Is Biya staying on?

Cameroonian President Paul Biya is 91 years of age and has been at the helm of his country for 42 years. He holds a dubious record as the world’s oldest head of state, the second longest-ruling president in Africa after Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea who has been in power for 45 years, and the longest consecutively serving current non-royal national leader in the world. And news is that he isn’t done. He is reported to have thrown his hat in the ring for re-election next year to an eighth presidential term of seven years that will last till he is 100 years old if he runs out the tenure. He will be the oldest candidate in electoral history anywhere when he stands in the poll, as he’s reported set upon.

The number of years that the old man has been in commanding heights of power in a non-monarchical setting has no equal if you add to his 42 years of presidency the seven years he served as prime minister under his country’s first president, Alhaji Ahmadou Ahidjo, from 1975 to 1982. He is the second president Cameroon ever had, and he has won all presidential elections in the country since the return of multiparty politics in 1990 – elections that the country’s opposition and external observers adjudged mostly fraudulent while his government insisted they were free and fair. He won his current term – the seventh – at the last presidential poll held in 2018 and is said to be eyeing the eighth term. A recent report by The East African news outlet that has been echoed by multiple sources said the Cameroonian leader had confirmed he would be seeking another term in office. “Cameroon is due to hold its next presidential election in 2025. Longtime President Paul Biya will be 93 and he has confirmed that he will contest,” the report said.

To be clear, Biya has not himself spoken out on the prospects of his running again for office, but that fits with his familiar style of making a formal announcement of his plan only a couple of months away from a scheduled election. The next presidential poll in Cameroon is expected in October 2025. In his New Year message last January, he made no mention of plans to seek re-election and his silence on such possibility inspired the country’s opposition to mobilise towards rallying behind a single candidate who would stand against whoever is fielded by ruling Cameroon Peoples Democratic Movement (CPDM) as potential successor to the aged president. Leaders of the main opposition party, Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM), said at the time that they were negotiating with more than 30 opposition leaders to present a single candidate in the next election should the president be incapacitated by ill health. The bane of opposition in Cameroonian politics has been its extreme fragmentation, with scores of political parties taking different pitches in challenging the Biya incumbency rather than joining forces. So far, they’ve failed to pose any serious challenge to the president’s staying power.

But if Biya has not led up with a statement about his running again, he did not lack the tribe of sycophantic cheerleaders found everywhere who’ve urged him on, saying he was the only one who could sustain peace and development in the country. These persuaders from the ruling party have called on him to run in the 2025 presidential poll and thereby extend his more than four-decade rule. The likely reason for this advocacy isn’t far-fetched. It was Biya who formed the CPDM out of the Cameroon National Union (CNU), the platform on which Ahidjo had led him to hold power, in 1985 – three years after the predecessor stepped down owing to ill health and handed over power to him. He has been the party’s leader since its inception. Biya had needed a new platform of his own because he fell out with Ahidjo, forcing the latter to flee into exile in France from where he publicly accused Biya of abuse of power and paranoia about plots against him. Biya’s government, in 1984, put Ahidjo on trial in absentia for alleged involvement in a 1983 coup plot and he was sentenced to death, although Biya eventually commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

“Biya…is another potentate in the pantheon of power leeches that plague Africa and makes the continent a laughing stock”

During CPDM’s 39th anniversary commemoration in March, this year, the party’s officials organised rallies in Cameroonian towns to solicit support for Biya as their candidate in the 2025 elections. The rally in Yaounde, the country’s capital, featured a throng of people who also called on the old man to accept CPDM’s nomination. A senior official of the party was reported touting Biya as the party's natural candidate because, according to him, there has been peace, unity and economic growth in the country under his leadership. The official described Biya at 91 years as strong and healthy. “We think that you don't change a winning team,” he said, adding: “If there is any challenger, let him come up. But we have not seen any challenger who can beat our candidate, so we all rely on him and call on him to continue to rule and bring our country to emergence as that is his vision.” If truly he is running again, Biya could say it is such calls he graciously accepted to continue in office. 

Under its laws, Cameroon is a country blighted by chronic gerontocracy. The country’s constitution provides that if Biya dies, resigns or becomes incapacitated, the presiding officer in the upper house of parliament who currently is an 89-year-old man would take power and organise elections for a new president within 120 days. It was at the instance of Biya and a pliant national legislature that the country did away with term limits to begin with. After he was re-elected in 2004, Biya had been barred from running again for president by a two-term limit stipulated in Cameroon’s 1996 Constitution. But he pushed for a review of the law, saying it was undemocratic to limit the people’s choice. The proposed removal of term limits was among grievances cited by some Cameroonians during violent protests in February 2008. Still, in April of same year, the national assembly voted to remove term limits among other amendments, which included a provision for the president to enjoy immunity from prosecution for his actions as president after leaving office.

Cameroon’s current population is estimated at some 30million. But the country’s electoral body ELECAM was lately cited saying those who registered as voters ahead of the August 31 deadline for the exercise were 7.9million people. Analysts argued that the number represents barely 50 percent of persons eligible to vote in the country and signposts reluctance by citizens to register owing to fears that the election wouldn’t be free, fair and transparent. Such fears were heightened when Biya controversially postponed the nation’s parliamentary and municipal polls till 2026, citing security concerns in Anglophone areas of the country where separatist conflict has raged since 2016. The conflict began as protests against perceived marginalisation by the Francophone-dominated government, but has since escalated into a full-blown insurgency by armed groups demanding independence for the English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions.

Biya follows in the steps of the late President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe who in 2017, at 93 years, insisted on contesting his country’s presidential election due the following year, saying he wanted to live till 100 years and planned to rule for life. He is another potentate in the pantheon of power leeches that plague Africa and makes the continent a laughing stock. A 93-year-old standing for president (for a seven-year term) and primed to win against all odds! In a country with a large youth population, where some 55 percent are aged between 15 and 64 years, nonagenarian Biya and his club of gerontocrats are making no plans for generational succession. 

United States President Joe Biden is 81 years, but he did not get his way to run for a customary second term in his country because Americans couldn’t trust his cognitive grit to oversee their affairs in a volatile world that requires leadership alacrity and mental clarity to engage. Not so in Africa where leaders who have entered into near-vegetative state yet hold fort, though in reality as fronts for ambitious associates who hitch their own political wagons onto their tired engine heads. But you never get the best of leadership that way. And that is perhaps why much of Africa wastes.