Heat in Maroua: What Biya’s Return Really Signals

This op-ed draws on a lengthy broadcast by Ambazonian activist and former CRTV reporter Akuroh Mbah John, whose critique is raw, partisan, and, at times, incendiary. Strip that heat away and a colder core remains: a state that confuses stage-craft for legitimacy, a campaign that arrives with an air ambulance, and a political class that mistakes the country’s exhaustion for consent.

The Comeback That Admits the Problem

Biya did not speak about the election for months. Surrogates filled the space; ministers toured; security memos multiplied. The Far North rally was billed as reassurance: the pillar region is still loyal, the machine still turns. But if reassurance were real, it would not require this much choreography, nor this much hush before the reveal.

Akuroh’s broadcast points to the optics: a last-minute outing, rumours about health, and a convoy padded by the state’s coercive vocabulary. His rhetoric is sharp, but his observation is simple: power that hides until the final week lacks confidence in its own story. You can dismiss the activist; you cannot dismiss the timing.

Meanwhile, in the west, rebels fighting for the restoration of the statehood of former British Cameroon keep towns closed under rolling lockdowns. Elections there “arrive like foreign news,” Akuroh says — not because people don’t understand stakes, but because the ballot has been severed from consequence. Even critics of the rebels concede a basic fact: fear, not trust, governs turnout.

A State That Plans for Order — Then Governs by Disorder

Akuroh accuses the administration of pre-emptive securitisation: communiqués that warn of unrest “during and after” the vote; local authorities that read intent into a crowd before it forms; a reflex to militarise spaces where opposition shows signs of life. He frames it as “governing by terror.” A more precise description is governing by anticipation: projecting chaos so force can be justified.

There is a cost to this reflex. When the state treats the electorate as a threat vector, politics downgrades into logistics: secure this road, cordon that square, clip that microphone when the speech meanders. The rally becomes a checkpoint with flags. The country notices. The country always notices.

In Bamenda, when an opposition candidate tried to cue the anthem, a voice from the crowd shot back a dry rebuke — a reminder of contested belonging that no slogan can dissolve. You can sneer at the heckle or romanticise it; either way, it exposes how brittle the social contract has become.

The Roads Tell on Everyone

One of Akuroh’s sharper segments is not ideological at all. It’s about roads — the rutted tracks to Bang, the axle-deep mud in Ekondo-Titi, the broken arteries that make a beer a luxury and an ambulance a prayer. You don’t need a manifesto to measure that failure; you need shocks, boots and patience. For a generation raised on promises of “grand projects,” the road is a quiet, daily plebiscite. It is voting “no” without ink.

Power replies with pageantry. But the choreography can’t cross a washed-out bridge, can’t evacuate a complicated pregnancy, can’t deliver teachers to classrooms that haven’t been rebuilt. If the regime wins again, it will not be because it solved the country’s movement problem. It will be because it mastered the immobility of politics: keep the core still, move only what you must, and declare the rest “stability.”

The Moral Hazards We Don’t Name

Akuroh’s broadcast leans into moral outrage — on soldiers lost, civilians killed, villages burned, and prisoners forgotten. His language often exceeds the boundaries of responsible discourse. Yet his underlying charge is not complicated: a state that will not tell itself the truth produces citizens who stop believing the state can hear them at all.

This is where the Far North rally meets the ghost towns of the west. The system thinks the two images cancel each other out — applause here, silence there. They don’t. They compound. Applause becomes duty; silence becomes indictment. Without credible accountability, violence becomes a language everyone understands and nobody can translate back into policy.

What the Next Days Require

The election will likely proceed, and the result will likely favour the incumbent. The question isn’t who claims the mandate. It’s who earns the margin of acceptance to govern the day after, and the week after that. On this, three points:

De-escalation by honesty. Admit where the state cannot guarantee normal voting and explain what that means for representation. Pretence increases the risk of post-poll volatility.
Civic oxygen. Stop criminalising assembly out of habit. Not every crowd is an insurrection; treat them as political speech by default, not exception.
Material signals. Fix roads and schools where cameras are not. Quiet competence will disarm cynicism faster than any rally can.

Akuroh’s final note is performative — “Heat. Heat.” Strip the performance, and a duty remains: lower the temperature. That burden sits first with those who own the levers of force, and then with those who own the microphones. The country is tired. It needs proof of adulthood from everyone who wants to govern it — or to liberate it.

Cameroon has learned to live with contradiction: a president who appears rarely and rules completely; elections everyone predicts and few trust; regions that vote and regions that lock down. That isn’t equilibrium. It is managed fragility. And fragility always collects its debt.