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Schrödinger’s President

Journalists in Cameroon struggle to report on the alleged death of Paul Biya.

October 11, 2024
Cameroon's President Paul Biya, center, waves as he arrives at the Beijing Capital International Airport, ahead of the 2024 Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in Beijing Wednesday, Sept. 4, 2024. (Wu Hao/Pool Photo via AP)

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Paul Biya has been Cameroon’s leader since 1982. His current seventh term in office  makes him Africa’s second-longest-serving leader, the world’s longest-serving nonroyal head of state, and, at ninety-one, the oldest world leader. 

He may also be dead. Nobody currently knows. He has not been seen in public since he appeared at a summit in Beijing in early September. And on October 7, the Africa Broadcasting Service, a US-based Pan-African satellite TV channel, put out a video that circulated quickly on WhatsApp and Facebook; the one-minute, forty-two-second clip cited unnamed sources in Yaoundé, the Cameroonian capital, as well as in France and Switzerland, who said he was no longer alive. 

The news soon swept a nation of twenty-seven million people that has its own concerns about the age and whereabouts of its leader. Biya has spent an extraordinary amount of time on private trips abroad, mostly in Europe. A 2018 report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project said he spent a third of his time overseas in 2006 and 2009. 

Biya was first rumored dead during a long private stay in Geneva in 2004, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the hashtags #WhereisBiya and #LetsFindBiya trended on X. On both occasions he reappeared promptly. 

But the latest rumors , and the lack of a public appearance, have set the Cameroonian government and its journalists against each other. The communications minister, René Emmanuel Sadi, said the rumors were “pure fantasy” and “imagination.” All that had happened, he wrote, was that, after that Beijing summit, President Biya “granted himself a brief private stay in Europe [where] he remains attentive to the development of national life.” The president, he said, is in “good health” and will be returning to Cameroon “in the next few days.” 

A chorus of other ministers dismissed the story of his death as “totally unfounded.” One, ominously, added that promoters of the “big lie” will pay a “heavy price.” 

Government-run media attempted to dispel the rumors in reports that showed a vibrant Biya during his most recent outings but stopped short of showing the president in his current form, whatever that is. 

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And Cameroon’s minister of the interior and permanent secretary of the national security council, Paul Atanga Nji, has banned further media debate on the health of the president. He warned that any offender will face the “full force of the law.” Cameroon’s president, he said, is the “first institution” of the republic—and debates on his health must be treated as a “national security issue.”

ABS, the network that first alleged that Biya was dead, told CJR that the government’s denials of its story are devoid of any “smidgen of truth.” 

“The burden isn’t ABS’s to prove the death of Mr. Biya,” ABS told CJR. That, the network said, is tantamount to asking it to reveal its sources. “The burden is on those who are denying the report. They could just ask Biya to stand by his hotel window, wave to reporters to prove he’s alive, and the subject would forever be laid to rest.”

And the government’s own media also took a clear stance. “What I did was to counter the rumors in an editorial; I didn’t go about asking anyone about the death of the president,” Ebenezer Motale, an editorialist working for PRC TV, a news channel run by Cameroon’s presidency, told CJR. Motale said he believed the government communication disputing the rumors of the president’s death. “If any media outlet had to know, I would have been one of the first, since my job is precisely to provide the best image of the president to the public,” he said. 

For the rest of the media, the subject presents a significant dilemma. Some censor themselves for fear of the consequences. Others report with extreme caution. Randy Joe Sa‘ah, editor of the Daily Voice newspaper and BBC correspondent in Cameroon, said that reporting on President Biya’s health has been a “formidable” challenge. 

“In Cameroon, discussing the president’s health is almost a taboo—akin to subversion,” Sa‘ah told CJR. He still recalls the jailing of a Cameroonian journalist, for two years, simply for reporting on a health issue involving the president. “Given this context, I approached the situation with caution, focusing on verifying information from credible sources rather than succumbing to sensationalism,” Sa‘ah says. 

Sa‘ah describes the government move to ban media discussions about the president’s health as “clumsy censorship” that only deepens public distrust and raises serious concerns about transparency. “This ban specifically targets the private press, with regional governors tasked to monitor and suppress dissenting voices,” he says. “It effectively prohibits the media from questioning authorities about the public’s right to know the president’s whereabouts and condition.”

Cameroon is due to hold its next presidential election in 2025. It’s not yet clear if Biya—who will be ninety-two then—will contest it even if he has endured. But some of his supporters have been urging him to run for an eighth term. Others have even called for a snap election. “His enemies desire to see him dead, and by virtue of his age, he himself seems to have some grace to keep on living, while his enemies keep groaning and announcing his death while he is alive,” Wilson Tamfuh, professor of public and international law at Cameroon’s University of Dschang, tells CJR. 

His friends, collaborators, and loyalists, Tamfuh said, fervently wish for his continued good health. “Since he does not often reshuffle his cabinet, every cabinet member prefers he should be alive,” he explained. “His continuous being alive gives them stability of position of leadership now and in the future. It gives them more hope of continuity.”

But even if the worst were to be true, he said, power would merely pass to the president of Cameroon’s senate: Marcel Niat Njifenji, who will be turning ninety this month. 

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Nalova Akua is an award-winning Cameroonian freelance journalist. He has appeared in outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, African Arguments, and El País.