Cameroon is being governed from a Geneva hotel suite. Biya has been absent for 64 days, leaving a leadership vacuum and unfinished wars.
Cameroon is being governed by decree from a hotel suite in Geneva, and the arrangement has lasted long enough to look like a system rather than an interruption. President Paul Biya (93 years old) left Yaoundé on 7th June for what his civil cabinet described as a brief private stay in Europe, and by 10th August he had been out of the country for 64 days, the longest continuous absence of a presidency which started 1982.
Possibly in response to mounting concerns about his absence, the government issued presidential decrees on 3rd August, overhauling the armed forces’ high command. Major General Ebaka Hippolyte was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, and Brigadier General Beko’o Abondo Raymond Jean Charles took charge of the Presidential Guard. This reshuffle of the military command likely had more to do with succession than with soldiering; the vice presidency created in April sits empty because filling it would settle a question the palace prefers to keep open, and the clause barring whoever occupies that office from contesting the following election is a great deal softer than its drafting implies.
The management of the absence has been revealing in itself. Where earlier disappearances were met with silence, the government has this time deployed a rotating cast of ministers to explain it, with the communication minister telling French broadcaster Radio France Internationale on 2nd August that the president is alive, that there is no power vacuum and that his return is imminent, while declining to say whether Biya is in a hotel or a clinic, and the labour minister describing the trip as annual leave to which any worker is entitled. The party’s own communication apparatus took the more theological route, insisting on 15 July that the office is not vacant and ‘’the Lion has not left’’.
That the party felt obliged to say so at all matters. An opposition legislator had asked the Constitutional Council to declare the presidency vacant, and the Cameroon Renaissance Movement had complained that executive power cannot be exercised by remote control from hotel suites on the other side of the world. When criticism reached that pitch, the CPDM secretary general summoned regional and divisional delegates to Yaoundé on 22 July for what he described as an important working session, officially convened to prepare the next legislative and municipal polls. Party barons do not gather at short notice to discuss an electoral calendar already pushed back twice.
The military decrees followed within a fortnight. Signed on 3 August and read out on national radio, they promoted five colonels to brigadier general, installed a new commander at the Rapid Intervention Brigade and replaced the commanders of four of the five joint military regions, with further changes across the motorised infantry brigades. The most closely watched line concerned Raymond Jean Charles Beko’o Abondo, promoted and immediately reappointed to the command of the presidential guard he has held since 2013. Rewarding the man who controls physical access to the head of state, while that head of state is unseen in Geneva, is not a routine personnel matter.
There is precedent for reading these moves as insurance. On 30 August 2023, within hours of the Gabonese presidential guard removing Ali Bongo, Biya reshuffled the defence ministry, touching the delegate to the presidency in charge of defence along with the air force, navy and police commands, while Paul Kagame retired twelve generals and more than eighty senior officers the same day. Both men read the coup wave as a warning about their own praetorian guards rather than about their armies. The difference is that 2023 answered an external shock, whereas 2026 answers an internal vacuum, which makes it the more telling of the two.
What gives the vacuum its charge is the office that was built to fill it and then left empty. In early April, a joint session of the National Assembly and Senate voted 200 to 18 with four abstentions to restore a vice presidency abolished in the early 1970s, with the main opposition boycotting. The president appoints and dismisses the holder, who exercises only delegated powers and, upon the president’s death, resignation, or incapacity, completes the remainder of the seven-year term, displacing the Senate president who previously served as caretaker pending a fresh election. The same text bars that interim leader from initiating constitutional changes or standing in a subsequent poll. Four months on, no one has been appointed, and no government has formed since the November swearing-in. The government denied reports in early April that Franck Biya had been given the post, along with a defence portfolio.
The prohibition on the vice president running afterwards has been widely treated as a firewall against dynastic ambition. It is nothing of the sort, because it lives inside a document the ruling party can rewrite. An amendment requires an absolute majority of the members of parliament sitting in congress, rising to two-thirds where the president demands a second reading, with the option of a referendum carried by simple majority. The CPDM holds 152 of 180 seats in the National Assembly and 94 of the 100 in the Senate, which is 246 of 280 parliamentarians, comfortably clear of the 187 votes a two-thirds threshold would demand. April demonstrated the tempo as well as the arithmetic, since the bill moved from tabling to adoption inside a weekend. An interim president could not table such a change himself, though a third of the members of either house can, and the entrenched clauses protecting the republican form and national unity would not obviously be engaged by deleting an eligibility restriction. It is therefore highly likely that a faction loyal to the Biya household could carry an amendment lifting the bar, and moderately likely that it would move only once the succession had been secured.
The wider constraint is that whoever inherits inherits two unfinished wars. Boko Haram combatants killed nine civilians in Logone-et-Chari in early July and abducted seven children in Mayo-Sava, while in the Anglophone regions separatists killed the son of the deputy justice minister in early July and the army killed the veteran commander known as General Sagat on 16 July, in a conflict that has claimed over 6,500 lives and displaced 584,000 people since 2017. The annulment in March of life sentences against ten detained separatist leaders, and the three-day ceasefire separatists declared around April’s papal visit, both showed that de-escalation remains available and unpursued.
Into that gap steps the man who claims to have won the last election. Issa Tchiroma Bakary, sheltering in The Gambia since 7 November after being escorted across the Cameroon-Nigeria border in late October, used a Southern Cameroons platform at the weekend to declare that Biya’s time is over and that any decision he takes is null and void, rejecting in advance any constitutional adjustment enabling a family handover and refusing to accept anyone appointed rather than elected. Choosing an Anglophone audience was deliberate, since his one distinctive national offer remains the referendum on the form of the state he first floated when he left government. The difficulty is that the constituency he courts remembers him as the minister who once called them terrorists, and Ambazonian leaders have publicly refused his overtures, so the only federalist proposition on offer at national scale belongs to a man with little capacity to deliver it.
Three markers will settle the direction over the coming weeks. A public appearance by Biya could deflate the vacancy argument at once, and the palace is working toward it, though each passing week makes it less likely. An appointment to the vice presidency would identify the heir, which is precisely why it remains unlikely while the incumbent lives. The December legislative deadline is quite likely to slip again, since a ruling party whose presidential share fell from 71.28% in 2018 to 53.66% in 2025 has little appetite for a count it no longer controls as comfortably as it once did.
The immediate political uncertainty around Biya’s absence and succession is already taking a direct economic toll. Cameroon has significant hydrocarbon reserves, cocoa and coffee exports, and a deepwater Atlantic coastline that gives it strategic value as a transit and logistics hub for the wider Central African subregion. That potential has always been constrained by governance, but the current succession vacuum adds a new layer of risk that investors and trading partners cannot price around. Project timelines stall when nobody knows who will sign the next decree. Infrastructure financing requires counterparty certainty that a government operating remotely from Geneva cannot provide. The Anglophone conflict, now in its ninth year with more than 6,500 dead and 584,000 displaced, continues to suppress economic activity across two of Cameroon’s most agriculturally productive regions. Until that conflict has a credible political process behind it, the north-west and south-west will remain effectively excised from the national economy, and the constitutional tinkering now underway in Yaoundé offers nothing to the communities living under it.
The regional implications are harder to contain. Cameroon sits at the junction of the Sahel crisis to the north, the Central African Republic’s protracted instability to the east, the Gulf of Guinea’s maritime insecurity to the south-west, and the Lake Chad Basin jihadist theatre, which already involves Boko Haram, ISWAP, and increasing Sahelian linkages. A prolonged leadership vacuum in Yaoundé weakens the country’s capacity to play its historically stabilising role in all of these theatres simultaneously. The Lake Chad Basin Commission’s joint military force, the Multinational Joint Task Force, depends heavily on Cameroonian participation and territory. If a contested succession produces a period of internal political crisis, Cameroon’s contribution to that architecture becomes unreliable precisely when the Sahelian corridor is under pressure from the southward drift of jihadist networks from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. For ECOWAS and the African Union, a destabilised Cameroon would represent a second major Central African stress point alongside the DRC, one that the regional security architecture has even fewer tools to manage.