Biya returns, nation still in wait!.

With his triumphant return, the gloomy cloud of uncertainty has fizzled out. The nation expected urgent sweeping reforms, with alacrity, to put the nation on course towards ameliorated infrastructure and cost of living as he took on his eighth term in November last year.

The first file on arrival was the reception and honour, given to the Indomitable Lionesses, for their scintillating victory at Women’s Africa Nations Cup, WAFCON, final in Morocco.

The live televised ceremony also served to dispelled social media vicious guesses and cynicism that his presence was not conspicuous on arrival, but rather a waving hand from the back of the driver’s seat.

That file has been treated with grace. The next urgent file is a reshuffle he explicitly stated: "...the government I will set up in the coming days..."

That new government, he said, would prioritise improving living conditions, economic growth, and a special youth employment plan, with 50 billion FCFA allocated. 

The appointments, he added, will be based on qualifications, skills, integrity, probity, and service to the general interest. Perfect!

That short time line, more than eight months later, has become like an expensive sartorial dissonance in an engineered din, where no serious issue like time frame is taken seriously by the CPDM regime.

The third urgent file is the appointment of a Vice President. Given the President’s blessed advanced age of 93, a heavy work load and so-called succession clan war, the post of Vice President was introduced in the March session of Parliament, perceived as an Interim President, since in the event of a vacancy at the Presidency (death, resignation, or permanent incapacity of the President of the Republic as determined by the Constitutional Council), the holder will automatically assume the highest office of the land and complete the current term.   

It is unfortunate that the position that establishes a bicameral executive structure, and aims at ensuring a smooth transition and political stability at the highest level of government, has remained vacant, despite the hurry to create it.

The third file is finance and the economy on which every political action depends on, especially when the regime is surviving on mountains of debts.

When the President was out, it emerged in the national and international media that 44 tons of gold were expropriated illegally out of the country. 

Mr President, the issue cannot remain in administrative limbo. It must be opened by the President, clearly, publicly, and firmly with a judiciary probe. 

On the day the President arrived, a cartel, operating in the name of questionable Muslim Community in Mutengene, without its recognised leader, sneaked into the Cameroon Development Corporation, CDC estate in Esuke, destroying palm trees that would have served the mill in Moliwe, constructed for that purpose.

The General Manager of CDC and some security operatives were informed and, he scurried to the scene with security operatives and chase them away. 

The gang returned six days later, protected by “heavily armed soldiers” to continue the collateral damage and in less than one week, hired chainsaw operators to cut down 152 prime oil palms across two separate raids (52 palms on August 20, followed by another 100 on August 26, 2026). 

Paradoxically, the 15 hectares the same group had grabbed in Golf Likomba, for Muslim IDPs, as if they were different from the rest of those displaced in the Anglophone conflict, was reportedly sold to individuals, not even to Muslims or IDPs.

Armed with lawyers and bailiff, the CDC management, supported by Bakwerians in Fako, whose lands have been grabbed, both in the CDC, Esuke village, renamed Bonganjo; for the purpose of land theft and other local civil society groups, urgently demanded that the Prime Minister, Head of Government, Dr Chief Joseph Dion Ngute, should intervene to halt the ongoing destruction.

The Guardian Post learnt at the weekend that the PM arbitrated with a commission, said to have been set up curiously composed by the regional administration that remained a suspicious silence and suspected of using troops to protect the destroyers.

The Head of State has to keep an eagle eye to ensure justice in the Esuke land deal and the case of a non-existence Bonganjo village and a Chief, principally for expropriating individual land.

 There is also another hot file to handle- the holding of the Higher Judiciary Council, whose void for five years has overwhelmed the judiciary with cases prejudicial to justice.

If the pending emergency files are hurriedly treated, Cameroon should be able to live like a State of law, where land grabbing, and fake villages like Bongangjo, should not exist to scandalously pit State institutions against each other, as if there is a vacuum at the helm of State, which the grabbers had craved for, while the Head of State was away in Geneva, Switzerland.

They should be made to feel the authority of the Head of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, by facing the law, not commissions in which they are judges in their own cases, so that, as it is said in Latin: “Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum”, [let justice be done, even if the heavens must fall]. 

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3895 of Monday August 31, 2026