Troops of supporters, bedecked in merchandise bearing the smiling face of President Biya, gathered at rallies in different parts of the country, chanting tributes to the 86-year old leader.

Government officials and members of the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) had another reason to make merry. The occasion coincided with the first anniversary of President Biya’s re-election for his seventh seven-year term.

The celebrations however, could not mask the challenges of insecurity, economic malaise and international isolation facing the government.

Having taken power as the second president of the Central African country following the resignation of Ahmadou Ahidjo in 1982 under the single-party system, President Biya has endured harsher political pressures, including an attempted coup after just two years in office during a clamour for multiparty democracy.

He reluctantly agreed to hold elections in 1992, winning against Ni John Fru Ndi of the Social Democratic Front with about 40 per cent of the vote; Ndi got 36 per cent. The two would have had a run-off, but an earlier extraordinary session of parliament failed to enact a Bill to that effect.

Perennial winner

President Biya has since then won all elections, with critics saying most of them were conducted unfairly. He has since spent nearly a combined period of five years of his long tenure in ‘’private visits’’ abroad, notably Switzerland, according to research by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project released in February 2018.

Since the report was released however, the president has spent less than 30 days abroad, according to Emmanuel Freudenthal who co-authored the investigation’s report.

The internal and external pressures President Biya is facing have escalated as separatist militants fight in the country’s two English speaking regions.

The three-year armed conflict has claimed over 3,000 lives, with half a million people displaced from their homes and 40,000 more having fled to Nigeria, according to data from the International Crisis Group: the regime says these figures are inflated.

The UN says the conflict has created a humanitarian emergency for nearly two million people with no indication that it will end soon despite the Major National Dialogue held in September, a welcome gesture of reconciliation.

An insurgency by Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram, which continues to carry out attacks against civilian and military targets in Cameroon’s Far North region, and spill-over from the Central African Republic refugee crisis in the East Region, have also stretched the security apparatus.

Weak governance

Besides security, weak governance and endemic corruption—the country was ranked 152 out of 180 countries in the 2018 Transparency International corruption perceptions index—have undermined the effectiveness of state institutions and scared away investors. The country is ranked 166 out of 190 economies in the World Bank’s Doing Business 2019 report.

Signs of increasing isolation started in February, when the US suspended military aid to Cameroon. US President Donald Trump followed it up last month with a note to Congress of his intentions to suspend Cameroon from the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), a preferential trade scheme, over human rights abuses.

Eyebrows were also raised last month when President Biya did not turn up for the Russia Africa Summit, despite him being among the first invitees and having confirmed attendance. His representative, Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute, also did not show up in Sochi leaving junior foreign ministry staff at a loss.

All the while, President Biya was in Lyon, France while French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian kept Yaounde’s top ranking diplomatic officials busy as he sought to safeguard a contract for logistics firm Bollore from slipping away.

It is reported that other countries, including Russia, have been discreetly pressurising President Biya to institute a federal system of government as panacea to the Anglophone separatist push.

Critics are not convinced that the international community is doing enough to hold President Biya to account.

“Symbolic half-measures like revoking preferential trade status are not enough to force the repressive regime of Paul Biya to change. Forcing cancellation of IMF loans and the remaining military aid would show that the White House is serious,” said Chris W.J. Roberts, the president of African Access Consulting.

Writing in Foreign Policy, Prof Roberts said Cameroon’s economic meltdown was being shielded by oil revenues and bailouts by international lenders.

“The Agoa blockade will not compel Biya to undertake political and economic reforms, to solve the crisis in the Anglophone region; the related violence driving a humanitarian catastrophe and the deep-rooted governance crisis that includes mass arrests of political opponents and journalists,” the political science don at Calgary University said.

In an open letter on Tuesday, 50 human rights advocates, scholars and writers urged French President Emmanuel Macron to use his country’s “considerable influence” to help bring Cameroon’s ongoing conflict to an end. The call coincided with clips of a frail-looking President Biya being assisted to walk at the Paris Peace Forum.

Fresh start?

President Biya’s Cameroon is also marked different from former US president Franklin Roosevelt’s inspired Renouveau (New Deal), the fresh start that he touted on coming to power.

Unlike Roosevelt’s effort that stimulated the economy after the Great Depression, his mentee’s achievements polarise opinion.

“Statistically the New Deal of President Paul Biya is as significant as it was 37 years ago…Yes, it is worth celebrating,” said Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, the director of the CPDM academy, saying Cameroon and the US still enjoy “other areas of co-operation”.

President Biya, who rarely speaks to the press, once told the French that only those who can, and not those who wish, can maintain a grip on power for long.

In her 2011 book, Au Cameroun de Paul Biya (In Paul Biya’s Cameroon), French journalist Fanny Pigeaud describes the country as being in a “worrying state of disrepair”.

His succession, however, remains a taboo topic within government circles and his ruling CPDM party, as Cameroonians crave for a new deal that would ensure peace, prosperity and a seat at the high table of global diplomacy.

Culled from The East African

Cameroon is poised to hold parliamentary and municipal elections in February but a bloody separatist conflict and political tensions are set to cloud the vote, experts say.

Anglophone separatists are fighting government troops in western Cameroon while the north of the country has come under attack from Boko Haram jihadists.

“These elections will not have optimum credibility,” Cameroonian academic Richard Makon told AFP, contending that in the present climate, “peaceful” polls were impossible.

“The security challenges in the Northwest and Southwest Regions are enormous,” he said, referring to a conflict between English-speaking separatists and security forces that have claimed more than 3,000 lives in two years.

The two regions with an anglophone colonial past are home to around 16 percent of the population of 25.8 million in the mainly francophone country.

In a remote region called the Far North, about a tenth of the population lives in deep poverty and at the mercy of Boko Haram.

Southern Cameroon long avoided such troubles, until men from the west recently launched ethnic attacks, wounding several people and setting businesses ablaze.

Despite the unrest, in a surprise move veteran President Paul Biya recently announced elections on February 9.

Members of parliament and town councils were last elected in 2013. Their five-year mandates ran out in 2018, but Biya has extended them twice.

The 86-year-old Biya has ruled the country for 37 years. He was returned to office in an election last year, which saw a significant drop in votes in the English-speaking regions.

– Plunging back into chaos? –

The 2018 presidential election triggered a major political crisis.

The runner-up, Maurice Kamto, immediately challenged the result and his Cameroon Renaissance Movement (CRM) held protests.

Arrested at one of the demonstrations, Kamto was jailed in January but released in October following foreign pressure.

The 65-year-old opposition leader has since been denied permission to organise rallies.

The MRC has for months insisted that holding elections should depend on a definitive return to peace in the anglophone regions.

Map of Cameroon locating English-speaking regions, AFP

Kamto’s party has not said if it will contest the poll, though individual CRM members have announced they will run for office.

“The risk is that Cameroon will plunge into the chaos of post-electoral confrontation,” Emmanuel Simh, the CRM’s third vice-president, said.

“It will enshrine the partition of the country — on one hand, we will have the francophone regions where the population will be able to vote, and on the other, the anglophone regions where it will be impossible to do so,” he warned.

– Special status –

Last month, Biya’s regime arranged what it called a “major national dialogue” to settle the anglophone crisis but the main separatist movements boycotted the forum.

One of the key recommendations of the talks was more autonomy for the English-speaking regions.

Biya has steered Cameroon for nearly four decadesLudovic MARIN, AFP/File

But the initiative must be adopted by parliament, which has yet to consider the proposal.

The election announcement was a surprise, given that the resolutions of the major national dialogue “have not even begun to be taken into account”, Makon said.

“It’s a little hard to envisage elections being held in the best conditions to produce legitimate winners who are accepted by the population,” he said.

Biya’s Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) is a colossus with 148 seats in the 180-member national assembly.

For all their doubts, opposition parties are caught between a rock and a hard place, Makon said.

“They must take part in the election because if they don’t, they will be shut out of political decisions for five years,” he said.

On the other hand, he argued, the ruling party “will no longer have a crushing majority… because of the ground taken by the MRC and the rise of (other) parties.”

He gave as an example the Cameroon Party for National Reconciliation (PCRN), led by Cabral Libii, a 39-year-old journalist who placed third in the 2018 presidential poll.

Source: Digital Journal