Cameroon bans reports on health of missing President Biya

Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon since 1982, making him the world's longest-serving non-royal head of state and, at 91, the world's oldest leader.

"He may also be dead," said the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). "Nobody currently knows." Biya has not been pictured since attending a China-Africa summit in Beijing on 8 September, and he missed the UN General Assembly meeting in New York last month. 

Last week the Africa Broadcasting Service (ABS), a US-based African satellite TV channel, released a video that "circulated quickly" on social media, citing unnamed sources in the capital, Yaoundé, claiming that Biya was dead. Rumours have "swept" the Central African nation since, and "set the Cameroonian government and its journalists against each other", said the CJR.

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'Something different this time'

Biya cancelled his planned appearance at last week's International Organisation of La Francophonie summit in Paris, which particularly "raised eyebrows", said the Financial Times, given Cameroon's "warm ties with France". This fuelled widespread claims in Cameroon that Biya was "seriously ill, or even dead".

The government was forced to release a statement saying Biya was alive and in "excellent" health. Biya is on a short stay in Geneva, according to the government spokesman – a city where he spends so much time that "he has earned the nickname 'President of the Hotel InterContinental'", said the FT. 

He is in "good health" and will return to Cameroon "in the next few days", said Communications Minister René Emmanuel Sadi.

"Biya's government doesn't communicate much. That's always been the case for the past 25 years of his travels," a political consultant told the paper. "But there's something different this time."

Authorities have gone so far as to ban the media from discussing the health of Biya. Interior Minister Paul Atanga Nji told regional governors that discussing the president's health was a matter of national security, and that "any debate in the media about the president's condition is therefore strictly prohibited". 

Offenders would "face the rigour of the law", he added, instructing the governors to monitor private media channels and social networks.

The burden of proof

Cameroon has had only two presidents since it gained independence more than 60 years ago. And the second, Biya, has spent so much of his 48 years in power abroad that rumours of his death circulate intermittently – "only for him to reappear dramatically at the last minute", said AfricaNews. 

Biya spent a third of his time overseas in 2006 and 2009, according to estimates in a 2018 report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. During the Covid-19 pandemic, hashtags #WhereisBiya and #LetsFindBiya began trending on Twitter. 

Unexplained absences are "nothing out of the ordinary for this most enigmatic of presidents", who "often eschews the front of the stage" and feels no need to "engage in diplomatic presenteeism or performative summitry", said the BBC. Biya is a "habitual non-attendee" at gatherings of African leaders.

Sources suggest Biya is now in Geneva "to rest under medical supervision after a heavy diplomatic schedule in July and August".

But if there is something amiss, "we have the right to know", a Yaoundé-based businesswoman told Voice of America. "So we are pleading with the government of Cameroon to let us know the health state [state of health] of our president."

She does not trust government officials' declarations that Biya is in good health, and "will believe Biya is alive only when she sees him", said the news site.

This is why the government's denial of ABS's story is devoid of any "smidgen of truth", the network told CJR. "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."