On July 20, 2018, twenty political parties went ahead and drank the “Kool-Aid” provided to them by the Biya’s regime in power for the last 36 years and on its way to extend that obscene longevity for life on October 7, 2018.

This act of electoral suicide is particularly worrisome since it is led by the lack of Jean de Dieu Momo, president of the PADDEC, who made his name as the defender of the “Bepanda Seven,” a group of young boys that were disappeared, probably, by the regime’s death squad during a tumultuous time when Mr. Biya legalized his president for life and periodic elections routinely ignored by a large if not majority segment of the electorate. Not to mention the pool of qualified candidates for elected office become exceedingly shallow, particularly, in a context where capable politicians were imprisoned under the name of fighting for corruption which the CL2P will never stop denouncing.

Indeed, Me Jean De Dieu MOMO’s turnaround is vertiginous. The man who has just rallied with drums and trumpets the presidential candidacy of the despot Paul Biya (86 years old, 36 years of absolute power) perfectly embodies these Cameroonian "politicians" (captured by the regime in place or to its opposition of flunkies) which, with a few exceptions, are radioactive and should absolutely be avoided especially outside the borders of Cameroon.

By dealing with these flunkies, one runs the risk to be "trapped" as was recently Mrs. Ségolène Royal leaving a little of your respectability; or sadly to leave your life in exchange for a few banknotes or promises of nominations or even other shabby honors and titles that love these sulfur characters in Cameroon.

In this way, they can, like Mr. MOMO, have for years toured Western chancelleries and multilateral institutions - helped by NGOs and the best lobby groups - to denounce the atrocities perpetrated by Paul BIYA's 30-year dictatorship. . Then in a brutal reversal of jacket - which they alone have the secret - intoning the old chorus of the plot so dear to the Yaoundé regime, to hide the crimes against humanity they condemned a few days before, or defend without the least embarrassment the perpetuation of the presidency for life that they rightly wanted to avoid in Cameroon.

This is why suspicion must, alas, be appropriate whenever one is confronted with a Cameroonian public actor.

The thing that is most disturbing about Biya’s supporters is that instead of pointing out the great things they say he is doing for the country and celebrating them, they do a really weird thing - they do a little happy dance when the regime does something his opposition will hate, and they celebrate the misery this will cause his opposition. They don't care what Biya does as long as it makes someone else miserable. I don't know what psychologists make of it but it scares the bejesus out of me. It is called a politic of sociopaths and psychopaths. Indeed, politics in Cameroon has always been, selfish and cruel. It is the daddy of the nation “always hot” claiming he knows best. It is all tangled up in religious dogma if not outright cultist.

What is more, this act of political suicide is another proof that many Cameroonians do not understand the stakes of political elections.

Political elections are the only moment when ordinary people can express their power of rationality and self-governance to give a public unction to a form of government. Elections are sacred processes because they mobilize the larger public to create new realities and a new world which is the kind of Cameroon we want for our children. Thus, elections are not the product of selfish processes, preservation of privilege, deference to authority, and disdain of the masses. Elections are ways to reorganize social institutions for the kind of reality that we want. Thus, we do not vote for a person, a family, a clan, a tribe, an ethnicity, a special interest group, we vote for the kind of Cameroon that we want which begins by taking seriously our responsibilities to others and ourselves. Therefore, elections are by nature not fetishistic and alienating but a time of possibilities.

Precisely, elections are collaborative processes which means that voting is unconditional. This, un-conditionality means a capacity for freedom, a capacity to exercise judgement which means having a memory to understand the historical forces of change at play and ways to think about the future with utopian principles. It means being a historical subject and work together for a collective future that begins by changing our core political reality. It means reaching out for forces that transcend personal circumstances. Consequently, no one must get a mandate by playing to people’s fears rather than their hopes.