Paul Biya
Paul Biya has been president of Cameroon since November 1982, forty-three years and counting, the longest-serving non-royal head of state in the world and, at ninety-two, the oldest, a man who has governed largely from the Intercontinental hotel in Geneva, whose absences are counted by the press in months, who survived a coup attempt in 1984, a rigged election that the Commonwealth observers said he probably lost in 1992, the abolition of term limits in 2008, and an Anglophone rebellion since 2017 that has killed thousands and displaced seven hundred thousand, and who was declared the winner of an eighth term in October 2025 at ninety-two. He was born in 1933 in the south, educated by Catholic missionaries and in Paris at the Sorbonne and the school of overseas administration, and entered Ahidjo's government as a civil servant in 1962. He was secretary-general of the presidency by 1968 and prime minister from 1975, the loyal technocrat Ahidjo chose when he resigned, unexpectedly, on 4 November 1982. The two fell out within a year over who ran the party, Ahidjo went to France and was sentenced to death in absentia, and on 6 April 1984 the Republican Guard, northerners loyal to the old president, rose in Yaounde and were put down in two days with several hundred dead. Biya kept the one-party state until the winds of 1990 forced multi-party politics, and the Anglophone opposition's campaign in 1992 was declared to have lost by four points amid the villes mortes strikes and evidence the observers called serious. The pattern held for three decades. Elections were won with seventy to eighty per cent, an opposition divided and its leaders jailed, oil revenues opaque, a constitution amended in 2008 to remove the two-term limit after riots in which a hundred died, and the president abroad. The Anglophone regions' strikes of 2016 over French judges and teachers became an armed separatist war in 2017 that the army has fought with burned villages and the separatists with kidnapped schoolchildren, and Boko Haram has fought the north since 2014. His wife Chantal and her hair are famous. His son Franck is discussed as a successor. The October 2025 election gave him fifty-four per cent against the seventy-nine-year-old Issa Tchiroma, who claimed victory, and protests were shot at.
- Lived: 1933 CE – ?
- Nationality: Cameroonian
- Roles: president, politician
