CNN
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Cameroon’s 92-year-old President Paul Biya has been holding the Central African nation for nearly 43 years.
“There’s still a lot going on,” said Bya, who is in Twilight in his seventh term. “The best hasn’t arrived yet,” the Cameroonian leader added in a statement on Sunday.
Biya is seeking a new seven-year term in the presidential election scheduled for October, despite reports that his health has deteriorated. He said his decision to broaden his grip on power was absent “in the urgent appeals coming from our 10 regions and the diaspora.”
His announcement comes months after his office pushed back speculation that he had either felt bad or died after a long absence from the public eye.
His health debate was later banned in the media, and the Cameroonian Interior Ministry declared it a national security issue.
For years, rumors about Bya’s health and whereabouts have been a major topic in Cameroon. However, he held the country strong and won multiple re-election victories.
Biya came to power in 1982, and has been in office for over 40 years, becoming one of the longest-serving heads of state on the planet, except for the monarch. He was the second president to lead Cameroon as he achieved independence from France and Britain in the early 1960s.
Questions swirled around the prospect of Biya, who has been seeking an eighth term since many local leaders urged him to seek a new mission. However, some of his allies left his government and began bidding for president.
Defeating Biya by vote might not come easily for his opponents, according to Germany-based political analyst Collins Molua Ikome.
Ikome told CNN that Cameroon’s opposition, which consists of over 300 political parties, is too fragmented to remove the Cameroon Democrat Movement (CPDM) party in an October poll. He said only the coalition could pose a threat to the president.
“They (opposition) don’t maintain their chances as individual candidates. If they form a transitional coalition, they may probably be,” he said.
The plan by the two opposition parties to create the coalition in March last year was called illegal by the Ministry of Home Affairs. This is what Human Rights Watch described as “part of the government’s opposition and opposition crackdown.”
Bya’s long rules have been undermined by widespread accusations of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial enforcement, arbitrary arrests, illegal detention, torture, unfair trials and persecution and imprisonment of people over sexual orientation and gender identity, according to rights group Amnesty International.
