> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Cameroon's President Came Home a Month Ago. He Still Hasn't Actually Appeared - URL: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/cameroons-president-came-home-a-month-ago-he-still-hasnt-actually-appeared/ - Published: 2026-10-07T06:22:09.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-07T06:22:09.000Z - Description: Whether a country can survive a president's absence is debatable. What it cannot survive, indefinitely, is being unable to tell the difference between his silence and his disappearance. - Author: Ankiambom Nkesa Nkesa - Tags: Politics Cameroonians within the national triangle had lived without their first citizen, President Biya, in sight for almost three months, away on what was called a private visit to Europe. The calls grew louder as citizens who yearned to see a president absent from public view for over seventy days grew impatient. [On the twentieth of August, the president finally returned to the country.](https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/cameroon-president-returns-home-after-10-week-absence-2026-08-20/?ref=bontehmagazine.com) CRTV, the state broadcaster, deployed over two hundred staff to capture the moment live, so that Cameroonians not on the tarmac could share the ambience just as much as those who were there, all of them eager to wave at a president they had waited so long to see. The motorcade rolled past. All anyone saw was a hand, waving from behind a tinted window. The usual ambience that marked his return was missing. The rituals that typically accompany it never got the chance to breathe. Citizens were left standing at the edges of the tarmac with no president to walk past and greet them. Why such devotion from a country's citizens should go this unrequited is not my concern here. What concerns me is what two hundred cameras were sent to capture, and what they came back with, a hand, and nothing else. His return is not the same as his appearance. Cameroon has a president who is physically home and still, in every way that matters to a citizen, absent. The country isn't waiting for him to come back anymore. It's waiting for him to be seen. Cameroonians want a president visible in their economic life, their health, their social life, in every part of life the state is meant to touch and improve. For decades, that has not been the case. It seems as though every Cameroonian has conceded that there is no president to step into their private struggles, that no help is coming from anywhere, and so they carry on alone. When last did you see the president grant a press interview, address the nation after catastrophe struck, visit citizens hit by a national disaster, or take a tour of the country to meet the people he rules over, to feel their struggles and talk with them? Contrast this with presidents elsewhere. [When floods devastated Accra and Tema in June, Ghana's President Mahama was airborne within hours, surveying the damage himself](https://yen.com.gh/ghana/307049-ghanaians-descend-mahama-helicopter-ride-assess-flooding-stop-content-creation/?ref=bontehmagazine.com#google%5Fvignette), directing the response in person. That is what a present president looks like, available to the people. As controversial as Donald Trump remains, he is arguably the world's most visible leader, whether it is his posture toward Iran or his [capture of Venezuela's president in a January military strike](https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/03/americas/venezuela-explosions-intl-hnk?ref=bontehmagazine.com) that Trump said would open the country's oil reserves to American companies, he is seen doing things, for better or worse, in the name of his people. If there is one thing Cameroonians have never enjoyed, it is the feeling of having a present president. There is something quietly painful about being Cameroonian in moments like this, when a crisis calls for a president to step forward and he stays inside the Unity Palace as though none of it concerns him. Ambiguity does not cost the people around him. It serves them. A president who governs by decree from behind glass never has to answer a question he cannot. The inner circle, the party apparatus, and whoever is managing what comes next all get more room to operate when there is no one left to contradict them. By staying silent, nothing gets contradicted, because nobody is saying anything at all. This silence is not a communication failure. It is a strategy for continuity. Immanuel Kant argued that a sovereign owes those he governs the ability to know who and what governs them. Being ruled at a distance you cannot verify is a way of being treated as a means, not as an end. But the strategy is not clean. It invites the very instability it is meant to prevent. The fake presidential decree, signed by an impostor and somehow delivered to CRTV, and a cabinet reshuffle promised since December 2025 that still has not happened, are both signs that the strategy is not working as intended. A vacuum this carefully managed still behaves like a vacuum. If communication from the presidency were frequent and honest about the issues that matter to the nation, perhaps none of this would be happening. Silence may prevent contradiction, but it cannot prevent speculation, and speculation is exactly what we are living through as a nation. The cost of the president's silence and absence from the things pertinent to national life is not small. Financing decisions get signed by decree instead of negotiated in person. A government cannot even keep to its own timeline, a reshuffle now ten months overdue. Whether a country can survive a president's absence is debatable. What it cannot survive, indefinitely, is being unable to tell the difference between his silence and his disappearance. That is exactly where we find ourselves as a nation, wondering most of the time whether our president is present in the affairs of state at all, or whether he is even alive.