Rumors began circulating this week that Paul Biya, Cameroon’s authoritarian leader for more than four decades, has died. While Biya’s government denied them on Wednesday, claiming he is alive and well in Switzerland, Biya has not made a public appearance in over a month.
The 91-year-old Biya has ruled Cameroon with an iron fist for 42 years, restricting political opposition and limiting free speech in the country. Some reports out of the country this week indicate that his regime has decreed private media outlets cannot discuss his potential death or health complications, though Biya’s abrupt vanishing has now made international headlines.
Biya, a close ally of communist China, was last seen in Beijing on September 8, where he traveled to participate in the “Sino-African Cooperation Forum.” His official social media accounts posted photos of the elderly leader standing alongside China’s genocidal dictator Xi Jinping and several other African heads of state.
Biya often spends time outside of Cameroon, particularly in lavish lodgings in Switzerland. He missed several scheduled public appearances in the past month, however, most notably the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which he was expected to attend. Biya’s office did not offer any information about the president for weeks, prompting dissident voices to demand more information on the whereabouts of the head of state.
“Make a simple statement explaining the president of the republic’s situation and the reasons for his long absence,” Ntibane Bomo, an aspiring opposition presidential candidate in 2025, demanded of the presidential office in a letter on October 5, according to the Journal du Cameroun. “It’s a legal obligation that falls to you.”
“He is our president, and if there is something wrong with him, we have the right to know,” Gloria Wirkom, a businesswoman in the Cameroonian capital of Yaounde, told Voice of America on Tuesday. “So we are pleading with the government of Cameroon to let us know the health state [state of health] of our president.”
Death rumors escalated with the publication of a mysterious claim on Tuesday that Biya had died. The report appeared in an online television network known as the Africa Broadcasting Service (ABS), headquartered in Texas.
Citing exclusively anonymous sources, ABS claimed that Biya traveled from China to Geneva, Switzerland, and was hospitalized there. Failing to improve his unspecified health condition, Biya was allegedly flown out of Switzerland to France, where ABS claims he died. ABS also claimed that Cameroonian special forces had surrounded the presidential palace in anticipation of an attempted coup once the news was made public.
ABS is notably a dissident outlet, regularly publishing content condemning Biya and supporting the Anglophone separatist movement in the south of the nation, which has attempted to establish a sovereign state known as “Ambazonia.” The majority of Cameroonians speak French, and the Anglophone separatist movement claims it faces outsized discrimination and repression under Biya.
The Ambazonia conflict, beginning with protests that erupted into violence in 2016, has been a particularly bloody one. Biya’s forces have attempted to suppress the separatists by killing their leaders and parading their corpses to discourage the ongoing struggle against their leader. Biya’s government, in turn, has accused the separatists of widespread human rights atrocities, including beheading civilians. Human Rights Watch documented that the conflict displaced 180,000 people in one year, between 2017 and 2018.
Biya’s government responded to the ABS report by denying it completely. According to the BBC, on Wednesday, senior Biya official Samuel Mvondo Ayolo declared that Biya’s health was “excellent” and that he has been in Geneva, Switzerland, since his visit to China.
“The head of state continues to exercise his duties in Geneva and has never departed the [Swiss] city following his visit to Beijing,” Ayolo was quoted as saying. The official condemned “mischievous individuals” for spreading rumors that he was ill or dead.
Elsewhere, a Biya government spokesman described the dictator death rumors as “pure imagination.” Notably, no Cameroonian officials have suggested a timeline for Biya to appear in public again, nor have any independent reports confirmed Biya’s presence in Switzerland.
ABS responded Thursday to the Cameroonian government by declaring itself the victim of a “frantic, poorly coordinated smear campaign” and standing by its reporting.
While outlets outside of Cameroon have reported that something may be amiss with Biya, outlets within Cameroon have not reported any details. The Journal du Cameroun suggested in its reporting on Thursday that this may be because the government banned private media from discussing Biya’s death. Territorial Administration Minister Paul Atanga Nji reportedly declared Biya’s health a “matter of national security” to be kept out of the papers and off the airwaves.
The minister also allegedly condemned “people without scruples” for “disrupting the tranquility of Cameroonians” by observing that their president has been missing for over a month.
Biya’s situation recalls the last days of Tanzanian President John Magufuli, who was last seen in public on February 27, 2021, disappearing for weeks before reports started surfacing that he may have been in ill health. Magufuli, who publicly opposed Wuhan coronavirus medical interventions, including vaccine products, was initially rumored to be in India, then rumored to have died of a coronavirus infection. The Tanzanian government announced in late March that Magufuli died of an unspecified “heart illness” at the age of 61. His successor, President Samia Suluhu Hassan, made a public display of receiving a dosage of a coronavirus vaccination product later that year.