Truth: Election rigging; Not in Biya's name!.

I wasn't there as a reporter but, inexplicably, as a member of the Central Committee Sub Commission for Communication and Marketing, even when I have never held a card for any political party in life.

But diplomats who have met him have told me he is "honest and sincere" in his conversation. I believe them, not those who want to deify him in their hypocrisy and even shamelessly say they will "invent" him if he inevitably leaves the stage as all humans do.

During the October 12, 2025 presidential election, I voted in the South West, a Region which, like the North West Region, has been greatly deserted.

The government calls them "risky zones" and has provided tax incentives to attract investors. But I have not seen the feel-good effects as I regularly travel within the two crisis-hit Regions.

I have had occasion to be forced to give the boys in the bushes money to avoid being kidnapped, when I met the hooligans with red eyes; portraying drugs they had taken. I saw them dangling automatic weapons to force their victims to obey them, "like Whiteman dog".

Political leaders of the North West and South West Regions, many internally displaced to save havens and "green areas", who visited their constituents to canvas for votes for their Champion, did so protected by security and defence forces.

Most of the rural areas in the two Regions are deserted and have become like graveyards. But it would look like on election day on October 12, the visitors, with bags of money, bread and sardines, invoked ghosts to vote massively for their candidate in such remote and deserted areas.

I just read Batonnier Akere Muna, anti-corruption advocate, summarise a graphic synopsis of the voting situation in the two restive Regions.

“Head first, they charge, tinkering with voting results and spreading the myth of the incumbent’s unshakable strength in rural areas- those very areas where the people suffer most," Barrister Akere Muna stated. 

They invoked the ghosts of rigging, not in reverence to President Biya, but to protect their shaky seats on the veranda of the master's kitchen. Others did so, not only to prevent going on retirement but to avoid a jail term after being sent on retirement.

The hypocrites, if they don't even like the President, they feared if the president fell from power, they shall crash from grace to grass.

There is no doubt President Biya is a master politician, honest and sincere. He knows how to shame such pseudo-politicians who rig elections to favour him.

He told them off when they attempted to prevent multiparty politics; he rebuffed them when they said there was no Anglophone problem and convened a Major National Dialogue to find a solution. He will surely punish those who rigged elections in the North West and South West Regions, by flushing them out of his next cabinet.

Postscript: You ask me to paint hope, but what brush should be used when the canvas is soaked with the blood of unfulfilled promises? - Anonymous  

This story was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3614 of Monday November 03, 2025