Last July 13, Cameroonian President Paul Biya, 92he announced through his social networks that he would be a candidate for next October elections. After almost 43 years exercising power uninterruptedly, Biya has become a true political longevity champion, only surpassed in Africa (for just one month) by Ecuatoguineano Teodoro Obiang. But they are not the only ones. In Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, head of state since 1986also prepares to his sixth re -election in January, while the Ivory Alassane Ouattara has reported that he will opt for his fourth mandate, after eliminating the constitutional limit that prevented it. The presidents for a lifetime flourish in Africa.
Some thought Biya was about to retire. The nonagenarian Cameroonian president spends practically all the time locked in his residence in Mvomeka’a, more than 150 kilometers from the capital but with a small next airport, and chooses his few appearances very well in public. Sometimes he leaves the radar for months, almost always for health reasons that force him to move to Europe, but mutism is total and rumors run.
A year ago they came to be taken dead. Their lieutenants and members of the party were already sharpening the knives in a hypothetical career for the succession, but Biya stopped them dry with a new candidacy.
Doubts loom about their real capacity not only to campaign electoral, but to direct a country. All eyes are put in their surroundings, who really handles the threads. There are Samuel Mvondo, Cabinet director; Jean Nkuete, coordinator of the government party; or Ferdinand Ngoh, Secretary of the Presidency. But, above all, it appears The figure of Chantal Biya56, second wife of the president. She exerts a remarkable influence on her husband and gains more and more presence as he deteriorates physically and mentally.
It will be four who coordinate the campaign of an elections planned for October 12 and from which Maurice Kamto, the main opposition leader, has been excluded, by judicial decision.
But the inexorable passage of time, from which not even Biya can escape, accelerates fractures. Two of its main allies in the north of the country, the former ministers Issa Tchiroma Bakary and Bello Bouba Maïgari, have now decided to fight it at the polls, as well as a member of their own party. They have little hope of winning, but the monolithic power built by Biya is cracking and in the barracks someone is already looking for a step forward to happen at some point.
“Paul Biya’s new candidacy only increases the possibility of a scenario that was already foreseeable for years: that of an unconstitutional succession at the end of its presidency, when it happens,” says Gilles Yabi, director of the Wathi Studies Center.
Neutralized rivals
In Uganda, Yweeri Museveni, 80 years oldit seems to follow the same pattern. After overthrowing the IDI AMIN dictators, Milton Obote and Tito Okello and taking power in 1986, he has been winning an election after another in processes in which he has put all the machinery of the State at the service of the elimination of the presidential career of his most serious competitors, as happened with the opposition Bobi Wine in the last elections. The day after he had presented his candidacy, the popular singer and opposition leader who embodies the hopes of change in Uganda was arrested for allegedly having violated the sanitary norms by the COVID-19, which prevented him from campaigning. After serious manifestations with dozens of dead, two days before the elections, the government cut internet.
By 2026 everything is prepared again: Museveni has applied again to repeat in office and Wine insists, although he knows what awaits him: “I will be a candidate if I am still alive and I am not in prison,” he said recently.
“It is not something that is part of the African political culture, but of the non -democratic culture of the whole world. It also happens in North Korea or Russia. These are politicians who believe themselves above the laws, which have the complex of the Savior. They come to believe that, if they are not, the country sinks,” considers the Ivory Dagauh Komenan, a doctor in contemporary history and specialist in international relations. “They organize elections because they know that without them they lack international legitimacy, but they are responsible for neutralizing their rivals through jail, repression or the use of justice. We are facing very presidentialist regimes, where the counterpoints are weak or can be manipulated. It is a structural failure of African political systems. When someone becomes president, it depends on their good will that respects their good will that respects their good will that respects their good will. Viole, ”he adds.
Whatever their way of getting to power, many of these presidents who eternalize in office repeat the model: they maintain a facade of free elections, but repress opponents that they can really face them, to the point that many of them give their bones in jail. Others are dedicated to these possible rivals and add them to their cause in exchange for charges or prebendas. With the control of public media and the ability to suffocate their rivals, the campaigns of the government candidate, in which money, power or influence is distributed as a way to get the vote, congregate to crowds, and the elections are usually triumphal walks.
On July 29 it was the turn of Alassane Ouattara, 83President of Ivory Coast. “I am a candidate because our country faces economic, monetary and security challenges, whose management demands experience,” he said in his message to the nation. In power since 2010, he opts for a fourth term in a country whose Constitution includes a limit of two. To overcome this obstacle, he carried out a reform of the Magna Carta in 2020, putting the counter to zero, as Alpha Condé already did in Guinea or Abdoulaye Wade in Senegal. The elections will be held on October 25.
Although there are recent healthy alternations, such as cases of Ghana or Senegal, the attempt of the rulers to remain in office far beyond the legal or reasonable is a rising trend that adopts new clothes. The military leaders who conquered power in the last five years In countries like Guinea-ConakryMali, Burkina Faso or Niger arrived at the presidential palaces and stayed in them. Not only have they extended the transition period they promised, but most have slipped that the candidates will be in a future electoral process, as has happened in Gabon. “There is little hope that the military in power will be Democrats. The usual thing is that they remain the time they want or demolish another coup d’etat,” Komenan analyzes.
