When Paul Biya unexpectedly became the president of his country, Cameroon, in 1982, following the unexpected resignation of his predecessor, Ahmadu Ahidjo, he was only 49. He has been president since. By the time Cameroonians line up for the polls in October 2025, the nonagenarian will most likely be in the race. At 92, he will be one of the oldest persons running for political office in the world. If he wins—and most likely he will—he will be 99 by the time his term in office comes to an end in 2032.
Paul Biya’s death grip on power in Cameroon is not uncommon in Africa. It is not only a problem for Cameroon but is symptomatic of the problem that has kept Africa underdeveloped.
There seems to be a virus haunting the presidential palace on the continent that infects most rulers and gets them holding on to power like their entire lives depend on it. Just a cursory glance and one would see the names of power-drunk rulers etched on the continent’s landscape.
There was, for instance, Habib Bourguiba’s 30-year rule in Tunisia, from independence in 1956 to his ouster in 1987 by Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who went on to rule for 24 years. He tossed up Tunisia so badly that a poor fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, could take it no more, doused himself in petrol and lit a match, lighting a fire that became the Arab Spring, which swept Ben Ali out of power. It also ended Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule in Egypt.
To the south, Robert Mugabe’s 37-year rule in Zimbabwe from independence in 1980 was ended by a coup in 2017, when he was already 93 and had no idea of his left from his right. At 80, Yoweri Museveni is burrowing down for his 39th year in power in Uganda. He had scrapped the term limit from the constitution and deleted the 75-year age cap on the presidency to allow himself to contest elections at 77.
Paul Biya has had a longer reign than all these men and remains second only to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang, who has held power since he overthrew his uncle in 1979. Forty-five years later, he is the “longest consecutively serving current non-royal national leader in the world.” At 82, and with his firm, authoritarian grip on power, he still has years left in him to stretch his record.
But Biya is 92, senile, and confused. He has hardly lived in the country he presides over, preferring the comfort of Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel to Yaoundé’s presidential palace. My 2019 travelogue to that Swiss city published by Daily Trust was titled “An Evening Walk in Geneva, Cameroon’s Other Capital.” While the streets of Yaoundé, Cameroon’s actual capital, are dotted with images of Paul Biya in his presidential role, Cameroonians hardly see the man himself apart from perhaps five times a year when he puts up controlled appearances. Just a couple of years ago, a video emerged of Biya, 90 at the time, at the US-African Leaders Summit, completely unaware of where he was. He could be heard farting rather loudly on stage and mumbling nonsense to his aides, who kept trying to get him to address the waiting audience.
With some of his loyalists already pushing for his candidacy in the next elections, and a fractured and (often physically) beaten opposition, and with a track record of scoring 90 per cent of votes in previous elections and jailing defeated opponents, if Biya runs, the charade of him ruling Cameroon would continue for a few more years.
If he eventually expires, as all men must at some point, there is no clear succession plan in place. His son Franck Biya is being propped up as a potential successor, while Maurice Kamto, the leader of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) party, is also eyeing the seat. A potential unceremonious or sudden exit from the scene for Biya might just cause underlying tensions to flare. We have seen this happen in countries like Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere where long-term strongmen have been ousted and a scramble for power ensued, turning those countries into war zones.
Nigeria’s experience is slightly different. Not for lack of men willing to stay in power till death, like Abacha, who was hatching a self-succession plan that would have kept him in the villa for as long as he lived, which wasn’t very long as it turned out, or Gowon’s nine years of prevarications. Due to the sheer number of ambitious and scheming men eyeing the presidential seat and our penchant for coups, Nigerian leaders have explored different routes to self-perpetuation in power. For instance, IBB’s eight years in charge ended with the June 12 annulment fiasco, but he had plans to return to power.
While PDP delegates gathered in Jos in 1999 to choose between former dictator Olusegun Obasanjo and former vice president Alex Ekwueme, the favourite at the time, everyone knew that the person choosing Nigeria’s next president was IBB from his Hilltop Mansion in Minna. He chose Obasanjo. It was an attempt to appease Abiola’s South West region and then succeed Obasanjo himself. But wily, old Obasanjo proved not to be the grateful lapdog IBB expected. He loved power so much that after a total of eleven years as dictator and president, he allegedly blew billions of looted public funds in trying to change the constitution to perpetuate himself in office. Thankfully, that effort failed. We do not give enough credit to the parliamentarians who resisted that desperate machination.
Since then, the approach has been to self-perpetuate by proxy, and we have dozens of attempts by all sorts of power grabbers to do this. Obasanjo installed what he thought was a meek combo of Yar’adua and Jonathan so he could effectively remain in charge. When Yar’adua tried to grow into his own, Obasanjo started unleashing his arsenal of open letters.
We have seen this method play out not only at the highest level but elsewhere as well. Every politician leaving office wants to replace himself with a pliable, compliant, and often inferior yes-man through whom they could retain power and control, as Tinubu had successfully done in Lagos and the rest of the Southwest. He had used that method as a ladder to the presidency.
The former governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, installed Siminalayi Fubara as his proxy and is now trying to take the job from him while he reigns as the FCT minister. Nasiru El-Rufai installed Uba Sani as his successor, but as such things happen, the new man is not playing by the script. This pattern has become perverse on the Nigerian political landscape where every fight between a political godfather and his handpicked successor has always been premised on one thing—breaking loyalty with the strongman, not a failure to serve the people who only matter at election time. At the heart of it is the personal interest of the rulers; not the interest of the people, the states, or the countries.
This desperation has scuppered what should be a smooth leadership recruitment process where institutions are deliberately weakened to serve the man in charge, and access to power is possible only through scheming, brutish force to take power from a sit-tight leader, or being a clueless or subservient lapdog who hopes to have power handed to him for being loyal, like a dog being fed a treat. This often means that the best candidate does not often emerge.
If you are wondering why Africa is still underdeveloped today, this has to be one of the major reasons. And all the rulers, big and small, who have privileged their personal interest over those of their nations and peoples and have, as a result, perpetuated themselves in power, played tinko-tinko with the constitution, maimed and murdered, chosen poor, pliable replacements, or fought their successors for control are the problem.
