By Andrew Nsoseka
Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya, in a social media post on August 1, 2025, stated that Cameroonians should be grateful that they live in a haven of stability and peace.
“In our troubled and imperfect world, we should, I think, be glad that to some degree, we live in a haven of stability and peace”, he wrote.
Though seemingly trying to thread with caution by slipping in “to some degree” in his statement, Biya’s assentation given the present state of affairs in Cameroon – the Anglophone crisis now a war against secession smouldering on for over eight years, the Boko Haram incursions and attacks in the Northern regions claiming lives of soldiers and locals, and insecurity in Douala and Yaoundé from the so-called “microbes”, one could say that Biya’s post is “not consistent with the reality”, in his communication Minister’s voice.
In the two Anglophone regions where Biya and his government have failed to find a lasting solution to the crisis, there are towns and communities where insecurity is rife and lives are lost easily in what has become almost no news.
As usual, Biya based his statement on the general world being troubled and imperfect. This follows a pattern of several of his other statements that either use isolated global realities to justify failure in domestic policy and action. With such a strategy, he easily meanders his way around to blame the heightened economic hardship in Cameroon to for instance, the war in Ukraine, and how it has starved the Cameroonian people from wheat and grain supply, even though Cameroon has potential to produce more grain than it needs, but which his over four decades leadership have failed to harnessed.
Biya’s assertion that Cameroonians should be glad that, to some degree, they live in a haven of stability and peace will make the everyday Cameroonian living in troubled areas wonder whether he is abreast with the reality of what is happening around the country he leads. But it is also necessary to add that he hardly visits any other place in Cameroon apart from the presidency and his village, when he is not enjoying private time in Switzerland or some other place outside his Cameroon.
In reality, there are several places in Cameroon where no one will tell you they are glad to live in, and call such a place anything similar to a haven of peace and stability. Such statements coming from the president or his social media accounts handler only help to drive home conspiracy theories that the president is far aloof from the everyday experiences and challenges of most of his compatriots.
