He was to retire definitively from Cameroonian political life this summer, during the congress of the Social Democratic Front, the opposition party he founded in 1990. John Fru Ndi, one of the historical opponents of President Paul Biya, who leads Cameroon with an iron fist for more than 40 years, died at the age of 81 “following a long illness”, Monday, June 12. For SDF activists and sympathizers, the news of his disappearance was met with shock and dismay.
It should be noted that John Fru Ndi had three times been an unsuccessful candidate against Paul Biya in the presidential elections of 1992, 2004 and 2011, each time coming in second position. Historically, the SDF was the first opposition party represented in the National Assembly. As of 2020, it has held five seats, but had 18 in the previous legislature. It has lost its influence in recent years against the all-powerful Democratic Rally of the Cameroonian People (RDPC) of Paul Biya, 90 and president of Cameroon since 1982.
John Fru Ndi was born in 1941 in Baba II, a commune bordering Bamenda, then located in the heart of the part of Cameroon under British and English-speaking mandate which will be integrated, in part, in 1961, into Cameroon, which became independent from France a year earlier. First, a fruit and vegetable merchant and then a bookseller, he began in politics in the 1980s within Biya’s CPDM before founding the SDF in 1990 when Cameroon legalized multiparty politics.
Bamenda is the capital of the North West region. With the Southwest, it is one of the two regions bloodied for more than six years by a war between English-speaking separatist armed groups and the army. The soldiers were dispatched massively by Paul Biya, intractable in the face of the desire for independence of part of the English-speaking minority, who considers himself ostracized by the French-speaking majority.
John Fru Ndi, in particular by having his party participate in all the elections, never supported the idea of ??independence, which notably earned him to be designated as an “enemy” in his region by the separatists the more radical.
His house was burned down and he was even briefly kidnapped in 2019 by an armed group who claimed they wanted to convince him to remove the SDF deputies from the National Assembly. In 2019, the opponent had supported the idea of ??a federalist solution put forward by the most moderate separatists, but rejected by power.
What political legacy does he bequeath to his successors? The question deserves to be asked, while the SDF is regularly plagued by internal crises and John Fru Ndi, nicknamed “the Chairman”, was very contested by a fringe of his executives in recent years, who accused him in particular , without providing evidence, however, of having personally enriched himself thanks to the public financing of the parties represented in the National Assembly and of having been “bought” by the power anxious to “coax” the opposition.
During the last presidential election of 2018, John Fru Ndi, already ill, had pushed his second Joshua Osih, vice-president of the party, to present himself in his place but it was Maurice Kamto, leader of the Movement for the Renaissance of Cameroon ( MRC), who came in second, relegating the SDF candidate far behind, in fourth position.
Since then, Kamto, imprisoned for nine months without trial in 2019 for peaceful protests against the power of Mr. Biya, has become Cameroon’s main opponent. The MRC has no elected members of the Assembly because it boycotted the 2018 legislative elections.