-By Angie Forbin –
In serious countries, succession offices are built on continuity of power. In Cameroon, it is about continuity of control.
A rubber-stamp parliament just helped Mr. Biya create a constitutional ghost of a vice presidency that only acquires sovereignty at the emptiness of the throne. A law/bill that intentionally leaves out the Anglophones.
This constitutional amendment has so boldly and without electoral risk offered a regime that has not ceased to fail its people the opportunity to perpetuate itself and impose another half a century of suffering on 30+ million helpless Cameroonians hungry for something different, as they expressed at the ballot box last year. Elections have been transformed into a secondary mechanism. The soon-to-be president can be cherry-picked without seeking the approval of Cameroonians and rubber-stamped by a parliament with no legitimacy.
As the history of the Francophone-dominated Biya government continues to unfold, the Anglophones disenfranchised by a promise they chose to believe in, a constitutional marriage they naively accepted and which has since been repeatedly violated by a group of incompetent, wicked, power-hungry apparatchiks we can say that Endeley was a visionary who saw what a child standing on a ladder could not see, as an old man in a chair.
The young men who took up arms in the North West and South West for self-determination, fed up with trusting a regime that denied their existence and refused to recognise them as human beings, had every reason to do so.
To the Anglophone parliamentarians who approved this infamy: you sacrificed the lives, the wishes, and the aspirations of millions of Cameroonians and Anglophones this afternoon. You laid down your experience, competence, and integrity at the altar of political gluttony. We will remember your names, and you shall descend into the trash heap of history!
At the tail end of his life and his devastating 43+ years of autocratic rule, Paul Biya was incapable of tactfully executing a copy of the cowardly blow Ahidjo dealt Anglophones in 1979 to constitutionally clear the path for Biya to become president at the expense of an Anglophone. The 2026 version of this constitutional coup is even more brazen, more distasteful, and more obscure riddled with lack of clarity and basic grammatical errors as if to remind Anglophones of how deeply he despises them.
Biya will be remembered as a ruthless, incompetent dictator who, until his deathbed and beyond, felt intimidated by Anglophones and shuddered in fear at the thought of power in their hands.
— Angie Forbin is a Cameroonian journalist and media-based political commentators.
