In meetings, his good-natured face is displayed on every dress, every shirt, every headdress. It’s been the same for over four decades, except for a few wrinkles. Monday, November 6, Paul Biya, the president of Cameroon, celebrated his 41st birthday at the top of the state. Having come to power after the resignation of Ahmadou Ahidjo, the first Cameroonian leader after independence, the former seminarian began his seventh term in 2018. A longevity celebrated throughout the country with much speech.
In Meyomessala, the president’s stronghold located 170 kilometers from Yaoundé in the South region, the demonstration of affection took place, like every year, as a high mass. All the notables of the province crowded onto the stands of Independence Square around the powerful Minister of Finance Louis-Paul Motaze.
Family-related to the head of state – he is the nephew of his first wife, Jeanne-Irène – he is among his supposed heirs. On the other side of the road, local activists from the Democratic Rally of the Cameroonian People (RDPC) listened absentmindedly to the litany of praise. Driven by the force of habit, they communed around the flame, symbol of the ruling party, and praised “the tact, the clairvoyance, the dexterity” of the “great leader”.
The play has been performed and replayed so many times that one had to pay close attention to notice that the “motion of support, encouragement and deference” read from the podium was not accompanied, this year, by an appeal explicit to the re-election of the president. The next election is scheduled for 2025. “It’s still a little early to make a decision,” says Joseph Mboutou Ze, president of the Ngoase-Meyomessala subsection of the RDPC. He will be 92 years old. Some speculate that his son Franck Biya could be a candidate, there is also talk of a party congress [the last one was held in 2011]. We’re waiting to see. »
The party’s “natural candidate”
Not everyone has this patience. On November 1, the secretary general of the CPDM, Jean Nkuete, openly pleaded, during a tour in the Western region, for the head of state to seek an eighth term. He was preceded in May by the Minister of Public Health Manaouda Malachie, who spoke from Mokolo, in the Far North, a border region of Chad and Nigeria where the State is at war against the jihadist group Boko Haram, in favor of a candidacy guaranteeing “stability” and “security”.
Never mind that nearly 75% of Cameroonians have known no leader other than Paul Biya. “The question does not arise, it should not arise: he is a candidate. Cameroon is a country where people live to be 100 years old and are very lucid,” assures Paul Atanga Nji, the Minister of Territorial Administration.
According to party rules, the president of the RDPC is in fact the “natural candidate” of the party. But, as always, the main party concerned does not comment. While in 2022 he traveled to Mvomeka’a, his native village which borders Meyomessala, to follow the festivities, Paul Biya remained this year in Yaoundé, the capital. It was there that, on November 4, he met the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Catherine Colonna, and the Secretary General of the International Organization of the Francophonie (OIF), Rwandan Louise Mushikiwabo, who came to attend a conference of the OIF.
But, if he entertains at the palace, Paul Biya rarely shows himself. His last public appearance was on May 20, on Independence Day. In the village or in its palace of Etoudi, installed on the side of one of the seven hills that undulate the Cameroonian capital, the “Sphinx” reigns more than it governs. In Yaoundé, current affairs are handled by Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, the very influential secretary general of the presidency who holds a permanent delegation to sign the head of state, and Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute. Government meetings are held regularly at the prime minister’s office. Paul Biya has not chaired a council of ministers since 2019.
At the palace, several clans
This absence, coupled with an unpredictability established as a system, is the main trademark of the Cameroonian president. And the guarantee of a power which does not hesitate to pounce on the ambitious who have had the misfortune of eyeing the throne too openly. The Kondengui central prison in Yaoundé is full of former barons of the regime – ministers, general secretaries, directors of public companies – devastated by the anti-corruption operation “Epervier” set up in 2006 to clean up the political field.
Too weak and fragmented, the opposition does not represent a serious threat. A military coup either, according to Paul Atanga Nji. “Here it can never happen. Never, never, never, insists the minister. The system put in place by Paul Biya prevents this. » The overthrow of Gabonese Ali Bongo Ondimba in August by his cousin, the leader of the Republican Guard, 55 years after his father Omar Bongo Ondimba came to power, nevertheless served as a reminder that the threat existed everywhere.
Especially since Paul Biya is not immortal. And the question of his succession, if it is not openly mentioned by those who could claim it, is on everyone’s minds. At the palace, several clans are already facing each other. On the one hand, those close to the first lady, Chantal Biya, including the secretary general of the presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, and the deputy director of the civil office of the head of state, Oswald Baboke.
On the other, the Minister of Finance, Louis-Paul Motaze, or Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, the director of the civil cabinet. Powerful people who could consider, if the situation turned to their advantage, rallying around the figure of Franck Biya. The eldest son of the head of state, who does not hold any official position within the palace and has always stayed far from politics, is increasingly present behind the scenes of the presidency.
A master in the art of divide and rule, Paul Biya has always been careful not to endorse one or the other. But “such a political beast necessarily has a strategy for its succession”, wants to believe the economist Dieudonné Essomba. For this retired former senior civil servant who became a consultant, the hypothesis of dynastic heritage cannot be ruled out. “Franck Biya’s promotion is strong, but discreet enough not to appear as competition. This way of playing hidden, of veiling one’s intentions, is pure Biya,” he observes.
