The Tragedy of Cameroon: A Nation Held Hostage by Geriatric Rule and Elite Cowardice

In the grand, crumbling theater of the Cameroonian state, the lead actor has been absent for years. The stage lights flicker, the set decays, and the audience—a nation of 30 million strong—waits in a darkness haunted by the constant ring of gunshots in the Anglophone regions. The play, a tragic farce titled "The New Deal," has been on a steady rerun for over four decades. Its director and star, a 92-year-old president, Paul Biya, clings to the script from a distant, luxurious green room at the Etoudi Palace as the entire production collapses into ruin.

Cameroon’s national story unfolds like a theater of the absurd, a Kafkaesque drama where reason is mocked, hope languishes in chains, where avarice, corruption and cowardice are celebrated. Cameroon is going to hell in handbasket. The scene is one of profound, institutionalized decay.

Let’s take a throwback to March 2018, shall we! The then newly minted British High Commissioner to Cameroon, Rowan Laxton, took to Tweeter (now known as X) to lament the lack of running water in his residence after a week without service, a common frustration for the country, but one that was unusual for a high-ranking diplomat to air publicly. Ponder that for a moment! A member of the diplomatic corps, in the nation’s capital city, in its most exclusive neighborhood, didn’t have running water in his residence for a full week. Talk about culture shock! That incident highlighted the chronic issue of water shortages and power outages widespread in Cameroon. But it also highlighted that in 43 years, Biya hasn’t come remotely close to providing two basic necessities for his people, a stark symbol of incompetence and broken promises.

For example, in Yaounde, the national referral hospital is a place where hope goes to die, a mausoleum of broken equipment where patients provide their own light bulbs and syringes. In Douala, the economic heart of the nation, the city chokes in potholes, gridlock and desperation. Around the country, floods and mudslides drown villages after rainstorms, a 45 kilometer distance could take days to arrive. Classrooms, once the forge of the nation's future, are now roofless shells, their students taught the brutal curriculum of neglect. This is not mere underdevelopment; it is a managed decline, it is incompetence, corruption and inertia in full display, a systematic dismantling of a nation’s potential to serve the immortality project of one man, Paul Biya.

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his sonnet "Ozymandias," captured the essence of such hubris millennia before Biya was born. He wrote of a shattered statue in a vast desert, its inscription a mocking testament to forgotten power:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Paul Biya and CPDM, the ruling party of the regime for over four decades which doesn’t have a single memorable legislation to their name, with their grandiose titles and endless five-year plans, are our modern Ozymandias. Their "works" are the ghost hospitals, the phantom roads, and the bridges to nowhere or better still, the lack thereof. The "despair" they inspire is not that of their power, but of their utter nothingness. Around the decay of their colossal wreck, the boundless and bare sands of poverty, conflict, and disillusionment stretch far away. Biya and the CPDM’s legacy, like Ozymandias’, will not be one of glory, but of a vast, empty silence where a nation’s voice should be.

Yet, Biya and the CPDM are not the only participants in this tragedy. The greater tragedy, the deeper sickness, is not the geriatric grip on power, but the cowardice of the elite who enable it. Ayn Rand, the Russian-American philosopher wrote in her famed work “Atlas Shrugged”; “Contradictions do not exist, whenever you think you’re facing a contradiction check your premises, and you’ll find out that one of them is wrong”. In other words, if events you can’t believe keep happening, something is missing. Otherwise, how does a land of vibrant youth, cultural riches, and academic promise tolerate this? How can a society that reveres football icons stomach the moral rot of its federation? How can civil society— faith-based institutions, clergy, academia, chieftaincies, and community groups—endorse another seven years of this insanity? The answer - this tragedy is sustained by a sinister dynamic: the enabling silence of Cameroon's educated, moneyed, and political elite. Yes, the second half of the nation's tragedy—Elite Cowardice—is the real political contradiction that Ayn Rand would urge us to resolve.

A coalition of the complicit—ministers, generals, and business magnates—whose moral compasses have been calibrated to Swiss bank accounts and Parisian arrondissements. They are the stage managers of this decay, ensuring the lights stay off, that there is no potable water, that Cameroonians get stuck in mud for days on end, and the audience remains pacified. They whisper the regime’s lies not out of belief, but out of a calculated, selfish fear of the abyss that might follow its fall. They have traded their nation’s soul for a seat at the table of a starving man.

But even worse, is the most pervasive and paralyzing premise that Cameroonians are powerless, that they lack agency. And nothing can be further from the truth. Cameroon’s youth, over 60% of the population, brim with energy, yet a gerontocracy stifles them. Graduates face joblessness; the diaspora watches in despair. Protests are crushed, dissenters jailed. Yet, history—from the Arab Spring to Burkina Faso’s 2014 uprising—proves collective action can shatter regimes. Cameroonians are not powerless. There is a saying that captures this national paralysis with chilling precision: "The longest sleep is not in the grave, but in the waiting room of the revolution." Cameroon is in that deep, enforced slumber, sedated by empty promises, and the narcotic of fear and division.

The awakening will be brutal. It always is. But it is inevitable. The question is not if, but when, and at what cost. The current path leads only to a deeper national unravelling, where the center cannot hold and things fall utterly apart. The alternative requires the one thing that has been in shortest supply: moral courage, and it demands selflessness. The Beti-Bulu-Ekang, long deceived by Biya’s empty promises, must reject tribal loyalty for national salvation—their roads still stink, their hospitals are crumbling, their children are still unemployed. Clergy must preach justice, not submission. Academics must speak truth, not platitudes. Businessmen must withdraw support, generals must defy orders to harm their own people. Parents must demand better for their children.

Cameroon is a nation of vibrant, talented, and resilient people, held hostage by the ghost of a president and the living cowards who prop him up. Cameroonians must learn that Biya and the CPDM regime—their grand, unfulfilled promises and the hollow cult of personality—will inevitably give way. Their true legacy will not be the stability they claim, but the pervasive decay they have presided over for four decades. The immense power held now by one man and his entrenched cabal is built on an unsustainable foundation of fear and economic dependency. As the world watches this absurd tragedy unfold, Cameroonians alone must write the final act of this horror show, for no savior—neither France, the US, nor the AU, not even Jesus—will come. At some point, Cameroonians must choose to finally rise from the waiting room, bite the bullet and look upon the works of this modern Ozymandias, and with one, unified voice, declare: "Enough."