"Cameroonians Love Me," Paul Biya Says

Paul Biya and Pope Benedict XVI
Okay, he did not say that; I made the quote up. But you can get the drift. Paul Biya has a longstanding tradition of countering widespread popular disenchantment with his dictatorship by asking leaders of his RDPC/CPDM ruling party to organize marches, chanting how they love him as president. My first experience of this was in the early 1990s, when I was still in high school in Cameroon. It was the time when the popular outcry was about multi-party democracy. At the time, Paul Biya sent some ministers out to organize marches and chant his praise. There is a popular song in Cameroon that begins with the word "dimabola." When I typed this word into the computer the computer presumed to know the right word by suggesting that the correct word may be "diabolism" or "diabolic". But that song, to tell you the truth, does not appear to be about diabolism. In fact, the first time I heard the song it was sung in a church. But as is the case in Cameroon, when a church music is really good, people use it for dancing even in nightclubs. That is how dimabola was lifted from the church onto the politics of Cameroon. I am not sure what the song means but given that it was sung in church, I suppose it is not in praise of Satan or the devil. (This is not to suggest that Paul Biya is the devil or anything of that sort. At the more mundane level, he is a Roman Catholic; at the sublime level, he is God). So, old men and women organized young men and women and off they went onto the the streets of some of Cameroon's towns. They sang and danced dimabola, placing Biya's name in the spot that was previously occupied by divinity. They sang and danced and said that Cameroon was immature for democracy. They sang and danced and said that Cameroon was just fine the way it was.

However, most people disagreed with this faith in Paul Biya. They went onto the streets and demonstrated and this demonstration resulted in the death of some people. In a very short time, Paul Biya said that he was bringing something called "Advanced Democracy" to Cameroon. He said that simple Democracy was not good enough for Cameroon, that Cameroon was so democratically mature that what they needed was Advanced Democracy. To this day, yours truly is still in the dark about what Advanced Democracy means. However, if one can tell what people believe by how they act, it will become clear that Advanced Democracy means buying off opponents with large bribes, jailing people who do not agree with you on trumped up charges, allowing only demonstrations that support you, constantly revising the constitution to suit the whim and caprices of the ruling party and its president, increased poverty for the masses, etc. In fact, Advanced Democracy, as some political scientists have seen, means the criminalization of the state. And, even though many people where killed before Paul Biya could concoct this bizarre phenomenon called Advanced Democracy, he has since praised himself as the one who brought Democracy to the country.

The current marches going on in Cameroon, begging Paul Biya to remain president, are deja vu. The only difference now is that those who were young people then are the old people now. They are grooming other young people into the faith of Paul Biya worship. However, this public demonstration of faith in Paul Biya is not voluntary. In the past months since Tunisia, there have been calls for Paul Biya to step down. That made Biya to go back to his old bag of tricks and pull an old stunt again - gathering people to march, sing and dance for him. In fact, it is the only march that can be allowed now. Police was sent to brutalize just a handful of people who attempted to march for the opposite message. In Paul Biya's Advanced Democracy, everyone should belong to one religion (Paul Biya worship). Opposing voices can only be bribed into compliance or suppressed. When you want to march in support of Paul Biya, you can do so; but when you want to march to call for Paul Biya to step down, you have a problem. In Biya's universe, that is called Advanced Democracy. And Cameroonians are loving it to death!