The Brenda Biya Saga: Give the man a break

It never rains but it pours. If the Head of State were superstitious, he should be rushing to check himself out with an oracle, following the harrowing trend of events reported around him and his family within the past months.

The public embarrassment with his limousine on May 20 may have been no more than a common mechanical malfunction or neglect on the part of his driver or mechanic, but it now seems to have been the publicly displayed tip of an iceberg of disconcerting happenings in his public and private life, if persistent media reports are anything to go by.

According to the most recent of these reports, the old man took off for one of those his characteristic “brief private visits to Europe” ostensibly Geneva, to sort out his 18-year-old daughter, Brenda, who has been giving his family most dreaded notoriety for months now.

A few months back, she appeared on the net, moaning about what she considered a racist cheek from a white American cabbie, releasing thereby the hair-raising detail of her wanton extravagance.

And she was surprised that instead of sympathy, she got criticism for hiring a limousine daily, for 400 USD – far more than the monthly salary of an average degree holder in the Cameroon Civil Service.

No sooner had the dust settled on that than the social media were once more awash with allegations of her being hospitalized for a drug-related malaise. The story kicked off a spate of spirited debates on various e-forums, giving vent to a mix of sympathy, outrage and transferred aggression.

In response to these allegations and the reactions thereto, Brenda was pictured sticking out her tongue in naughty, get-lost defiance to her detractors, and said she was in good health.

But when her father was alleged to have read the wrong speech in Abuja at around the same time, it began to seem that there was indeed a storm in the family teacup that was slopping over onto the saucer of state. The First Lady’s unusual absence beside her man on May 20, heightened fears that all was not right.

For those who were a la page with her daughter’s alleged antics, it was evident that she had flown to the US to fix the mess. It was, therefore, a President with his heart in California who, at the 20th May Boulevard, had to also wrestle with the embarrassment of a car breakdown.

And now, as if that were not unsettling enough for the poor old man, fresh reports emerge that the young lady has had to be whisked out of the US after the police allegedly found her threatening people with a knife. The people, the Rambler learned, were her neighbours, called to help when her mother was unable to handle her excessive tantrums.

The girl is said to have flown into a mad rage, smashing everything handy, to protest her parents’ decision to withdraw her from the US where she was becoming a bigger nuisance and disgrace as the days wore on.

When children become this deviant, it is usual for parents to wonder, “where did we go wrong? What did we fail to do?” But it is said that you give birth to children but not to their hearts – or minds. We do our best for them but they will be what they choose to be at the end of the day.

Brenda Biya is an adolescent like any other, but with an ungodly allowance of privileges which she needs far more help managing.

Now we can wonder if she was morally and psychologically equipped enough to live by herself, so far away from parental oversight, with so much money and freedom at her disposal.

The late President Ahmadou Ahidjo seems to have understood this. He sent his daughter to Lycee Leclerc and to CUSS, Yaounde. And the story is told of how, for disciplining her, the principal of the high school earned a commendation rather than a sack from Ahidjo.

If all what we read and hear about our first daughter is true, then, somebody had better tell her to give our old man a break. Untold privileges go with being the President’s child, but there are loads of challenges too, not least permanent exposure to public scrutiny.

Similarly, there are untold privileges to being President, but it is also the toughest job in the land, and for a spent octogenarian, additional stress from the family can only send him to an early grave.

Cameroonians want to see their President enjoying a relaxed and well-deserved retirement in the near future. So Brenda, Frank, Junior, give your dad a break.

If, on the other hand, all these reports were to be no more than the creation of malevolent minds, what a shame it would be to journalism and to Cameroonians who would market their country in such false, negative light. Don’t forget that in America, everything can be verified.

If it is the work of the President’s political adversaries, we understand that politics can be a no-holds-barred game, but is degenerate behaviour, even in politics, to seek to destabilize a man by inventing degrading stories about his child. So give the man’s family a break.

As for the May 20 limousine saga, if the breakdown was the result of criminal negligence as some seem to suggest, it may well be time to overhaul not just the car but the presidential garage itself, be the drivers and mechanics-his relatives or not. In that case the inventors of the Chinese tourist story should give us a break.