Cameroon’s Eternal Youth: When 92 is the New 22

Regime apologists claim that combining experience with a youthful spirit can still serve the nation. But this defence collapses when ninety-two-year-olds are paraded as the future. Experience without renewal is not leadership; it is stagnation dressed up as succession.

By The Independentist Political Desk

The Word That Lost Its Meaning

In Paul Biya’s Cameroon, words have lost their meaning. Nowhere is this clearer than in the regime’s abuse of the word youth. Across the world, youth is universally defined within a narrow band: the United Nations says between fifteen and twenty-four, the African Union extends it to thirty-five, and the World Health Organization agrees that youth ends well before middle age. Yet in Cameroon, under Biya’s rule, youth has become a label for anyone the regime wishes to recycle, even men in their sixties, seventies, and now, astonishingly, their eighties.

From Champions of Youth to Fossilised Leaders

It would be laughable if it were not so tragic. Jacques Fame Ndongo, the Minister of Higher Education, is in his late seventies and still styles himself as a “champion of youth,” presiding over a system where students are beaten in the streets and lecture halls crumble. Oben Peter Ashu, a loyal baron of the ruling CPDM, continued to attend youth congresses into his sixties, hailed as part of Cameroon’s “younger generation.” Tsimi Evouna, long past retirement age, has sat comfortably on panels supposedly dedicated to youth and leadership. Even the CPDM’s official youth wing has for decades been run by men in their fifties and sixties — recycled faces pretending to be the future.

Philemon Yang: The “Youthful Option” at 80

The absurdity has now reached its peak. Philemon Yang, a man approaching eighty, is being presented as a “youthful option” to represent Ambazonians in the next government, standing shoulder to shoulder with Paul Biya himself, a ninety-two-year-old head of state, and yet another septuagenarian “youth.” When ninety-two becomes the face of youth, what chance do genuine young people have?

A Strategy, Not a Slip of the Tongue

Defenders of the regime sometimes argue that Cameroon uses “youth” in a cultural sense — to mean those not yet at the very pinnacle of leadership, regardless of age. They claim that combining experience with a youthful spirit can still serve the nation. But this defence collapses when ninety-two-year-olds are paraded as the future. Experience without renewal is not leadership; it is stagnation dressed up as succession.

More importantly, all of this fits into a broader French strategy embedded in Biya’s doctrine of Communal Liberalism. This ideology, framed as a model of “peaceful coexistence” and “guided unity,” was in fact designed to stifle dissent. By stretching definitions, blurring language, and promoting docility, it creates a population too weary, too confused, and too conditioned to rebel. The misuse of “youth” is just one more way of keeping Cameroonians perpetually waiting, perpetually obedient, and eternally denied their rightful turn at leadership.

Psychological Warfare Through Language

This is not mere clumsiness with words. It is a deliberate strategy, a political weapon. By calling old men youth, the regime has blocked real generational change. Young Cameroonians in their twenties and thirties are told to wait their turn, but their turn never arrives because the space reserved for them is already occupied by those twice their age, masquerading as their successors. It is also a way to recycle cronies endlessly. So long as one is loyal to the system, one can be dressed up as youth regardless of age. Renewal becomes a lie, hope becomes a mirage, and leadership is frozen in a grotesque cycle of eternal adolescence.

The psychological damage of this game is profound. If an eighty-year-old can be called youth, then time itself loses meaning. The future is always postponed, leadership is permanently deferred, and citizens are conditioned to accept stagnation as their destiny. The manipulation fits a wider pattern: national dialogues that resolve nothing, decentralisation that never devolves power, promises of national unity that deepen division. In Cameroon, words do not build — they suffocate.

The Cost of Eternal Adolescence

The consequences are everywhere. Brain drain has become a national tragedy as talented young Cameroonians escape abroad in search of futures denied to them at home. Those who remain are left disillusioned, learning quickly that merit counts for nothing while loyalty to the ruling clique counts for everything. Politics is frozen in time, with the same slogans, the same failures, and the same old men recycled decade after decade, all under the mask of youth.

Dr. Sako’s Position: Breaking with De Gaulle’s Imperial Model

Dr. Samuel Ikome Sako, President of the Federal Republic of Ambazonia (in exile), has consistently argued that the misuse of youth, the manipulation of language, and the recycling of gerontocrats are not just Cameroonian oddities. They are direct legacies of Charles de Gaulle’s imperial presidency model — a design exported to francophone Africa at independence.

De Gaulle’s system of presidential monarchy, centralised power, and “eternal father figures” was marketed as stability. In reality, it became the cornerstone of Françafrique, where ageing strongmen, propped up by Paris, ruled indefinitely while suppressing real generational change. Today, that system is cracking along its seams. Across francophone Africa, from the Sahel to Central Africa, populations are rising against this model of control.

For Dr. Sako, a free Ambazonia means rejecting this false inheritance. It means dismantling Biya’s Communal Liberalism, breaking the chains of Françafrique, and building a political order rooted in federalism, renewal, and genuine democracy. It means restoring words to their true meaning — youth to the young, leadership to the capable, sovereignty to the people.

Conclusion: A Stolen Future

A ninety-two-year-old cannot be the future. A seventy-year-old cannot be the face of youth. And a government that insists otherwise cannot claim to be honest with its people. Behind the joke lies a strategy. Behind the strategy lies the theft of an entire generation’s future.

The Independentist Political Desk