Cameroon Holds Its Breath as Biya, 93, Lingers in Geneva

CAMEROON · POWER PLAYERS

Paul Biya, Cameroon’s 93-year-old president and the world’s oldest head of state, has been in Geneva for more than a month. Reports that his family has been summoned to Switzerland have put Central Africa’s anchor economy on succession watch.

Paul Biya’s longest silence in a tense year

Biya left for Switzerland in early June, according to Cameroonian and pan-African media. He has not been seen at a public event at home since, and officially nothing is wrong.

Rumour has filled the vacuum. In Yaoundé, officials refuse to discuss the president’s health, a subject Al Jazeera has described as off-limits for local journalists.

It is not the first vanishing act. In October 2024, a weeks-long absence sparked rumours that Biya had died, and the government declared his health a national security matter before he resurfaced.

A report, a denial and a summons

Jeune Afrique reported on June 17 that Biya was receiving care at a private Geneva clinic. The health incident, it said, happened during Cameroon’s National Day events on May 20. The government pushed back within a day.

Communication minister René Emmanuel Sadi called the allegations “malicious and unfounded.” The head of state, he said, is in Geneva but not staying in any medical facility.

The story moved again this week. Channel Africa, the international service of South Africa’s public broadcaster, reported on July 9 that relatives and senior officials, including Biya’s son Franck, had been urgently called to Switzerland.

None of this has been confirmed by Yaoundé. What is not in dispute is the president’s long absence from the country he has ruled for more than four decades.

A disputed election, barely six months old

Biya won an eighth term in October 2025 with 53.66 percent of the vote, extending a rule that began in November 1982. His main challenger, former minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary, rejected the count and declared himself the winner.

Security forces killed at least four protesters in the crackdown that followed, according to Al Jazeera. Chatham House warned at the time that suppressing protest would not solve the looming succession crisis.

The president then largely vanished from view again. He had already spent long stretches of the campaign abroad, reappearing only briefly before the vote, per regional reporting.

What the constitution says, and what analysts fear

On paper, the path is clear. If the presidency falls vacant, the president of the Senate takes over as interim head of state and organises an election within 120 days.

Practice may be messier. Geopolitical analyst Aaron Nga’mbi told Channel Africa that factions who benefit from Biya’s presidency have worked to keep him in office. His permanent absence, he said, would likely trigger infighting and fracture the ruling party.

Some of Biya’s fiercest rivals are former ministers who broke from his inner circle. Cameroon has changed president just once since independence in 1960, so a contested handover would unfold with no living playbook.

The ruling CPDM party has never named a successor, and Biya has never publicly groomed one. Analysts have long viewed that vacuum, rather than any single rival, as the country’s biggest risk.

Why investors and neighbours are watching

Cameroon is the biggest economy and banking market in the six-nation CEMAC currency zone. Its port of Douala handles trade for landlocked Chad and the Central African Republic, making the country the region’s commercial artery.

France, the former colonial power, the United States and China all court Yaoundé, and each would read a succession differently. Cameroon’s Gulf of Guinea coastline and borders with six states make it a security lynchpin.

The economy pumps oil, exports cocoa and timber and anchors a pipeline of regional projects. Every one of them now carries a single unpriceable risk: who rules next.

The uncertainty lands on a state already fighting an Anglophone separatist conflict in its west and Boko Haram in its far north. A drawn-out power vacuum would strain both fronts at once.

Neighbouring capitals also recall that Cameroon’s only transition, in 1982, was a peaceful handover from Ahmadou Ahidjo to his prime minister: Paul Biya himself. Two years later, rival camps fought a bloody coup attempt.

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