However you look at it, Paul Biya is dead tired to continue in Office. He can’t even make it to 2011. His prolonged and repeated sojourns abroad are evidence of the president escaping work and resting a body too tired for any hard work. Back home the man spends most of his time resting in Mvomeka’a, This newspaper pleads with Biya to surrender at this point. Let the president organise a transparent election to allow Cameroonians freely choose another man to take them forward. We urge our foreign partners also to see it this way.
Does Cameroon have a head of state? The sure answer is, of course, yes. But the reality is that the president has been absent abroad for so long that it would be correct to say there isn’t a de facto head of state.
Paul Biya left Cameroon on Thursday, 18 September for what a now familiar announcement said was “a short private stay in Europe.” He was also to attend the UN general assembly, the official announcement added.
The president was in fact in New York for a week. Since then there has been no official statement about Paul Biya’s whereabouts until last week when another announcement said he would be attending the Francophonie summit at Quebec City, Canada, that took place at the week-end.
There has been no official statement saying when Paul Biya would be back home, just like the first statement about his outward journey did not say for how long the president would be away.
If by some chance Paul Biya returns home this week he would have spent five weeks continuously abroad. It is not the first time that the president travels abroad for an undisclosed purpose and spends an unusually long time. In August Paul Biya travelled abroad for two weeks for no reason known to the public.
It was from confidential reports in the weekly Jeune Afrique magazine that it became known that he had spent the time in Paris. From other sources it was further learnt that he was in the French capital that long to be by the side of his sick wife who had been rushed to hospital there.
Last year Paul Biya also used the occasion of the UN general assembly to stay out for more than three weeks. He returned home to prepare yet another trip abroad where he spent some three weeks again to get a Cameroonian candidate re-elected on the UNESCO board as well as meet Nicolas Sarkozy for the first time.
It is noteworthy that the Cameroonian press gave the president favourable mention for trimming his trips abroad last year to two. The tradition is to take four or five such trips with each lasting three or four weeks.
Legislative election
Last year the president was much concerned about a legislative election that was to constitute an Assembly which helped revise the constitution to pave the way for yet another term. That kept him home.
Back home Paul Biya is not a hard worker. He easily tires of the daily routine that moves every government. The president’s work habit is extremely prejudicial to Yaounde’s centralised administration that obliges even unimportant matters to be sent to the president’s desk.
Paul Biya spends most of his day in leisure, and almost all the time at his village residence in Mvomeka’a, some 200 kms south of Yaounde. His entourage admits that each time you see him receive an important foreign guest at Etoudi he himself also just travels in from the village for the occasion.
The president’s work style and attitude are not a thing of today. Those who recall his days as prime minister or at an earlier position say that he has always been a lazy worker.
The point of this narrative, before it gets too long, is that however anyone looks at it Paul Biya has most definitely lost both interest and energy for his job as head of state. The cumulative effect of long years of lethargy now takes its toll.
There is absolutely no way he can conceal this, no matter how he pretends about it. Public media carry routine messages and decisions signed by Biya as part of this pretence. The president has once defended his absence from work by claiming that state institutions function normally in spite of his repeated and prolonged absences. All of this only begs the question as to why there is a president at all.
Paul Biya is not a patient hospitalised in Europe (like Levy Mwanawasa who was long in hospital in Paris before dying). Neither is Biya on annual leave. How many vacations is the president entitled to each year and for how long? These are surely not matters Cameroonians ever have an idea of.
Yet there isn’t a Cameroonian who considers their president’s prolonged stay abroad an acceptable thing. Every African leader who was at the UN with Biya since returned home to work. Needless to talk of European leaders, none of whom stayed more than a day or two at the UN.
Paul Biya’s record over twenty-six years in office does not help his defence. Cameroon suffers a huge development deficit. All development indices point to massive under-achievement. How could the president take a permanent holiday and think that all is well? Is he himself well and in touch with the reality of Cameroon?
Presently every African country is struggling to cope with the world-wide phenomenon of hiking prices of food and essential commodities as well as other pressing problems of health and education. How could Paul Biya be so unconcerned about the trauma that the daily lives of Cameroonians have since become?
Armed assailants
Upon these daily problems of hardship, the country itself is gradually slipping into insecurity. Last month well-armed assailants emerged from the sea in Limbe and sacked four banks, successfully ripping away the strong-room safe of one of the banks.
As one more evidence of the country’s lack of leadership due to Biya’s absence, the government has not as much as set an inquiry into the terrifying incident. Last week the prime minister was still promising one. In the meantime the offices of four army generals caught fire, consuming vital documents – another criminal act of insecurity.
Last week government forces provoked Nigerian rebels in Bakassi and misled the public by claiming they sank a rebel boat. The report was intended to raise the image of government soldiers that have in recent months suffered humiliation in the hands of Nigerian rebels. Again the leadership vacuum caused by Biya’s prolonged absences is responsible for such questionable acts.
None of these problems bothers Paul Biya to return home and take matters into his own hands as head of state. He claims that he directs the country from abroad. He has even been quoted as having told a European newspaper last year that he feels a lot better working from abroad than from home!
Imagine Nicolas Sarkozy setting up office in the US and telling the French he wants to work from there! How would national pride and sovereignty allow such outrageousness? Calls for immediate resignation and motions of impeachment would certainly follow. Yet that is what Paul Biya makes Cameroonians believe is normal!
Upon the well-established charge of absolute fatigue, it is further certain that Paul Biya doesn’t really love Cameroon. Isn’t it a shame that he sees nothing wrong in wanting to live abroad and operate Cameroon from there?
We are in no doubt that there now exists a strong case against the president wanting to continue in office. He is not fit; not even to continue to the end of his present mandate in 2011.
This newspaper urges the president to respect Cameroonians and prepare a proper election in the nearest future so that Cameroonians could for once freely elect their next leader to begin the long process of recovering Cameroon from the abyss where it is now.
We call upon the true friends of Cameroon viz: the US, EU, France and Britain, among others, to understand this position and urge Biya to accept that he is no longer capable to meet the challenges of leadership.
Source:The Herald
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