THINGS FALL APART FROM PARIS TO YAOUNDÉ: Biya, the Last Student Who Met De Gaulle — The Death of Françafrique

The Fifth Republic, built by Charles de Gaulle as a presidential monarchy, once projected stability and grandeur. Today, it stands hollowed out — a Republic in name, but a corporate protectorate of billionaires, security elites, and aging political dynasties.

By Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-Chief, The Independentist

Paris: The End of the Fifth Republic’s Illusion

From Paris to Yaoundé, the foundations of an empire are crumbling. Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s reflections on France’s internal decay reveal the final act of a system that has long governed both France and her African vassals — la Françafrique.
The Fifth Republic, built by Charles de Gaulle as a presidential monarchy, once projected stability and grandeur. Today, it stands hollowed out — a Republic in name, but a corporate protectorate of billionaires, security elites, and aging political dynasties.

Macron, who once styled himself as Jupiter, now rules over fragments: a divided right that flirts with fascism, a divided left unable to unite, and a divided center with no ideology beyond survival. Mélenchon’s words are prophetic: “We are at the end of Macronism.”

Yaoundé: The Colonial Student Who Never Graduated

In Yaoundé, Paul Biya — the last student who personally met General de Gaulle — remains the embodiment of that same Fifth Republic logic.
He inherited not only the presidential palace but the imperial DNA of the French system itself: centralised authority, divine presidency, manipulated democracy, and contempt for the governed.

Like De Gaulle, Biya believed in the myth of the providential man. Like Macron, he surrounded himself with oligarchs and technocrats, turning governance into spectacle and repression into routine. But unlike his masters, Biya never adapted. His regime froze time. For 42 years, he kept Cameroon in the grip of Napoleonic bureaucracy and Bonapartist psychology — the tools France used to govern her colonies and silence dissent.

Françafrique’s Internal Collapse

As Mélenchon and La France Insoumise describe, the crisis in Paris is not just political — it is moral and civilizational. The same racist, capitalist order that sustains police brutality in France sustains military occupation and exploitation in Africa.

When Mélenchon speaks of “the oligarchy versus the people,” he unknowingly describes Yaoundé as well. The same oligarchy that controls the French media controls Cameroon’s mineral contracts. The same police logic that kills young Arabs in Nanterre burns villages in Ambazonia.

Françafrique is collapsing not because Africans resisted — they always did — but because France can no longer afford her hypocrisy. The empire is eating itself from within.

From Nanterre to Nkambe — One Revolt, Two Fronts

Mélenchon’s analysis of the “citizen revolutions” — from the Yellow Vests to the suburban uprisings — mirrors the Ambazonian resistance across the equator. In both cases, ordinary people rebelled against the same architecture of power: economic exclusion, racial humiliation, and state violence masked as order.

The French suburbs and the Ambazonian forests are twin mirrors — one reflects the anger of the exploited, the other the courage of the colonised.

The Last Monarch and the Coming Sixth Republic

If Mélenchon calls for a Sixth Republic to end France’s presidential monarchy, then Africa, too, must bury its own Fifth Republics — those mimic regimes designed in Paris, scripted in Yaoundé, and exported to Bamako, Libreville, and Abidjan.

Biya, the last student who met De Gaulle, will also be the last symbol of Françafrique’s artificial immortality. When he falls, the mask falls with him. The empire that pretended to be eternal — built on “cooperation,” “security,” and “Francophonie” — will be exposed as a relic of greed and racism.

The same fire consuming France’s moral order is reaching its colonial shadows. From the boulevards of Paris to the hills of Buea, history is whispering the same truth: “The age of imperial tutelage is over. The Republic — in Paris or Yaoundé — must belong to the people, or it will perish.”

Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-Chief, The Independentist