Paul Biya on Monday extended his ironclad 43-year grip on power, winning an eighth term as Cameroon’s president despite making few appearances on the campaign trail.
The country’s Constitutional Council said the 92-year-old incumbent secured 53.7% of the vote, defeating main challenger Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who finished with 35.2%.
While Biya’s 11 rivals fanned out across the Central African nation to rally support ahead of the Oct. 12 election, the longtime leader largely stayed out of sight – in keeping with his image as the “Sphinx,” a figure shrouded in secrecy and silence.
The world’s oldest sitting head of state launched his re-election bid on Sept. 27 through a slick social media video that critics say leaned heavily on AI-generated imagery.
His campaign since then has relied mostly on daily posts to X, recycling old photographs and familiar quotes that evoke a distant past rather than a fresh vision.
He made his first campaign appearance late in the election run-up in Maroua, in the Far North region – long considered a Biya stronghold – where several former allies ran against him.
When Biya first became president in 1982, U.S. President Ronald Reagan was in office and the Cold War still had nearly a decade to run.
Cameroon’s second president since independence from France in 1960, Biya has ruled with an iron fist, personally appointing and dismissing key officials while ruthlessly repressing political and armed opposition.
Once respected and active on the diplomatic stage, his leadership has in recent years drawn criticism from the United Nations and Western governments.
Despite frequent absences and persistent rumors about his fragile health, Biya has managed to hold onto power through social upheaval, economic inequality and separatist violence.
“All you have to do is lose your head for a second, and you’re done with,” Biya once told a journalist.
Since 2018, when the opposition alleged election fraud, Biya has limited his public appearances to rare televised speeches recorded in advance and brief video clips of family celebrations with his flamboyant wife, Chantal, and their three children.
His frequent trips abroad for medical treatment and holidays at a luxury hotel in Geneva have sparked accusations that he spends vast amounts of public money on himself and his entourage.
In 2018, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project estimated that his trips had cost Cameroonians a total of $65 million.
Biya survived a coup attempt in 1984, which deeply affected him, a security official in Yaounde said.
Unscripted public appearances afterward became rare, and crowds were kept at a distance when Biya’s motorcade passed through the capital’s streets.
His detractors accuse him of ruling from his native village of Mvomeka’a in the south.
Even from afar, Biya continues to closely control his ministers and entourage.
His succession remains a taboo topic.
After the fall of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe in 2017, Biya became Africa’s oldest president and its longest-serving leader after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in 1979.
He initially trained to become a Catholic priest before studying political science in Paris.
Biya rose through the ranks under his predecessor, Ahmadou Ahidjo, becoming prime minister in 1975 before taking over as president when Ahidjo suddenly resigned in 1982.
He was elected with 100% of the vote in 1984, when he was the sole candidate, and re-elected in 1988. Since the introduction of a multiparty system in 1990, he has won another five consecutive terms.
He has appointed loyalists to key posts, including parliamentary speaker, army chief and head of the state-run oil and gas company.
Even his inner circle has been kept in check through a strategy of granting top military roles to trusted associates and hiring Israeli operatives to train elite troops and his personal security detail.
Biya has long relied on a “divide and rule” approach to maintain control, said Cameroonian political scientist Stephane Akoa.
“If you try to go against Biya, you’ll be crushed,” said Titus Edzoa, a former Biya aide who resigned to challenge his boss for the presidency.
Edzoa was arrested, accused of theft and spent 17 years in prison.
Under Biya, Cameroon has faced persistent security crises.
The Far North region has endured attacks blamed on Boko Haram extremists and the Islamic State West Africa Province since 2009.
Since the end of 2016, a deadly conflict has pitted pro-independence armed groups in the English-speaking west against government forces, with both sides accused of atrocities against civilians.
That conflict began after Biya’s government violently repressed peaceful protests by the Anglophone minority.
