Opposite Treasure Hunter, one of four casinos on the same street in Douala, Cameroon’s commercial capital, money changers and motorcycle taxi drivers such as André Ouandji mill around, calling out to potential clients.
Ouandji has worked in the area for three years but has not entered the casinos. He prefers to frequent the sports betting shop in his local neighbourhood of Bonabéri.
Cameroon has the second-best performing economy in central Africa, but despite this a third of the population live on $2 or less daily and, according to a 2023 survey by the country’s National Statistics Institute, eight in 10 of the workforce are informally employed. Against this backdrop, gambling and betting have become increasingly popular.
“We stopped relying on the government for anything years ago,” said Ouandji, who is 27.
Like many young Cameroonians, he is undecided about whether to vote in October’s presidential election. In a country where the median age is 18 and average life expectancy is 63, the overwhelming favourite is the 92-year-old incumbent, Paul Biya, president since 1982. He formally declared his candidacy for another seven-year term on 13 July, brushing aside calls from inside and outside the country to step aside. “Together, there are no challenges we cannot meet,” he wrote on X. “The best is still to come.”
Biya’s decades-long rule has been accompanied by a decline in voter turnout. The abstention rate in the 1992 election – widely believed to have been stolen from the late opposition leader John Fru Ndi – was 19.6%. By 2018 it had hit 46.7%.
Eighteen-year-old Serge (not his real name), a first-year geography student at the University of Douala, said prioritising his economic future in a country of high unemployment and rampant nepotism was more important to him than voting. “My dream was to be a lawyer but you need connections for jobs, your father needs to be placed somewhere, so I settled for being a teacher which is easier,” he said.
‘We are in misery’
Supporters of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) point to the country’s overall economic performance relative to its neighbours and say they prefer stability to the unknown. Some even believe Biya’s mandate is divine.
“No authority can exist unless it comes from God,” said Antoine Nkoa, the author of the 51-page pamphlet 10 Good Reasons Why You Should Vote Paul Biya in 2025. Nkoa, who lives in the capital, Yaoundé, said he had never met the president but that he had an early morning vision of the world’s oldest president winning again.
Such a vision represents a nightmare scenario for Barthélemy Yaouda Hourgo, the Catholic bishop of Yagoua in the country’s Far North region. “Enough is enough,” he said in January while urging Biya, the son of a catechist, to call it quits.
Christopher Nkong, the secretary general of the leading opposition party, Cameroon Renaissance Movement (MRC), said in an interview that Biya had “outlived his usefulness”. “We say, ‘Papa you have done your best. Can you not leave for another Cameroonian to take over?’”
Biya’s critics say his supporters are out of touch with reality. Endemic corruption and a cost of living crisis have been exacerbated by concurrent conflicts with armed anglophone separatists in the west sending thousands into neighbouring Nigeria, jihadists in the Far North region and criminal kidnapping gangs in the so-called triangle of death near the borders with Chad and Central African Republic.
Experts say the crises could make voting in some areas harder, which would favour Biya. The election takes place a few days after separatists mark the independence of the breakaway state of Ambazonia. At least seven people including a priest were killed by security officials during the 2018 election weekend in Buea and Bamenda, the main cities in anglophone Cameroon.
In a twist to proceedings, two of Biya’s longtime allies – the influential ministers Bello Bouba Maigari and Issa Tchiroma – resigned from the cabinet within days of each other in June and declared their intention to run against him. “We are in misery,” Tchiroma said from his home town of Garoua in the north, a hunting ground for the jihadists of Boko Haram.
The same month, Léon Onana, a municipal councillor, filed a lawsuit to compel CPDM to organise its first national congress since 2011 on the grounds that “we cannot remain in a party where everything revolves around a single individual”.
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A battle against all odds
MRC hopes to rally the undecided and uninterested to vote in large numbers for its candidate, the former justice minister Maurice Kamto.
“Everybody is feeling the pinch of mismanagement, embezzlement, non-development, low standards of living, and poverty brought by the regime [which] knows that it is unpopular,” said Nkong. But, he added, “to uproot a dictator is not a day’s job”.
Despite efforts by civil society groups to mobilise people to register to vote, and moves by multiple opposition parties to coalesce into a coalition, some say the field has already been rigged in favour of Biya. The country’s electoral commission, Elections Cameroon, for example, comprises several former ruling party members and is not seen as impartial.
The commission is supervised by the all-powerful minister of territorial administration, Paul Atanga Nji, a self-described “Biyaiste” nicknamed Moulinex National after the French kitchen blender for his threats to Biya’s opponents.
Among his critics, Biya is seen as a master of divide and rule. For years, CPDM has been accused of sponsoring political parties to cause confusion within opposition ranks and armed separatist factions to stir chaos. A law forbidding parties from campaigning until a month before the election often does not seem to apply to CPDM. The government was approached for comment.
Shortly after Kamto held a mass rally with the diaspora in Paris at the end of May, he was put under house arrest. Some of his supporters were also locked up in police cells for two days. “The police, gendarme and military came,” a witness who wished to remain anonymous said.
Kah Walla, the leader of the left-leaning Cameroon People’s party, has similar stories of harassment. “In the last year, my office here has been surrounded by police tanks and water cannons,” she said. “If I cannot hold a normal political meeting, then for sure I cannot be a candidate in the election … it’s an aberration to even call these things elections.”
Her party is boycotting the elections, as it did in 2018, demanding serious reforms instead. “I always tell Cameroonians, if we are asked to go to a football tournament, say in Nigeria, and the referees are Nigerian, the people allowing people into the stadium are Nigerian, and the stadium is on a hill with Nigeria at the top and the other teams are at the bottom, Cameroonians will say bring the team back home.”
In some circles there is hopeful talk on social media of a “post-Biya era”. MRC has urged young people to copy its Senegalese counterparts, who stayed at polling stations during vote-tallying last year to “protect their votes” and helped unseat the ruling party.
Some experts say another post-election scenario may be a repeat of events in Gabon, where the re-election of Ali Bongo in August 2023 triggered unrest and a coup. There is the sense that many Cameroonians will be comfortable with either scenario. “There will be no error in 2025,” Nkong said. “CPDM’s time has ended.”
