Nformi Bime was 23 years old and still a student when Paul Biya first won Cameroon’s presidential election in 1984.
Bime is now 65 years old and retired from teaching. Biya is 93 years old and still serves as president. Last year, he won a contested eighth term, potentially keeping him in office until he is nearly 100 years old.
“The best is yet to come,” Mr Biya said before the election, which opponents called rigged and marred by deadly clashes between demonstrators and police.
But for the past two months, the man who has ruled Cameroon since 1982, when he took power as prime minister after the incumbent president resigned, has been thousands of miles away. He left on June 7 for what his office called a “short personal stay in Europe,” which is now the longest uninterrupted absence from the central African country in years.
Last week, government spokesperson René Emmanuel Sadie told French radio RFI that Biya was in Geneva, Switzerland, and was not hospitalized, but did not elaborate on his whereabouts.
Biya is Cameroon’s second president since independence in 1960 and one of the world’s longest-serving leaders. He first became president under a one-party system in 1984, and then won six more elections after a multi-party system was introduced.
He spent extended periods overseas during his presidency. But his recent absence has reignited questions about his health and who will be running the country in his absence.
Rumors about Mr. Biya’s health and whereabouts have kept him out of public view for years in Cameroon, and he rarely appears in public. His office has repeatedly been forced to push back against speculation that he was seriously ill or dead. In 2024, the government banned media discussion of his health as a matter of national security.
Biya’s long reign also reflects broad contrasts across Africa. Although the continent has the world’s youngest population, several countries are still led by older leaders who started their political careers decades ago, including former liberators who now govern different eras.
For millions of Cameroonians, Biya is the only president they have ever known.
Bime’s children are among them. His oldest is 32 years old and his youngest is 18 years old.
Avit Riasay Acha, 26, a doctoral student at the University of Yaoundé II and a local youth leader, also belongs to the same generation.
“As a child, President Biya was the only president I knew, so his presidency was part of my entire Cameroonian experience,” said Atcha, who voted for the first time in last year’s presidential election and supported young opposition candidate Samuel Hiram Iyodi, 38.
After more than 40 years under the same president, questions about his leadership have only increased.
“Many Cameroonians have become accustomed to it because this has happened repeatedly over the years,” Acha said of Biya’s long absence. “But just because you get used to something doesn’t necessarily mean people should stop asking questions about how the country is governed.”
Iyodi, who finished eighth in last year’s presidential election in which several candidates, including one of Biya’s main challengers, were barred from running, called on parliament to ask Cameroon’s Constitutional Council to consider whether Biya’s absence constitutes a vacancy in the presidential seat. However, such a move is unlikely to succeed given the dominance of Mr. Biya’s ruling party, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement.
Despite his distance, Biya continues to make important decisions from abroad, including a major military reorganization announced earlier this month. However, questions about his prolonged stay abroad have led officials to publicly assure Cameroonians that the president is still alive.
Government spokesperson Saadi dismissed concerns about a power vacuum, telling RFI that “President Paul Biya is alive and well” and “will return soon.”
Bime is old enough to remember when Biya changed. He first heard Biya’s name in the 1970s, when he served as presidential secretary-general under Ahmadou Ahidjo, Cameroon’s first president after independence. When Mr. Ahidjo resigned in 1982, Mr. Biya succeeded him.
Two years later, when Biya first appeared on the ballot, Bime said he saw him as a “representative of hope.” “We believed he was young, dynamic and handsome. He meant a lot to Cameroonians.”
Few imagined that the man they saw as a new beginning would remain in power for decades. For his critics, the disappointment lies not only in how long Biya has been in power, but also in his failure to improve the lives of ordinary Cameroonians.
Collins Moroua Ikome, a Cameroonian political analyst based in Germany, said he saw some of the country’s problems firsthand when he visited the country in April.
“Cameroon’s roads are very bad. I have witnessed fatal accidents,” he told CNN.
Ikome also pointed to frequent power outages, corruption and lack of jobs for young people.
Wilson Tanfou, a professor of public and international law at Jean University in Western Cameroon, said the country has institutions that can continue to run the government when the president delegates responsibilities. He said key duties could be held by the Prime Minister, the Secretary-General of the President’s Office, and Cabinet Ministers.
But the bigger question is whether the government is solving the country’s long-standing problems, Tanhu said.
“People want the Anglophone crisis to be resolved, living standards to improve, roads to be improved, people to get degrees and fewer people to be on the streets,” he told CNN, referring to the long-running separatist conflict in Cameroon’s Anglophone region.
Whenever Mr. Biya ultimately leaves power, his successor will inherit a country that also faces attacks from Boko Haram militants in the north and deep economic grievances among its youth.
Healthcare is another concern. Ikome said access to quality healthcare remains out of reach for many Cameroonians.
“The average life expectancy in this country is less than 70 years. However, Biya far exceeds that average lifespan thanks to his access to foreign medical services, which ordinary Cameroonians do not have access to due to poverty,” Ikome said.
Division is not unique to Cameroon. Across Africa, political elites often seek medical care or maintain housing abroad even as domestic public services struggle.
For Bime, the question is more personal. Will he live to see the next president?
After decades of waiting for change, he worries that it may not happen and that Biya may outlive him and many others who are not part of the country’s elite.
“When they catch a cold, they run abroad to take care of them, but other Cameroonians die from lack of care,” he says.
