Maurice Kamto has resigned from the leadership of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, MRC. Mamadou Mota has also stepped down, and attention has already shifted to the question of who should take over the party.
That is understandable. Political parties must think about succession.
But before the MRC rushes into its next chapter, there is an uncomfortable part of its recent history that deserves to be revisited.
Her name is Michèle Ndoki. This is not an argument that she should automatically become the next president of the MRC. It is not an argument that every position she has ever taken was correct, or that every disagreement she had with Maurice Kamto was handled perfectly on her side.
It is a simpler question. Was Michèle Ndoki pushed out for raising some of the very questions the MRC would later be forced to confront?
And if that is what happened, is it time for the party to acknowledge it, apologise to her and ask her back?
She paid a heavy price for this party
It is easy, with the passage of time and all the political quarrels that came afterwards, to forget how closely Ndoki’s story became tied to the MRC struggle after the 2018 presidential election.
She was part of the legal team that challenged the election results before the Constitutional Council. She became one of the most visible faces of the party’s post-election resistance. She joined protests. She was shot during an MRC demonstration in Douala in January 2019. She was later arrested and spent months in detention.
Eventually, she went into exile. These are not small details in the story. Whatever anybody now thinks of Michèle Ndoki, she cannot fairly be described as someone who stood at a safe distance and later arrived to criticise the party. She put her body, her freedom, her career and her personal security on the line during one of the MRC’s most difficult periods.
She was also one of the party’s most active public communicators. She organised and participated in live discussions explaining the MRC’s ideas and political vision. She defended the movement when doing so came with real consequences.
Then she began to disagree with some of its decisions. That is where the relationship changed.
The 2020 boycott was the first major fault line
One of Ndoki’s most important disagreements concerned the MRC’s decision to boycott the February 2020 legislative and municipal elections.
At the time, refusing to participate was defended as a matter of principle. The MRC argued that credible elections could not take place without meaningful electoral reform and while the conflict in the North-West and South-West continued.
The MRC presented the boycott as a matter of principle. It said Cameroon should not proceed with elections while war continued in the North-West and South-West and without consensual reform of the electoral system. Those were not framed as minor objections. Kamto argued that proceeding with the 2020 elections under those conditions would effectively accept the partition of the country. Months later, he said the party would oppose new popular elections until those two prerequisites were met.
But neither prerequisite was met when the MRC changed course. By 2023, with the Anglophone war still raging and the electoral system the party had condemned largely intact, Kamto announced that the MRC would participate in every future election, including municipal, legislative and presidential elections, even if they were called the next day.
That leaves a question which becomes unavoidable in light of what happened in 2025: if the conditions made participation unacceptable in 2020, why did those same conditions no longer prevent participation afterwards?
That is much stronger, because we are not telling readers what Kamto’s motives were. We are putting his own positions beside each other and asking him, politically, to account for the contradiction.
But there was also another question: what would staying out of those elections cost the party?
Ndoki was among those who raised that concern. She also questioned how the decision had been taken and whether enough attention had been paid to what it would mean for the party’s grassroots structures.
For that, she was heavily criticised. Yet the problem she warned about did not disappear because people disliked the warning.
The MRC knew even before the 2020 elections that the boycott carried a serious electoral risk. In its own declaration announcing the decision, the party acknowledged that staying out of legislative and municipal elections could create difficulties when the time came to present a presidential candidate under Cameroon’s Electoral Code.
That risk became reality five years later. By 2025, the MRC had no elected officials from the 2020 legislative and municipal elections. Maurice Kamto’s presidential ambitions then ran directly into the political and legal consequences of that absence.
What followed was extraordinary. The man who had led the boycott eventually had to leave the MRC and seek a presidential ticket through MANIDEM.
After years in which questions about the boycott had often been treated as attacks on the leadership, the party eventually found itself struggling with the very consequence that some of those critics had warned about.
Kamto still did not make it onto the presidential ballot. One does not have to argue that participating in the 2020 elections would automatically have solved every problem. Nobody can know how many seats the MRC would have won, or whether the government would have found another way to obstruct Kamto.
But one thing is now much harder to dispute: the boycott came at a very high political cost. And Michèle Ndoki had warned that it would.
Then she committed what appeared to be the bigger offence: she challenged Kamto
The second issue may be even more important now. Michèle Ndoki wanted to contest the presidency of the MRC. In a party that presented itself as an alternative to the political culture of the CPDM, this could have been a remarkable opportunity.
She was unlikely to defeat Maurice Kamto. Kamto was the founder, the national figurehead and by far the strongest personality in the party. He had a loyal base and enormous political recognition compared with Ndoki.
But that was precisely why a contest could have helped the MRC. Imagine what an open leadership campaign could have looked like.
Ndoki and Kamto travelling through party structures. Members asking difficult questions. Debates about the 2020 boycott, party organisation, grassroots mobilisation, political strategy and the future of the movement. Two senior figures explaining what they wanted the MRC to become.
Kamto might well have won comfortably. But he would have emerged from that contest with something valuable: a fresh democratic mandate from within his own party.
The MRC too could have emerged stronger. It could have shown Cameroonians that an opposition party did not fear competition, even at the very top.
Instead, Ndoki’s challenge became part of a deep and bitter conflict with the leadership, and she was eventually expelled from the party.
The official case against her contained more than the fact that she wanted to challenge Kamto, and that distinction matters. But it is impossible to discuss her removal honestly without acknowledging the political context in which it happened.
Her attempt to contest the leadership had become deeply controversial inside a party where Kamto’s authority appeared increasingly difficult to challenge.
Richard Tamfu later ran into a similar wall after openly challenging the direction and leadership culture of the party.
That history looks very different today. Because the MRC is now preparing to do exactly what Ndoki had said political parties should be able to do: choose between people who want to lead.
What was unacceptable then is normal now
Kamto has resigned. People are already declaring interest in succeeding him. That is how politics should work.
There should be several candidates if several people believe they can lead the party. They should present their ideas. They should campaign. Members should examine their records and choose.
But if all of that is legitimate today, the MRC must ask itself why it was treated with so much suspicion when Michèle Ndoki wanted the same thing while Kamto was still in charge.
Why should wanting to replace a party president become evidence of betrayal? Why should internal ambition suddenly become respectable only after the incumbent leaves voluntarily?
These are not questions about Michèle Ndoki alone. They go to the heart of what kind of political institution the MRC wants to become. A party cannot argue that Cameroon needs political alternation while behaving as though alternation inside its own structures is dangerous. It cannot condemn a political culture built around one dominant leader while allowing its own identity to become inseparable from one man.
The test of internal democracy is not whether everybody is allowed to agree. It is what happens when somebody says: I think I can lead this party differently.
Ndoki said that. The MRC’s response was not to beat her in an election. It was eventually to lose her altogether.
The Atanga Nji irony
There is another part of this story that should make the MRC uncomfortable. After everything that happened in 2025, Kamto returned to the MRC and was reinstated through a party congress.
Then Paul Atanga Nji entered the picture again. The Minister of Territorial Administration challenged the outcome and the status of Kamto’s leadership. There is a serious democratic problem here.
Atanga Nji is a senior figure in a government led by the CPDM. Whatever administrative powers the Ministry of Territorial Administration has over political parties, it is deeply troubling when a minister serving the ruling party can become such a powerful actor in determining who is recognised as the leader of an opposition party.
The MRC is right to object to that kind of interference. But there is an uncomfortable irony. The party now wants outsiders to respect its right to determine its own leadership freely, yet it has struggled in the past to accommodate serious internal challenges to that same leadership.
These are not identical issues. State interference and internal party discipline are very different things. But the principle underneath both is worth considering.
Political legitimacy is stronger when it comes from open competition, transparent rules and members who genuinely have choices. That is what Ndoki was asking the MRC to demonstrate.
Has she been vindicated?
On every issue? Probably not. Politics does not work that neatly. But on the two questions that defined her eventual break with the party, it is becoming increasingly difficult to dismiss what she said.
She questioned the wisdom of the 2020 boycott and warned about its consequences. Five years later, the MRC’s absence from elected institutions became one of the biggest obstacles facing Kamto’s presidential plans.
She argued that the party should allow genuine competition for its leadership. She was treated as a threat when she tried to provide that competition.
Now Kamto has gone, and the MRC is preparing for exactly such a contest. That does not make Michèle Ndoki a prophet. It does mean the party owes itself an honest examination of how it treated her. And perhaps it owes her something too.
An apology would say something important about the post-Kamto MRC
The MRC does not have to offer Michèle Ndoki the presidency. It does not have to agree with everything she has said since leaving the party.
She may not even want to return. But the party could acknowledge that disagreement over the 2020 boycott was legitimate. It could acknowledge that wanting to contest the presidency of the MRC should never, by itself, have made anyone an enemy of the movement.
It could recognise what Ndoki sacrificed during the years when defending the MRC carried consequences far greater than losing an internal argument.
And it could invite her back. Not to crown her. Not to hand her the party. Not to rewrite history. Simply to say: you were one of us, you suffered with us, you disagreed with us, and some of the questions you asked deserved a better answer than the one we gave you.
Then, if she wants to return and contest the leadership, let her contest it. If other candidates want to run, let them run too. That would be a much more meaningful demonstration of internal democracy than any speech about political renewal.
Because the real question facing the MRC after Maurice Kamto is no longer simply who replaces him. It is whether the party can become larger than the political personality that built it. For years, Michèle Ndoki argued, in different ways, that it needed to. The MRC may now be discovering that she had a point.