Cameroonians are in a waiting game. As elections approach this October, all signs point to an 8th term for president Paul Biya, now age 92. For decades, opposition groups, international pundits, and the country’s burgeoning youth have rested their political aspirations on organ failure and heart disease. Wait for the post-Biya era, the logic goes, and democracy will follow.
Stalling may not be a smart strategy. Age-related concerns have circled a seemingly invincible Biya for over two decades—infants have graduated college in the meantime. And when the president does pass, what next? Despite not having a designated successor, rumors in the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement point towards the president’s son Franck Biya, an assured continuation of his father’s legacy.
Why, then, does the capital Yaoundé expect a quiet election season? Indeed, why hasn’t Biya faced a single serious challenger since the nation’s first multiparty elections in 1992? Traditional answers are formulaic: government repression of opposition groups, a fractured opposition, and security support from international allies. There is some truth to these arguments. Opposition leaders are routinely harassed, arrested, or outright barred from running for office. Voter turnout is often artificially high in Biya’s strongholds in the southeast; in any case, all branches of government, including the electoral commission, are unquestionably loyal to the president.
Likewise, Cameroon’s opposition is indeed fractured. With over 250 ethnic groups and hundreds of languages spoken across the country, opposition parties have historically struggled to put aside their differences. Even when they do unite, the ruling party regularly co-opts budding movements into its own coalition. Cameroon’s plurality voting system also conveniently favors the incumbent, making any minor splits in the opposition fatal in an election. Moreover, France and the US have provided his regime with much-needed security assistance and shielded him from questions about human rights records.
Ultimately, these factors represent a one-size-fits-all political analysis of a particularly unique situation that justifies complacency. After all, repression, fractured opposition, and Western support are staples in dictatorships around the world, but that has not stopped all mass citizen uprisings. From Nairobi to Dakar, youth movements are threatening the status quo, uniting fractured civil societies and upending traditional alliances with the West. Even in neighboring Gabon, protests over elections in 2023 helped precipitate a coup against the Western-backed, heavily entrenched Bongo clan. But outside of the insurgency-affected Anglophone western regions of the nation, Cameroon remains remarkably silent.
Taking a look at public opinion in the country reveals an attitude of anticipation. When Biya stopped appearing in public for over a month in September of 2024, news outlets and social media went ballistic over any information surrounding his whereabouts. Exiled in Germany, the Cameroon Concord News reported on legions of expats eagerly awaiting confirmation of Biya’s death to return home. For a few weeks that fall, Cameroon felt alive, so much so that the government banned all speculation about Biya’s health. As soon as Biya emerged once more from his presidential office in Geneva, however, the country went back into hibernation.
Unfortunately, authoritarian regimes around the world have proven remarkably resilient to a leader’s death. A Michigan State University study titled When Dictators Die found that amongst the 495 worldwide autocrats from 1946 to 2012, over three-fourths of regimes remained intact more than half a decade after the autocrat’s natural death. Moreover, even when successors initially promise change—as with Senegal in 2000 and 2012—elements of the ancien régime often come creeping back. Mass uprisings and civil disobedience, like that witnessed in the Maghreb in 2011, have a better track record of bringing about lasting change against decaying regimes.
More importantly, Biya is no longer the fundamental problem in Cameroonian politics. Smart political maneuvers in his early years were undoubtedly critical to navigating the unpredictable 1990s, but echoes of intrigue in the presidential palace have long since quieted down. According to Professor Yonatan Morse, a political scientist at the University of Connecticut, Biya leveraged the foreign-imposed introduction of a multiparty system at the end of the Cold War to expand his own patronage networks from a small group of elites towards a nationwide system to effectively limit opposition. In turn, these middlemen have entrenched themselves in Cameroon’s oligarchic system as the various gatekeepers of power and resources. Under Biya’s stable guidance, this aging civil service has grown into a powerful change-averse stakeholder in the regime. Indeed, remarkable stability at all levels of government has created a strong preference for the status quo for those within the system, a preference that need not die with Biya himself—When Dictators Die observes that regimes with institutional networks transcending the figurehead have an almost 95% chance of surviving compared to 78% for personalist regimes.
The regime’s reputation for secrecy also conceals decades of preparation for transition. Since rumors of Biya’s death first circled in 2004, the president’s health has become a regular topic of conversation in Yaounde’s cafes, but also discreetly within the circles of power. Biya has long eschewed designating a successor for fear of creating a rival, but rumors surrounding the president’s eldest son have steadily grown in recent years. The fact of the matter is that Biya’s capabilities have been declining for a long time. It is uncertain how much power he still wields, and some analysts have even begun viewing him as a constitutional monarch. If anything, recent episodes of health rumors constitute trial runs for an actual succession. That it took over a month of non-appearance for questions about Biya’s health to arise speaks to the time any internal transition team would have to set up a new regime (and Biya’s absentee leadership). By the time news of Biya’s death reaches civil society and opposition groups begin to organize, a new leader may already have been sworn in. With literal decades to anticipate and months to prepare, it is hard to imagine Cameroon’s establishment being caught off guard by Biya’s death.
In any case, recent precedent favors continuity in succession. When Chad’s longtime president Idriss Deby died in 2021, his son Mahamat quickly found allies and consolidated power despite an ongoing civil war. Even in Togo, where dynastic succession was heavily challenged by civil society, established forces soon rallied around the late president’s son. Elsewhere, regimes in the DRC, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Gabon have all managed to produce continuity out of uncertain succession crises. Precedent in Cameroon itself, no matter how far back Biya’s accession in 1982 feels, recalls the handpicked succession from Biya’s mentor Ahmed Ahidjo to himself with little fanfare.
For forty-three years, politics in Cameroon have been held hostage by a single man. Biya is now the second-longest serving non-royal leader in the world, and the oldest current head of state. Despite relative stability and moderate development, the cracks of authoritarianism are beginning to show in Cameroon. The Anglophone Crisis, so often the focus of international attention, is merely a product of a decaying regime—at its core are disagreements about resource allocation and government favoritism towards Francophone allies. A younger, more energetic successor may attempt to reform the country, or more likely, perpetuate the status quo.
When millennials in North Africa rose up in 2011, Cameroonians waited. As Gen Z stood up last year in Senegal and Kenya, Cameroonians sat down. Time is running out for Biya, but so is it for Cameroon’s future generations. When will they stand up?
Featured/Headline Image Caption and Citation: “President of Cameroon Addresses General Assembly” | Image sourced from Flickr | CC License, no changes made
Author
