France—once proud, and now desperate—continues to hold his trembling hand, terrified that when he falls, the truth about Ambazonia’s stolen sovereignty will stand.
By Ali Dan Ismael – Editor-in-Chief, The Independentist
Paul Biya is not a president. He is a living museum exhibit of colonial decay, a French project in African skin, embalmed in power since the age of vinyl records, gramophones, and telegrams.
When Biya was already Secretary-General of the UPC in 1955, my late mother—who passed at ninety-one this past May—hadn’t even given birth to her first child. Seventy years in politics! Seventy years of deception and servitude under the tricolor shadow of Paris.
When Biya ascended from Prime Minister to President in 1982, we were still young students just out of O-Levels. And when he renamed the country from United Republic of Cameroon to simply Republic of Cameroun—recycling the exact name used by French Cameroon at its 1960 independence—I had barely left high school. That was the moment I joined the generation of our true nationalists—Fon Gorji Dinka, Albert Mukong, Bernard Fonlon, Arnold Yongbang, Justice Ebong, Ambassador Fosung, and others—who refused to watch a dictator erase a people and their destiny.
Biya has never governed; he has only renamed ruins. He destroyed corporations that fed our economy, strangled the common-law foundation that once defined our justice, and corrupted bilingualism into mockery. Under his rule, resources vanished into Swiss vaults while schools rotted and doctors fled.
France rewards him not for leadership, but for loyalty. To Paris, Biya is not a man—he is a guarantee: the guarantee that Cameroon will never think, never grow, never rise without permission from its colonial father. France’s presidents come and go—De Gaulle, Mitterrand, Macron—but Biya remains, their most faithful relic of the Napoleonic order.
THE PEN THAT SHAMED THEIR GUNS
When Fon Gorji Dinka prepared to raise an army to defend Ambazonia, God intervened: “Not by the gun, but by the pen.” And indeed, the Bakassi Peninsula case became that pen. It was the heavenly courtroom where truth finally condemned imposture. The ICJ judgment of 14 August 2013 forced Biya’s Cameroun to surrender what it never owned. The myth of “one and indivisible Cameroon” was broken by legal truth, not bullets. The Bakassi ruling revealed what Biya tried to bury: two Camerouns existed—CamerOOn and CamerOUn—and only one was legitimate.
THE HOLY DOCUMENT THEY FEAR
Later, divine guidance led me to unearth UN Resolution 1608 (XV)—the sacred paper trail Biya prays no one reads. It states clearly that La République du Cameroun had to finalize an act of union with Southern Cameroons—an act it never signed. Thus, Cameroun has no legal boundary with Nigeria, no moral boundary with truth, and no historical claim over Ambazonia.
From 2009 to 2011, and again before the military tribunal in 2018, I stood to defend this truth—invoking 1608 and declaring the Greentree Agreement null at its expiration. And every time, Biya’s regime trembled. Because for every gun he fires, there is a document that disarms him. For every lie France funds, there is a pen that exposes it.
THE EMPEROR OF EMPTINESS
Biya’s tragedy is not age—it is absence. He no longer governs; he only breathes. He is a hologram projected from Paris, a colonial echo trapped in a presidential suit. Cameroon has a flag, but no republic; ministers, but no morality; soldiers, but no soul.
And France—once proud, now desperate—continues to hold his trembling hand, terrified that when he falls, the truth about Ambazonia’s stolen sovereignty will stand.
THE PEOPLE SHALL SPEAK
Ambazonia rises not from hate, but from heritage.
We are the nation of schools, of law, of innovation.
We are not the children of decrees—we are the heirs of justice. While Biya clings to a dying empire, we build the new one of conscience.
History will not forgive him. Nor will it pardon France. But history will remember those who wrote truth while others whispered fear. The pen of justice has already written his epitaph: “Here lies Paul Biya—the last governor of a vanished empire.”
By Ali Dan Ismael
Editor-in-Chief, The Independentist
“Truth in Resistance, Clarity in Crisis.”
