The same phrase has been repeated for 9 years in Cameroon: “An investigation has been opened.” It is the same anxiety that returns with the Hadja Haoua case, supported by an association from Garoua.
On September 14, 2026, the Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Oppressed -ADDO- appealed to Paul Biya for a missing person: Mrs. Hadja Haoua. Known as an activist of the Cameroon People’s Democratic Rally -RDPC- in Yaoundé, and for her viral videos on “Mondovision” where she attacked high-ranking officials. But since then, no sign of life.
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It is here that the ADDO brings out the heavy artillery: it quotes the writer Calixthe Beyala who allegedly stated that “her body was thrown from a helicopter over the Bertoua forest.” True? False? Rumor? The ADDO itself asks the question: “What credibility can be given to this disturbing but recurring testimony?” And the organization makes the chilling connection with two cases that Cameroonians have never digested.
Mgr Jean-Marie Benoît Bala – May 31, 2017
The Bishop of Bafia, Mgr Benoît Bala, found dead in the Sanaga, at the bottom of the water. In his car, a farewell letter considered suspicious by his relatives. The official thesis: drowning/suicide. The thesis of the family and the Church: assassination. The investigation? Announced, then radio silence. 9 years later, still no judicial truth. “Monseigneur was found at the bottom of the lake like a freshwater fish, supposedly taking care to direct his final resting place through a pseudo-letter left in his car,” writes the ADDO.
Martinez Zogo – January 17, 2023
The head of the Amplitude FM radio station, kidnapped, tortured, his mutilated body found in Ebogo. The case that shook the Republic with the indictment of the head of the DGRE Léopold Maxime Eko Eko and the magnate Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga. Lengthy trial, but 3 years later, still no final judgment. The names of the alleged masterminds circulate, but justice struggles. The ADDO worries about Haoua and makes the connection. “She shows no sign of life… if she is not in the eye of the storm following the labial groove, of the late Martinez Zogo.”
Hadja Haoua – September 2026
She is the missing link. According to the ADDO, Hadja Haoua would have “seen a lot, heard a lot” at high levels as the “wife of Mr. Baongla, presented as the presumed eldest son of the President.” She would have “violated their intimate secrets” live on Facebook. The association admits: her words were “vulgar,” “reckless,” “condemnable” for public insults. But it raises the central question of the rule of law: “Her parents have the right to know under what roof their daughter resides, what sentence has been passed against her and why?” At best, it says, “interned in unfortunate jails.” At worst, “thrown into the grave.” The most important thing for them is first to know where she is.
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The common point: the magic formula
For the ADDO, the modus operandi seems identical: “The opened investigation is now a term used each time to close it definitively the same day to end all investigations… to put compromising files in the cupboards of condemnable indulgence and abject impunity.”
This is what the association calls “State kidnapping” and “indecent gangsterism that thrives due to complicit and aberrant silence and excessive authoritarianism.” It asks President Paul Biya, as president of the Superior Council of the Judiciary, to “dispel the fog of arbitrariness.”
At this time, there is no official confirmation of the arrest or detention of Hadja Haoua by the police or justice; no confirmation of the testimony attributed to Calixthe Beyala; no visible complaint from the immediate family. The Yaoundé prosecutor’s office has not communicated. The case therefore remains, at this stage, an associative denunciation based on unverified testimonies and connections with two distinct criminal cases. But the letter has the merit of raising the question that all Yaoundé has been asking for 48 hours: Is Hadja Haoua alive? Where is she? “Justice, Justice, Justice.” concludes the ADDO.
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