Is Cameroun’s other name “Paul Biya and Sons Limited?”

By Isaac Asabor

Cameroon is not alone in this disgrace. Across Africa, particularly in West and Central Africa, leaders have turned nations into family estates. In Togo, Faure Gnassingbé inherited power like pocket money. In Gabon, Ali Bongo sat on his father’s throne until a coup finally yanked him off. In Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang is preparing his son like a royal coronation.
Cameroon is not a republic. It is a family franchise with a faded national flag as the logo. A nation of 27 million people has been hijacked and rebranded as a private company. The founder is Paul Biya, the managing director-in-waiting is his son Franck, and the citizens are the unpaid shareholders who never see dividends. Welcome to Paul Biya and Sons Limited.
Paul Biya has been in power since 1982, which is forty-two years of one man suffocating a country. At 91, he no longer rules; he squats on power. His leadership style is absentee landlordism: he governs Cameroon the way a Swiss hotel suite governs its guests. Biya spends months abroad in Geneva, sipping champagne while his people sip despair.
And now, as if four decades of damage were not enough, he is grooming his son Franck as heir. This is not politics. It is family inheritance. Cameroon has gone from being a republic to being treated like an heirloom chair passed from father to son.
Franck Biya’s only qualification is his surname. But in Cameroon’s warped political climate, that is enough to crown him the “crown prince.” The country has become a political monarchy wearing the torn mask of a republic.
This is the dynasty scam: loot the treasury for decades, then hand the wreckage to your child. Gabon did it. Togo did it. Equatorial Guinea is doing it. Now Cameroon is next in line for the funeral of democracy.
What has Biya’s four-decade reign delivered? Poverty as deep as the oil wells. Corruption so brazen it is practically a national sport. Roads that collapse faster than promises. An Anglophone crisis soaked in blood. A country with potential reduced to a cautionary tale.
Meanwhile, the Biya family lives in obscene luxury, jetting around the world as if Cameroon were a holiday home with a flag. The people are left behind to rot, while their president shops in Paris boutiques and naps in Geneva.
That is the dividend of Paul Biya and Sons Limited: despair for the people, delight for the dynasty.
Cameroon is not alone in this disgrace. Across Africa, particularly in West and Central Africa, leaders have turned nations into family estates. In Togo, Faure Gnassingbé inherited power like pocket money. In Gabon, Ali Bongo sat on his father’s throne until a coup finally yanked him off. In Equatorial Guinea, Teodoro Obiang is preparing his son like a royal coronation.
This trend is not just shameful. It is an outright assault on democracy itself. Abraham Lincoln defined democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people. In these countries, it has been twisted into government of the family, by the family, for the family. It is not governance; it is nepotism with a constitution as camouflage.
And the African Union? Snoring. ECOWAS? Busy chasing coup-makers while ignoring the hereditary coups happening in slow motion. Western powers? Happy to look the other way so long as oil keeps flowing and contracts keep signing. The hypocrisy is a global scandal.
Cameroon does not belong to Paul Biya or his offspring. It belongs to its people. Yet for too long, Cameroonians have been reduced to tenants in their own house. Every day the silence continues, the Biya dynasty digs in deeper.
Civil society, opposition leaders, the diaspora, all must rise. Cameroonians must tear down the illusion that one family owns their future. Because once the republic is fully converted into a family business, reclaiming it will cost blood and generations.
Paul Biya has vandalized the republic, looted its resources, and now wants to hand the carcass to his son. This is not leadership; it is political grave-digging. Cameroon is being suffocated by a geriatric president who mistakes his son for the Messiah and his country for a retirement package.
The truth is ugly but unavoidable: Cameroon today looks less like a nation and more like Paul Biya and Sons Limited. And unless Cameroonians rise to smash the company signboard, the country will remain a private family estate where millions are forced to live like tenants while one family lives like kings.
And Biya is not alone. From Yoweri Museveni in Uganda grooming his son, to Teodoro Obiang in Equatorial Guinea polishing his son’s crown, Africa is sliding into a shameless tradition of family fiefdoms. If this dangerous trend is not stopped, democracy in Africa will be nothing more than a word in textbooks, mocked, mutilated, and murdered by men who mistake bloodlines for ballots.
Isaac Asabor is a Public Policy Analyst.