CNN
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Cameroon’s 92-year-old President Paul Biya, who has held an iron grip on the Central African nation for practically 43 years has launched a reelection bid that might maintain him in energy till virtually his a centesimal birthday.
“A lot stays to be carried out,” stated Biya, who’s within the twilight of his seventh time period in workplace. “The very best is but to return,” added the Cameroonian chief in a statement on Sunday.
Biya is looking for a recent seven-year time period in a presidential election scheduled for October, regardless of experiences that his well being has deteriorated. He stated his choice to increase his grip on energy rested “on pressing appeals coming from the ten areas of our nation and from the diaspora.”
His announcement comes months after his workplace pushed again on hypothesis he was unwell or had died following a prolonged absence from the general public eye.
Discussions about his well being had been later banned within the media, with the Cameroon inside ministry declaring it a national security matter.
For years, rumors about Biya’s well being and whereabouts have been main speaking factors in Cameroon, the place he has not often been seen in public. He has maintained a powerful grip on the nation, nonetheless, profitable a number of re-election victories – some by a landslide.
Biya got here to energy in 1982 and has remained in workplace for greater than 4 many years, turning into one of many globe’s longest-serving heads of state, excluding monarchs. He’s solely the second president to steer Cameroon because it achieved independence from France and Britain within the early Sixties.
Questions swirled across the prospects of Biya looking for an eighth time period in workplace with many native leaders urging him to hunt a brand new mandate. Nevertheless, a few of his allies have give up his authorities and launched their presidential bids.
Defeating Biya on the polls could not come simply for his opponents, in accordance with political analyst Collins Molua Ikome, who is predicated in Germany.
Ikome advised CNN that Cameroon’s opposition, which contains greater than 300 political events, is simply too fragmented to dislodge Biya’s ruling Cameroon Individuals’s Democratic Motion (CPDM) get together on the October polls. Solely a coalition, he stated, may pose a menace to the president.
“They (the opposition) don’t stand an opportunity as particular person candidates. In the event that they kind a transitional coalition then perhaps they could,” he stated.
In March final 12 months, plans by two opposition events to create a coalition had been dubbed illegal by the nation’s inside ministry, a transfer described by Human Rights Watch as “part of a government crackdown on opposition and dissent.”
Biya’s lengthy rule has been marred by widespread accusations of human rights violations that included “extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests, illegal detentions, torture… unfair trials, and persecution and imprisonment of individuals for his or her actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identification,” according to rights group Amnesty Worldwide.
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