Today, 25 June, marks exactly one year since Issa Tchiroma Bakary did something Cameroonian politics almost never sees. He walked away. Power in Cameroon tends to be held until it is lost, defended to the last by men who calculate that loyalty pays better than principle. Tchiroma, then Minister of Employment and Vocational Training, broke that rule, and in breaking it he changed how history will remember him.
What began as rumour became fact when MMI News received the letter in which he told the nation he would challenge the very president he had served. Within days he confirmed his resignation and announced he would stand in the election, saying Biya’s 43-year rule had shown its limits. It would have been far easier, and far safer, to stay.
The man who walked away
The weight of what he did is easier to grasp when you remember who he had been. For years, as Minister of Communication and government spokesman, Tchiroma was the public voice of the regime, the man sent out to explain and defend it. He had every reason to remain inside, where the comforts and protections of office are real and the cost of dissent is high.
Instead he told Road to Etoudi, MMI News’s flagship election programme, that the president had grown distant from ordinary Cameroonians and even from his own ministers, a leader he could no longer reach. He spoke of a party base that no longer wanted him defending a government that had stopped delivering. Where others would have clung on, he concluded that the honest thing, and the harder thing, was to leave.
Owning the past
The most striking part was not the exit but what came with it. Tchiroma did not reinvent himself as a lifelong outsider or pretend his years in government had never happened. He apologised. He asked Cameroonians for forgiveness, including the Anglophones, and accepted his share of responsibility for being part of a system that had impoverished millions.
That kind of public accountability is almost unheard of among Cameroon’s political class, and voters understood its rarity. Rather than diminish him, the honesty redrew him in the public mind. He was no longer simply a former regime man. He was someone who had looked at what he had been part of, named it plainly, and chosen to stand on the other side.
The movement he built
From there a candidacy grew into something larger. His rallies in Bamenda, Douala and Yaoundé drew crowds that sensed they were watching an insider who knew exactly how the system worked and how it might be changed. He rarely attacked Biya the man. He went after the record, framing decades of CPDM rule as a burden the country had carried for too long.
The energy spread on its own. Musicians wove his name into their songs, associations rallied behind him, and his support reached across the religious and ethnic divides that have long fractured the opposition. When the authorities blocked him from campaigning abroad, his standing only rose. On Road to Etoudi he challenged anyone accusing him of looting the state to produce their proof. For the first time in many years, large numbers of Cameroonians believed real change was within reach, and they believed it because of him.
The vote, and a contested verdict
The election was held on 12 October 2025, and its outcome is still bitterly disputed. Official results gave Biya 54% and placed Tchiroma second on 35%, a verdict Tchiroma and his supporters reject to this day. Civil society actors and parallel tabulations also confirmed that the results had been in favour of Tchiroma. He alleged tampering and published his own tallies showing he had won around 60%, and vast numbers of Cameroonians are convinced the people’s choice was set aside.
The reaction told its own story. Protests erupted across several cities and an armed vigil formed outside his home in Garoua, and the state’s response was severe. Official figures put the dead at 16, United Nations sources suggested 48 and opposition groups said 55, and MMI News counted and documented 65. Meanwhile Human Rights Watch reported around 2,000 people detained. Whatever the certified count, the scale of the upheaval showed how deeply Tchiroma had moved the country.
Won the people, if not the levers
His own camp was clear-eyed about the limits of a ballot. His campaign director, Dr Chris Manengs, told Road to Etoudi and Mimi Mefo Newuh that they had won the election but not the instruments that control power, and that a system entrenched for over four decades was never going to surrender through machinery it ran itself.
The longer plan, by Manengs’s account, was a negotiated path: a power-sharing arrangement making Tchiroma vice-president, with the authority to reform Elecam and run credible municipal and parliamentary elections, building towards a clear FSNC win and, ultimately, the presidency in 2032. It was a strategy that recognised reality without abandoning hope, and it rested on Tchiroma surviving to see it through.
Survival, not surrender
That survival came at the price of leaving. As the crackdown intensified and his home and offices fell under surveillance, Tchiroma left the country to stay alive and keep the cause breathing. It is no small thing to ask whether the movement might have gone further had he remained, but it is also no small thing to remember what staying would likely have cost a 78-year-old marked man in the middle of a deadly clampdown. His associate Anicet Ekane, who was detained, denied his medication and ultimately died in detention, only confirms how difficult it can be to evaluate the choice to leave.
One year on: a legacy remade
A year on, Tchiroma is in exile but he has not gone quiet. He reached The Gambia, which confirmed his presence in late November 2025 as temporary humanitarian shelter, carried there by a cross-border Fulani network. From Banjul he has taken the fight to new ground. This month he announced two complaints before the Paris courts, invoking universal jurisdiction over the killings and detentions that followed the vote, naming Biya and senior officials.
Whatever happens next, the meaning of that June letter is already settled. History will not file Issa Tchiroma away as another functionary of a rotten system. It will remember the moment he decided that system was no longer worth defending, and chose to stand with the people instead. In a country where so few ever make that choice, the choosing is the legacy.
