, a shipwreck captained by a man asleep on the porch. The chimp, meanwhile, marauds.

Atanga’s narcissism blots out the sun. He ignores law, procedure, consequence. He runs circles around a regime unbound by rules of engagement. He fantasizes about killing political opponents, muses about murdering children who dare protest. The moment you silence someone with a bullet instead of an argument, you’ve admitted your worldview is too weak to stand on truth. Yet truth is the first casualty when Rasputin swings the rock.

Even inside the CPDM panic is spreading. A memo circulating on social media—frantic, unsigned, unmistakably authentic—warns that Atanga’s high-handedness and rude posture toward the Cameroonian people are dragging the party into the abyss. Tone it down, comrade, or we all sink. Too late. The ex-con has the boulder; the party has the rope.

Yet, the CPDM rallies around the guy who substitutes murder ideation for persuasion to beat the real violent threat: a people oppressed by generational trauma. Like him, they have no foundational principles, only the pedigree of power. Hard-nosed, head in the sand, he has proven that while beauty is only skin deep; evil goes all the way to the bone.

Atanga is a toxic brew of extreme buffoonery and mean spirit. He once pluralized “boys” as “boyses” and, attending a flood disaster, conflated “burying the deceased” with “burying the bereaved.” As they say, “Au Cameroun, le ridicule ne tue pas!” This would not be so funny if it wasn’t so close to the truth.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad—"Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat". Biya’s Rasputin is the madness made minister: ex-convict turned court sorcerer, jailbird turned executioner. The chimp still believes he is saving the man. The man is already dead. The fly—Cameroon—still buzzes, waiting for the next rock.