Ghosts of Kamerun

by August Conchiglia, New Left Review

On 9 October 2011, the Cameroonian president Paul Biya was re-elected for yet another seven-year term, amid widespread electoral violations. [1] Aged 79, he has been in power since 1982, when he was appointed to the presidency by his predecessor, Ahmadou Ahidjo; the latter had in turn ruled the country since independence in 1960. In fifty-two years, Cameroon has had only two presidents, who have held this country of 19 million in an iron grip: behind a fraudulent, electoral façade stands a highly repressive regime which has imprisoned or killed its opponents, muzzled the press and salted away trillions of dollars in oil revenue. The balance sheet is catastrophic. Corruption is pervasive, from the apparatchiks of the ruling Rassemblement Démocratique du Peuple Camerounais—until 1990 the only legal political party—down to local traffic cops. According to the World Bank, 40 per cent of the population live below the official poverty line, while life expectancy, at 52, is five years shorter than in Liberia and twelve shorter than in Ghana. In 2011, Cameroon’s Human Development Index ranked it 150th out of 187 countries surveyed by the UNDP.