Cameroon’s voters will decide on October 12 whether to grant 92-year-old President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state, an extension of his four-decade rule. Here is what investors are watching in the race to lead central Africa’s biggest economy:

WHO ARE THE CANDIDATES IN THE ELECTION?

Biya, who has been in power since 1982, is facing a dozen other candidates in an election in which more than 8 million voters are eligible to cast ballots. But at the helm of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) party, he controls the electoral machinery and is almost certain to win.

The main opposition challengers include Issa Tchiroma Bakary, a former minister of employment, and Bello Bouba Maigari, whom Biya appointed as his first prime minister when he took power.

But the opposition is more noteworthy for one absence: Maurice Kamto, Biya’s main rival. The electoral commission rejected his candidacy in July without giving a reason.

Kamto secured 14% of the votes cast during the last election in 2018, which Biya won amid fraud allegations.

WHAT ARE THE TOP ISSUES FOR INVESTORS?

Cameroon, like other Sub-Saharan African countries, started issuing Eurobond debt in the last decade, putting it on the radar of frontier market investors.

It issued its maiden international bond in 2015, before tapping the market again last year with an issue that will mature in 2032.

The country also had a $689.5 million International Monetary Fund programme, as well as $181.7 million from the Resilience and Sustainability Facility, both of which ended in July. Investors will be watching to see if it will secure a new arrangement.

Cameroon’s economy is reliant on commodities exports; it is the world’s fifth biggest cocoa producer and also exports oil, gas and timber. This leaves it vulnerable to the vicissitudes of commodity price slumps.

WHAT ECONOMIC CHALLENGES WILL THE WINNER FACE?

The IMF classifies Cameroon’s debt as sustainable – but at high risk of distress. Analysts have warned that its rising reliance on borrowing as well as inefficiencies in its debt management could increase the country’s vulnerability to shocks.

That could pose a problem for the winner as the government seeks to borrow $1.6 billion locally and abroad to plug a financing gap, amid falling disbursements from donors.

Cameroon’s debut $750 million bond also matures next month, which could drain some cash from government coffers, although officials have not yet commented on plans to manage the maturing bond.

The winner will also have to address the financial sector in order to exit the global Financial Action Task Force’s “grey list”, a determination that its system is susceptible to money laundering.

Cameroon has also been dealing with increased climate catastrophes, including droughts and floods, which have pressured the agriculture sector and could curb production of key commodities.

ARE THERE ANY OTHER FACTORS AT PLAY?

Investors also closely watch Biya’s health, as his advanced age and the lack of a clear succession plan, raise concerns over the country’s stability.

Biya would be nearly 100 years old at the end of the eighth term in office he is seeking.

His health is the subject of frequent speculation, and he already often spends long periods of unexplained time in Europe, including last year when he disappeared from public view for a 42-day stretch.

He has brushed off concerns about his health and said he was determined to serve the country.

Cameroon also faces a host of serious security challenges, including a conflict with Anglophone separatists in the southwest and the northwest and threats from Nigeria-based Islamist fighters in the north.

Source: Reuters

As the nation teeters on the brink of collapse, haunted by its own fractured identity, former Prime Minister Philémon Yang has stepped forward not to call for reform or justice but to once again decorate the presidency with laurels. In a recent public declaration, Yang hailed President Paul Biya as the best candidate to ensure peace, stability, and development in Cameroon.

To the average Cameroonian who wakes each morning in a country consumed by war, corruption, and deep institutional decay, such praises land not as reassurance but as salt in an open wound.

After more than four decades in power, President Biya is not just a symbol of continuity. He has become the face of an enduring and painful crisis. Yet from polished podiums and elite gatherings, the political establishment continues to sing his praises while the nation bleeds in silence.

A Tale of Two Cameroons

There is the Cameroon that Philémon Yang speaks of. A land of order, progress, and unity under the steady hand of its long-standing and dictatorial ruler. And there is the Cameroon most citizens live in. A nation where soldiers torch villages in the Northwest and Southwest, where journalists disappear into detention cells, and where mothers grieve over the charred remains of their children!

In this other Cameroon, peace is a myth, stability is enforced through fear, and development has taken a long painful detour.

What Mr Yang calls leadership, many Cameroonians now recognize as survival politics. A regime that sustains itself not through vision but through silence, suppression, and self-preservation.

Samuel Wazizi The Journalist Who Vanished in Custody

Perhaps no story better captures this brutal contradiction than the tragic fate of Samuel Wazizi, a journalist arrested in August 2019 in Buea for reporting on the Anglophone crisis. Daring to speak aloud what others whispered in fear. For months, his family and legal team were kept in the dark about his whereabouts. It was not until June 2020 that the government finally confirmed what many feared. Wazizi had died in military custody, allegedly due to severe torture.

No one has been held accountable

There was no public inquiry, no independent investigation, and no justice. His death sent a chilling message across the media landscape. In today’s Cameroon, telling the truth can cost you your life or exile.

Yet, Philémon Yang invokes stability without mention of the silence that now blankets the press and the country.

Ngabou Ngarbuh and the Memory of Fire

What kind of peace allows the massacre of children?

In Ngarbuh in 2020 and later in Ngabou, families were ripped apart in unspeakable acts of violence reportedly at the hands of state forces. The haunting images of babies burned in their sleep, mothers executed in broad daylight, and entire villages left in ashes are etched into the national memory. These are not the birthmarks of peace. They are the scars of abandonment.

Still, the state’s response has been slow, evasive, and muted. Instead of confronting these horrors, the political elite chooses to elevate a narrative that serves power over truth.

Development Deferred, Justice Denied

While Mr Yang speaks of development, hospitals collapse under the weight of neglect and roads in rural regions are impassable during the rainy season. Unemployment remains high and the wealth gap continues to widen. The COVID-19 pandemic further exposed the fragility of Cameroon’s health infrastructure. A system more responsive to elite interests than public needs.

And what about justice? For many, it remains a phantom. A luxury reserved for those with connections. The poor are left to navigate a system designed to exhaust rather than empower. Victims of abuse from arbitrary arrests to land grabs find little relief in courts where power not law determines outcomes.

A Legacy of Fear Disguised as Stability

What Philémon Yang and others in the ruling elite call stability has in practice become the art of managing fear. Dissent is criminalized. Protesters are jailed. Artists and musicians like Longue Longue have faced harassment and physical abuse simply for daring to speak. Cameroon has become a place where criticism is conflated with criminality and where silence is no longer a choice but a survival tactic.

The Danger of Ritual Praise

The most dangerous lies are not the ones told by dictators but the ones repeated by those who know better.

Philémon Yang, a seasoned politician with decades in public service, cannot claim ignorance. His endorsement is not just political theatre. It is an act of betrayal. A betrayal of the suffering Anglophone mothers, the silenced journalists, the displaced families, and the young Cameroonians who see no future in a country where truth has no microphone.

The Final Irony

In the end, it is not Biya’s rule that shocks the conscience. It is how many in the elite continue to applaud while the country drowns. Their praises echo in marble halls while ordinary Cameroonians bury their dead, walk miles for medicine, or flee their homes under gunfire.

To call this peace is to spit on grief.

To call this development is to mock despair.

To call this stability is to ignore the tremors shaking the nation’s soul

The truth is not convenient but it is necessary. Until those in power begin to speak it, Cameroon will continue to stand as a republic of silence wrapped in empty applause.

By Ntam Charles in Bonn, Germany

Cameroon’s elderly president Paul Biya was absent from the country on Sunday as campaigning kicked into high gear for October 12 polls to decide who will fill his position.

The 92-year-old — the world’s oldest head of state, in power since 1982 — is seeking an eighth term in office.

But he left Cameroon a week ago on a “private trip” to Europe, according to his office. Diplomatic sources have said the leader, who is rarely seen in public, was in Geneva.

Campaigning started on Saturday and continued on Sunday with Biya’s main rivals holding rallies.

Cabral Libii, candidate of the opposition Cameroon Party for National Reconciliation (PCRN), held his under light rain in the coastal city of Douala.

A former tourism minister, Bello Bouba Maigari, who is also running, roused several hundred National Union for Democracy and Progress party members in his own rally, alongside another candidate, Akere Muna, who has dropped out of the race and given him his support.

A total of 12 candidates were cleared to vie for the presidency, including Biya.

The outgoing president has not directly addressed his fellow citizens since July 13, when he announced his candidacy on the social media platform X.

Biya — who is seen as a favourite to win, given the divided opposition — was embarrassed on September 17 when his daughter Brenda Biya posted a video to TikTok urging her followers to abandon her father.

She later deleted the video and posted an apology.

A 2018 investigation of economic crime by a consortium of journalists found Paul Biya had spent some 4.5 years of his presidency abroad, largely in Switzerland, at an estimated cost of $65 million.

The president failed to show as scheduled at the UN General Assembly in New York on Thursday, represented instead by his foreign minister.

By Queen Besumbu Agbaw