Cameroon's President Paul Biya. FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP
Cameroon’s President Paul Biya is poised to win a seventh term
of office come October 7, which will see him extend his 36 years rule
and become a life president.
Like in 2011, the
85-year-old president said his decision to run again was a nod to
overwhelming calls for him to do so. His supporters already see victory
for the incumbent.
Higher Education minister and the
communication secretary for the governing Cameroon Peoples Democratic
Movement (CPDM), Prof Jacques Fame Ndongo, said the incumbent will “win
the election in all transparency”. Prof Ndongo reckons that President
Biya remains the best choice for Cameroon because he respects republican
institutions.
Arrested and detained
To
the CPDM members, many of who hold hold key government positions,
President Biya is indispensable and his succession is considered a taboo
topic within government and the political party circles.
In
April 2016, some opposition party militants, including the 2011
presidential candidate, Ms Edith Kah Walla, were arrested and detained
in Yaoundé for protesting against Biya’s long stay in power and
persistent brutality against voices opposed to his attempt to be
“president for life”.
Yet, there is seemingly no reason to think President Biya will not win again.
A
group of 20 opposition political party leaders have thrown their weight
behind the candidature of incumbent. The “Group of 20 or G20” among who
are four who were in the race to unseat Biya in 2011, said they had
decided to give their “total and unconditional support” to the veteran
because he “possesses the qualities and wherewithal necessary for the
maintenance of peace, stability, national unity, economic progress and
the respect of Cameroon in the international community.”
The challenges
A
member of the G20, Barrister Jean de Dieu Momo of the Democrat Patriots
for the Development of Cameroon (PADDEC), who was eighth with a 0.49
per cent score in the 2011 poll, said the opposition cannot win a
presidential election by presenting multiple candidates. To him,
President Biya had “already won” the upcoming election with a 70 per
cent score.
In his tweet that announced he would be in
the run, the president said he was “aware of the challenges we must take
up together to ensure a more united, stable & prosperous Cameroon”.
Tongues
have been wagging that President Biya was too old to run, but the
constitution does not make any provision for that. His supporters, on
their part, are argue that at his age, and with his experience, he had
exceptional mettle and values, which give him a considerable head-start
vis-à-vis other contenders, to handle the challenges the Cameroon was
facing.
Should he win another mandate, President Biya will be 92 by the time the tenure ends in 2025.
President
Biya, who grudgingly accepted the introduction of multiparty politics
in the early 1990s, repealed the term limits in 2008. He has ranked near
the top in almost every list of the “World’s Worst Dictators” that has
been published since 2005.
Political pundits say
Cameroon had made more political losses than gains under the 36-year
leadership of President Biya. The leader inherited a stable, united and
prosperous Cameroon in 1982, but the country dropped from a middle
income to a low income economy today.
Cameroon has a
one-round presidential election system where a candidate only has to
garner the most number of votes to be declared winner. No percentage
threshold exists.
In most African countries that
practice the one-round electoral system, incumbents have always emerged
victorious. Such a systems, some Cameroonians claim, had contributed to
President Biya’s over three decades stay at the helm.
Five million
Though
President Biya has always been elected, critics say he was an
illegitimate leader. Their arguments were a legion and one of them was
that a president elected by less than five million people in a country
with over 20 million inhabitants was not legitimate.
In 2011 for example, President Biya won the election with just 3,772,527 votes .
The
2018 presidential election comes at a time Cameroon was faced with
several challenges including a separatist movement in its two English
speaking Northwest and Southwest regions. Anglophone separatist
activists who have been clamouring for secession and the creation of the
Republic of Ambazonia, have warned that they would not allow any
election organised by the Yaoundé regime to take place in “their
country”.
But Mr Abdoul Karimou, the deputy Director
General of Elections at the Cameroon poll agency, ELECAM said they would
organise the vote in the regions “but ensuring security is the
responsibility of the state”.
Regional bloc
A
political scientist and member of the governing party, Prof Elvis
Ngolle Ngolle, said the vote would take place in the strife-hit regions
and Cameroonians who would not feel like going to vote “have the right
not to vote”.
While awaiting the final list to be
published by ELECAM, latest August 8, President Biya has to face 27
opposition parties which have submitted their candidacy files. Scores of
them are new comers, considered as light weight without enough
experience to challenge the 36 years old system.
President
Biya is Africa’s second longest-serving head of state. Only Equatorial
Guinea counterpart Teodoro Obiang' Nguema Mbasogo is ahead of him, by
three years. In Congo Brazzaville, another regional bloc CEMAC state,
Denis Sassou Nguesso has now served 34 years in two different stints,
from 1979 to 1992 and then again since 1997.
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