Paul Biya Is Gone and Nobody Can Say Who Is Running Cameroon

Paul Biya is 93 years old. He has ruled Cameroon since 1982, longer than most of the young people now trying to find work in Douala, Yaoundé, and Bamenda have been alive. And for months at a time, he is simply not there. Not in the cabinet meetings. Not on the state broadcaster. Not in the public eye that is supposed to hold him accountable.

So we have to ask the question that every Cameroonian is whispering and few officials will answer out loud: when the man at the top disappears, who is actually in charge?

This is not a idle question. It is the difference between a country with a government and a country with a rumour mill. And right now, Cameroon is running on the second.

Begin with the record. Biya returned to Yaoundé on August 20 after more than ten weeks in Europe, a stay that began on June 7. That alone should trouble anyone who believes a head of state is accountable to the people who pay his salary. But the OCCRP's investigation goes further. Its review of travel records dating back to 1982 found that Biya has spent at least four and a half years abroad on private visits. Four and a half years. Across more than three decades. Those are years in which hospitals, schools, and roads depend on decisions made by someone who is not in the room.

Now look at what the constitution says. Cameroon's constitution gives the president sweeping executive power. He sets national policy, appoints the prime minister, and commands the armed forces. The law allows him to delegate some of those powers, but only through clear, express delegation when he is temporarily unable to perform his duties. A plane ticket to Geneva is not a delegation. An absence abroad does not, by itself, transfer one ounce of constitutional authority to anyone else. Yet the government has never offered a detailed public account of whether such a delegation exists during these long stretches away. Silence on something this important is not a neutral act. It is a choice, and it is a choice that serves whoever benefits from the fog.

The fog is thickest around the presidency itself. Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, secretary-general at the presidency, holds a permanent delegation of signature granted under Decree No. 2019/043, signed on February 5, 2019. That is a legitimate administrative tool. But it is not a transfer of presidential power, and Ngoh Ngoh is not the constitutional successor. Commentators, including Africa security analyst Ryan Cummings, have argued that people close to the president are playing increasingly tangible roles. Perhaps they are. But that is an assessment, not a finding. The people of Cameroon are entitled to proof, not whispers. Who signed what, on whose authority, and under what legal instrument? These are not rude questions. They are the minimum demands of any democracy.

Then there are the soldiers. On August 4, while the president was still abroad, three presidential decrees reshuffled Cameroon's senior military command. Commanders were replaced in four of the five joint military regions. The head of the Presidential Guard was promoted from colonel to brigadier general. A new commander was installed at the Rapid Intervention Brigade. The decrees gave no reasons. Robert Besseling of Pangea-Risk reads them as a move about loyalty and the management of threats to the presidency. Whether he is right or wrong, the point stands: the men who hold the guns were rearranged in the president's absence, and the public was not told why.

Consider what is at stake. Cameroon is fighting a separatist conflict in its English-speaking regions, a war that has displaced families and cost lives for years. Boko Haram-linked groups continue to attack communities in the Far North. Those are the wounds of a country that needs a steady hand at the centre. When command is murky, when the army is reshuffled by decree from abroad, and when no one can say who would act in a crisis, the people who suffer first are not the elites in Yaoundé. They are the farmers, the teachers, and the mothers in the villages where the guns are loudest.

And here is the trap that Cameroon has built for itself. In April 2026, parliament approved a constitutional amendment that brought back the office of vice president, with Biya holding the power to appoint and dismiss that officeholder. On paper, the reform is a step toward order. Under the revised Article 6, a vice president would take over if the presidency fell vacant through death, resignation, or permanent incapacity certified by the Constitutional Council. If there is no vice president, the Senate president steps in as interim head of state, and a presidential election must be held within 120 days of the vacancy at the latest.

But the appointment remains in Biya's hands. As of November 10, no vice president had been named. The succession mechanism exists in ink, and it has never been tested. Opposition leader Joshua Osih warned during the April debate that the reform weakened democratic legitimacy and deepened the centralisation of power. He was right to sound that alarm. A succession plan that depends entirely on one ageing man's willingness to choose is not a plan. It is a bet.

Government spokesman René Emmanuel Sadi has said Biya is entitled to decide when to form a new government. That is technically true. It is also exactly the problem. Entitlement is not accountability. Power that cannot be questioned, delegated transparently, or transferred predictably is not a system. It is a personal possession.

Some analysts insist that the state keeps functioning. Paul Anchang, a Yaoundé-based political analyst, argues that institutions still do their jobs. Perhaps they do, in the narrow sense that ministries issue letters and civil servants show up. But Besseling's verdict deserves to be taken seriously: "The political scene suffers from distinct institutional paralysis." A country can keep its lights on while its steering wheel rattles loose.

So let us be clear about what Cameroon needs, and what its citizens must demand.

First, the government should publish a clear account of any delegation of presidential powers during the president's absences, as Section 10 of the constitution requires when he is temporarily unable to perform his duties. Parliament must insist on it, and the Constitutional Council should rule on it.

Second, the vice president must be named, and the appointment should be made public and justified, not kept as a private card to be played later. A democracy does not outsource its future to a single signature.

Third, the decrees that reshaped the military command should be explained to the National Assembly. Security appointments made in the dark are how coups get their confidence.

Fourth, the institutions that the constitution already provides must be given the independence to work. Look at what happened in Senegal in 2024, when President Macky Sall tried to postpone a presidential election and the Constitutional Council overturned him. Look at Botswana, which handed power from Ian Khama to Mokgweetsi Masisi in 2018 through a peaceful, orderly transfer. These are not Western miracles. They are African institutions doing the job they were built for. Cameroon can do the same.

Cameroonians, too, have a role. Demand the publication of presidential absence records. Demand that your MPs, your mayors, and your civil society groups ask the hard questions in public. Support the journalists and researchers who are doing the work the state refuses to do. A government that is not afraid of its citizens has nothing to hide.

Paul Biya has given Cameroon more than four decades of his life. The country owes him respect for his years of service. But it does not owe him a succession by silence, an army reshuffled by decree, or a state whose leadership is a riddle. We are Africans. We have the right to know who is governing us, in whose name, and under what law. And if the answer is still a fog, then we must stop waiting for the fog to lift on its own.

Who is calling the shots in Cameroon? The people have every right to ask. It is long past time someone answered them.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA