Cameroun - Power and Political Guinea Pigs in Cameroon

Elections in autocratic regime are another political experimentation where the dictator tricks the people into gaining an undeserved political unction. Authoritarian regimes are all built on fraudulent practices that in times come to be seen as natural. In practice, the dictatorship is in fact a quest of political experimentation. The history of dictatorship is always a history of deceptive practices and the people its guinea pigs.

Thus, election is not the cornerstone of democracy in autocratic regimes where there all the institutions are privatized, there are no checks and balances and no public liberties to say the least. The dictator constantly undermines of the judicial system through the appointment of pliant judges across all levels of the judiciary, appointments that will continue to have an effect long after the dictator leaves office and have the potential for subsequent administrations to get away with eroding human rights more easily.

Authoritarian regimes are known to rig the voting system from the bottom-up---from choice of candidates to cheating at the polls. The privatization of the state in the hands of the tyrant makes running for office not merely expensive but impossible for anyone but the super-connected because nepotism runs rampant in autocracy.

More, not all Cameroonians who are eligible has equal access to vote because we have political prisoners who are deprived of their rights. Another one is that voters go to the polls to make an informed decision. Yet, however, the education system sucks and the media - both of which are prerequisites for voters to be less susceptible to populism, are in the hands of the dictator.

Hence, democracies die when voters want to be lied to. Studying liars who just happen to come along and supply what happens to be in demand is secondary. Dictators will come and eventually go - but what if the system only for a string of psychopaths to come to power?

One of the CL2P’s missions is to provide for civic knowledge for ordinary citizens to think critically & vote accordingly. That begins with ordinary Cameroonians refusing to continue the Biya’s regime charade that uses them solely as guinea pigs. Knowing the difference between propaganda and demonstration which mean actions that make sense in their own lives in order to make the difference between biological and biographical lives.

The French scholar, Didier Fassin, calls biographical life, the capacity to sanctity one own life through personal integrity and testimony. It begins with the knowledge that life is never grasped more fully than when existence and living come together. Thus, the life through which ordinary Cameroonians can, independently, give a meaning to their own existence. As such, making one's life into a biography implies two specifically human qualities: making sense of events which have occurred and using language to transmit it. Thus, a “politics of life” that constitute forms of politics that give specific value and meaning to human life as opposed to the “bare life or the naked life produced by punitive autocratic states where human life is reduced to flesh and the state of guinea pigs. 

Biographical lives are predicated on humanitarian principles, as the practice of governing precarious lives, that must consider every person as equal. In his formulation of the concept of biolegitimacy, consequently, Didier Fassin begins from the recognition that the right to life has gained priority on the human rights agenda in relation to social and economic rights.

Therefore, the first mandate of any humanitarian government is to protect human life not endanger it.

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