2025 is the year when Biya’s long rule finally lost its last convincing justification ⁰

By any reasonable measure, 2025 stands out as the bleakest year of President Paul Biya’s long tenure. After decades in office, the familiar arguments of stability and experience no longer convince a population grappling with deepening hardship, political fatigue, and a growing sense that the country is simply treading water while the rest of the world moves on.

Economically, the social contract has frayed. Rising living costs, stubborn youth unemployment, and declining purchasing power have turned everyday survival into a political issue. For many Cameroonians, the promise that patience would one day yield prosperity has worn thin. What makes 2025 particularly damning is not just the persistence of these problems, but the absence of a credible, energizing response from the presidency. The state appears reactive rather than visionary, content to manage decline instead of charting renewal.

Politically, 2025 has exposed the limits of a system built around one man. Institutions feel weak, public trust is eroded, and the distance between rulers and ruled has widened. Calls for reform—electoral, constitutional, and administrative—are louder and more mainstream than ever. Yet the government’s answers have been predictable: cautious statements, cosmetic adjustments, and a reliance on security-first thinking. This has only reinforced the perception of a leadership out of ideas.

Social cohesion has also suffered. Long-running crises, particularly in marginalized regions, continue without durable solutions. Dialogue feels episodic, not sincere; peace feels managed, not built. In 2025, the cost of this approach is more visible than ever: frustration has hardened into cynicism, and cynicism into disengagement. A country cannot thrive when large segments of its population feel unheard and unseen.

Perhaps most damaging is the symbolic weight of 2025. After more than four decades in power, President Biya now embodies continuity without progress. What once passed for experience now looks like inertia. The generational gap between the leadership and the majority of citizens has become impossible to ignore, and with it the sense that Cameroon’s future is being postponed indefinitely.

This is why 2025 feels different—and worse. It is not marked by a single catastrophic event, but by the accumulation of unresolved failures and missed opportunities. It is the year when endurance stopped being admirable and started looking like stubbornness. History may well record 2025 as the moment when President Biya’s long rule finally lost its last convincing justification.

By Rita Akana

Yaoundé Bureau Chief

Cameroon Concord News Group