Paul Atanga Nji, truly Biya’s hatchet man

Easily a member of Biya’s inner circle, the minister in charge of Special Duties at the Presidency and doubles as Permanent Secretary of the National Security Council might have acted at the instance of his master when he made the call for the 2018 presidential election to be anticipated.

There is no gainsaying that Paul Atanga Nji, minister of Special Duties at the Presidency and permanent secretary of the National Security Council, is a close aide of President Paul Biya.

Sources close to the president even hold that after Gen. Ivo Descancio, the chief of presidential security, Atanga Nji is the next Anglophone who is closest to the President. For this reason, they say, every public action of his is well calculated and does not happen by chance.

This immediately brings to mind the request for President Biya to convene the electorate for an anticipated presidential election and stand as the candidate for the ruling CPDM, made on 30 January 2016 by North West elite and signed by 14 signatories headed by Atanga Nji.

In an interview granted the national bilingual daily, Cameroon Tribune, of 1 February 2016, Atanga Nji justified this request by saying that the Head of State has a very charged itinerary in 2018. He pointed out that in addition to the planned presidential election, there are three other elections scheduled for 2018: the senatorial, the parliamentary and municipal elections.

Secondly, Atanga Nji explained that given the engagement that Cameroon has taken to host the African Cup of Nations in January 2019, the infrastructure linked to the organization of the event have to be completed and handed to the government before July 2018. They include the new stadiums in Douala and Yaounde, the major highways that need to be refurbished, hospitals and hotels etc.

If the 2018 presidential election were to be anticipated, therefore, Atanga Nji suggests, it would give the President ample time to follow up on these projects, especially given the security problems that the country is facing at the moment. It would also enable him to attend to other important state issues, Atanga Nji posited.

Pundits have been quick to observe that the request of the Permanent Secretary of the National Security Council, for President Biya to call an anticipated election, is not coming from the blues. They say the Etoudi Palace Prince and his close aide must have discussed the matter in great detail and that the former is only using the latter to test the waters.

“Paul Biya is not a fool. Every action he makes is calculated. Well calculated indeed. Besides, age is not on his side. He is 83 today; he will not wait until he is 85 to call an election that will lead him to another seven-year term of office. The current year may have much in store for Cameroonians. A presidential election is likely to hold before the year runs out. If this happens, Biya will be 90 instead of 92 by the time his next mandate ends,” a regime baron who asked not to be named explained to The median.

The explanations were not surprising to this newspaper which was one of the first in Cameroon to predict an anticipated presidential election in the country many months ago.