It's not often that the West African country of Cameroon breaks into the mainstream news cycle (the last time I remember even hearing about the country was when they were doing unexpextedly well in the FIFA World Cup, and that wasn't this year's World Cup!)
But it seems that 85-year old Paul Biya, the current and long-time President of the country, is planning to stand for his seventh consecutive term in office.
Biya has controlled the poor country for 36 years already (second only in longevity to Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasago of Equatorial Guinea). You'd think that was enough. But he has managed to bleed a very comfortable life out of the poor beleaguered country. He is sometimes referred to as the "President of the Hotel Intercontinental", after his preferred Geneva hotel, where he and his entourage of 50 spend up to a third of the year at an estimated cost of around US$40,000 a day.
Meanwhile nearly half of the population of his country subsist on less than $2 a day, and the military has been responsible for dozens of cases of torture and killings according to Amnesty International, as well as its involvement in a brutal war against an Anglophone secessionist uprising in one region of the country and an ongoing struggle against Boko Haram extremists in another. It is a text-book example of a basket-case African republic.
The country deserves better, but realistically it will probably not get it.
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