Paul Biya: Absence of Cameroon’s president fuels speculation about his health

Some Cameroonians are, however, comfortable with Biya’s restrained approach to leadership and his readiness to leave successive prime ministers to handle routine decisions.

They see his role as more symbolic and distant, akin almost to a constitutional monarch.

Certainly, this representational role is a dimension of the presidency with which he has seemed at ease.

On 15 August, for example, he was at Boulouris, on the Côte d’Azur in France, where he gave a detailed 12-minute address at the commemoration of the 1944 Allied landings to liberate southern France from the Nazis – an operation in which many troops from the French African territories took part.

And in fact, despite frequent absences from the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé – usually retreating either to his home village in the forested south or to his preferred international base, Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel – Biya has continued to take the key sensitive political and strategic decisions.

The main gatekeeper to the heart of power at the Étoudi presidential palace is the Secretary General of the Presidency, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh.

A power system where Biya, as the head of state, keeps his cards so close to his chest inevitably generates gossip about his own intentions for the 2025 election and about potential successors.

But some of the senior regime figures most frequently tipped, such as Laurent Esso and René Sadi, are by now themselves far from youthful.

Support groups have also appeared to promote a passing of the torch to the president’s elder son Franck Biya, a businessman – although Franck himself has never shown any interest in politics or given any hint of such ambitions.

But in today’s Africa, where disenchantment with the political establishment runs deep, particularly among young urban populations, establishment attempts to secure the continuation of power can carry risks.

In neighbouring Gabon, President Ali Bongo was deposed by the army last year after the regime manipulated the 2023 election to deliver him a further seven-year term despite his fragile state of health.

And when Senegal’s President Macky Sall lined up his Prime Minister Amadou Ba as his successor, he was decisively rebuffed by the voters who opted instead for the young reformist opponent Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

Biya and his inner circle may feel confident of avoiding such scenarios. But that will require a shrewd reading of popular sentiment, especially among youth and the middle-class in big cities such as Yaoundé and Douala.

Paul Melly is a consulting fellow with the Africa Programme at Chatham House in London.