Cameroon celebrates this Sunday the 40 years of Paul Biya in power between calls for reform from the opposition

The second longest-serving leader in Africa remains unclear if he will stand for election in 2025

Nov. 6 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The president of Cameroon, Paul Biya, will celebrate this Sunday his fourth decade at the helm of power in the largest economy in Central Africa between calls for reform from the opposition and doubts about his appearance in the 2025 elections.

Only Equatoguinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema has spent more years in power than Biya, known as ‘The Sphinx’ and head of a power structure at his service that has made him impervious to any attempt to remove him from office.

It is still unknown whether the 89-year-old president will attend the celebrations being organized by his party, the historic Cameroonian People’s Democratic Movement (MDPC), a dominant force in both houses of Parliament since its foundation in 1985, just three years later. of his coming to power on November 6, 1982.

On that day, Biya became the country’s second post-independence president, following the resignation of Ahmadu Ahidjo, the culmination of the political aspirations of the one who once tried to become a Catholic priest before ending up studying political science in Paris.

Its supporters celebrate advances such as the introduction of multi-party elections or the economic policy that has brought Cameroon into the current reality. The festivities will celebrate “political stability and peace, the greatest successes of the last four decades in Cameroon,” Herve Emmanuel Nkom, a member of the party’s central committee, told Cameroonian media.

The opposition, on the other hand, denounces that the president’s political reforms have been mirages to consolidate him in power without attracting too much attention from the international community. Opposition leaders like Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement recall the contentious 2018 presidential election in which Biya won amid criticism of fraud, ten years after his decision to scrap the term limit.

Another serious problem for Cameroon is that of endemic corruption in a country that ranked first on this Transparency International list in 1998 and 1999. In the new index, it ranks 144th on the list of 180 most transparent countries in the world.

The president has also been unable to quell the bloody Anglophone separatist conflict that began in 2016 and intensified following the self-proclamation of Ambazonia’s independence by the separatists on October 1, 2017.

The violence has caused around 6,000 deaths and a major humanitarian crisis, with nearly 600,000 people internally displaced in and around English-speaking regions, and more than 77,000 forced to become refugees in Nigeria, according to humanitarian organizations.

To this must be added the insurgency of the jihadist organization Boko Haram, which has spread to the country since 2013.

In this scenario, Biya, who rarely speaks to the media, continues to leave it up in the air whether he will seek re-election, amid speculation about his state of health, or will retire at the end of his current term and pass the baton to his son Franck or someone else. baron of his party.

“Wait until the end of the mandate to find out if I will stay or return to my village,” Biya said in July during a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron in Yaoundé.