President Paul on Monday, July 4, 2016, granted a presidential pardon to Lydienne Eyoum. This Franco-Cameroonian lawyer has been in jail since 2010. The Cameroonian dictator has come under pressure from the French government to release her.

Lydienn Eyoum is a Cameroonian born with French nationality. She spent 6 years in jail over embezzlement of public funds. She was condemned to 25 years imprisonment in 2014 by the Special Criminal Tribunal and confirmed by the Supreme Court. Francoise Hollande French president spoke lengthily on her freedom when he visited Cameroon last year.

Recalled that since her incarceration at the Kondengui maximum security prison pressure has been mounting on Biya from the French. In December 2015, a visiting French Senator, Jean-Yves Leconte, who met with Eyoum in prison announced that the jailed Lawyer pleaded for a presidential pardon and was to be released very soon. A group was even created to lobby for her release. To facilitate their mission, Eyoum had paid into the state treasury 4.7 billion francs which included the initial recovery sum of 3.6 billion francs and interest. Her lobbyists then claim she has served the state and her incarceration was unjustified. The United Nations also judged her jail sentence as arbitrary. This was the same position held by the International Federation of Human Rights.

It is not understood whether Biya pardoned her only because Lydienn Eyoum paid such monies back into the state covers or because France had to intervene. It is possible that monies paid will be immediately embezzled again if at all it was truly paid. The Cameroons people are not seeing the proceeds of these so called monies paid into the state treasuries. The people want to see structures, projects done by the government with this recovered embezzled most especially to build public trust. While we have genuine Cameroonians in prison for political reasons, here is the President once again listening to his master-France.

This is only possible because of the pressure from Hollande. What else could this be if not a slave answering YES SIR to the master?

However, with the release of Lydienne Eyoum, hopes are high that Marafa Hamidou Yaya whose sentence has been described as arbitrary by the United Nations may be a free man.

Born in 1959, Lydienn Eyoum was a Douala-based Lawyer and got married in 2006 to a French banker, Michel Loyse, then, based in Cameroon. Her husband claimed in a Le Monde Afrique article in 2015 that she is the daughter of one of Ahidjo’s former Ministers. After obtaining French nationality in 2010 while in detention she petitioned a Paris court for her arbitrary detention and torture in a foreign land, – the foreign land being Cameroon.

God is still saying something