Martin K When Paul Biya, aged ninety-two, was declared the winner of Cameroon’s October 2025 presidential election, the announcement seemed less like continuity than culmination: the closing act of a political order born in the late colonial era and sustained by post-colonial endurance. The protests that erupted in Douala and Yaoundé, led largely by young citizens, were not only a reaction to electoral irregularities but also a rejection of the deeper structure of rule that has defined Cameroon for decades: a system where “peace” is invoked to justify paralysis and stability becomes a pretext for democratic stagnation. In that sense, Cameroon’s current turmoil is both historical and generational, exposing the long shadow of colonial compromises and the failure of a leadership model that confuses longevity with legitimacy.
Cameroon’s political imagination was shaped by the contradictions of empire. The territory once known as German Kamerun was partitioned after the First World War into French and British mandates, establishing dual systems of law, education, and administration that would later harden into enduring lines of exclusion. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC), led by Um Nyobé, Moumié, and Ouandié, articulated a radical anti-colonial vision grounded in social justice and national unity. Its violent suppression by colonial and early post-colonial forces installed what might be called the DNA of Cameroon’s governance: security first, politics later. Reunification in 1961 brought independence but not reconciliation; the state that emerged inherited the administrative logic of domination without its emancipatory counterpart.
This historical trajectory helps explain how Paul Biya’s presidency, now spanning more than four decades, has become the endpoint of a long process of depoliticization. Taking office in 1982, Biya inherited the centralized machinery built by Ahmadou Ahidjo, refined it after surviving a coup attempt in 1984, and perfected an art of rule that balances patronage with repression. The 2008 removal of constitutional term limits, celebrated by ruling elites as continuity, was in reality a moment of rupture: it institutionalized permanence and normalized manipulation. From that point onward, Cameroon ceased to imagine leadership as renewal; it became a theatre of endurance.
Measured against the aspirations of its independence era, Biya’s governance can be understood as a failure on several fronts. Constitutionally, the erosion of checks and balances transformed the State into a personalized regime. Socially, the Anglophone crisis, sparked in 2016 by demands for linguistic and legal recognition, demonstrated how unresolved historical grievances were securitized instead of negotiated. Economically, youth unemployment and regional inequality have eroded trust in the promise of citizenship. Moreover, civically, the systematic restriction of assembly, speech, and digital expression has reduced participation to performance. What remains is a fragile equilibrium sustained not by legitimacy but by fatigues: a peace of silence rather than of consent.
Yet the limits of that model are now visible. Across Africa, a new civic generation is redefining politics through creativity and technology. As I have argued in The Rising Generation: Youth Movements Between Democratic Renewal and Political Rupture and From Resistance to Reconciliation: Rise of Youth Movements and the Transformation of Civic Peacebuilding in Contemporary Post-Conflict Africa – Read it Here: https://www.kumartinez.com/the-rising-generation-youth-movements-between-democratic-renewal-and-political-rupture/, youth are not simply protesting exclusion; they are re-imagining peace and governance as participatory, accountable, and justice-oriented. Cameroon’s mobilizations must therefore be situated within this continental awakening. In Kenya, digital-era activists have built platforms to expose corruption and police violence, while in Madagascar, student-journalist coalitions contest the monopolization of power by entrenched elites. Uganda’s People Power and Senegal’s Y’en a Marre demonstrate how music, art, and satire can transform dissent into cultural citizenship. Sudan’s 2019 uprising showed both the potential and peril of generational revolt: the capacity to unseat dictators, but also the fragility of transitions when militaries reclaim the revolution.
Cameroon now sits at the intersection of these currents, illustrating the continental struggle between aging liberation-era elites and digitally mobilized youth. The country’s leadership continues to equate dissent with instability, while its citizens increasingly view silence as complicity. This generational dissonance has turned politics into a moral argument about the meaning of peace. The rhetoric of stability, once persuasive to international donors and regional partners, rings hollow to a population whose lived reality is unemployment, censorship, and insecurity. Africa’s median age, under twenty, means that the politics of endurance has reached demographic exhaustion; time itself has become oppositional.
Refined for 2025, one might restate a thesis I advanced earlier: Cameroon is a test case of how youth-led civic resistance and digital activism confront aging regimes in post-conflict societies where the rhetoric of peace conceals democratic decay. The difference today is that confrontation is turning into reckoning. Young Africans are asking whether the post-colonial state can still serve as an instrument of emancipation or whether it has hardened into a machine of self-preservation. The answer will not only define Cameroon’s trajectory but also shape the future of political legitimacy across the continent. Read also https://www.kumartinez.com/from-resistance-to-reconciliation-rise-of-youth-movements-and-the-transformation-of-civic-peacebuilding-in-contemporary-post-conflict-africa/
Cameroonian youths demonstrate for change, Yaoundé, 2025. Photo: Unsplash (CC0)
The potential outcomes are stark. Renewal would require the regime to embrace inclusion, reforming electoral processes, engaging Anglophone grievances through dialogue, and integrating youth voices into decision-making. Containment, the more likely scenario, entails partial concessions and managed dialogues that delay but do not resolve the crisis, perpetuating cycles of repression and protest. Rupture remains the looming risk: prolonged refusal to negotiate core questions of power and justice could provoke systemic collapse, as Sudan’s experience painfully illustrates.
Biya’s reign thus stands as a cautionary tale about the perils of conflating durability with stability. His government optimized for survival, loyal security services, disciplined bureaucracy, and legal engineering, while neglecting transformation. It achieved a negative peace that suppressed open conflict at the cost of positive decay in civic trust and institutional integrity. By 2025, the contradiction has become visible to all: an elderly presidency governing a youthful nation that no longer recognizes itself in its rulers.
From Antananarivo to Nairobi, Dakar to Douala, Africa’s youth are asserting a different political grammar, one rooted in accountability, creativity, and dignity. Whether current regimes can adapt to that grammar or insist on criminalizing it will determine which States renew and which disintegrate. Cameroon’s crisis, in this light, is less a domestic aberration than a continental reckoning. It marks the exhaustion of a model born of colonial fragmentation and sustained by post-independence fear. If that model refuses to evolve, the future belongs to those who dare to imagine and organize another one.
