Six weeks out of public view, a private-clinic report the government denies, and a daughter’s claim that “PB is dying” — Cameroon is once again governed by a leader nobody has seen.
Cameroon has not laid eyes on its president in six weeks. Paul Biya, 93, has not appeared in public since the 20 May National Day celebrations in Yaoundé, and the only official account of his whereabouts is that he is in Switzerland — his destination of choice for the extended, unexplained stays that have punctuated more than four decades in power.
Into that silence has stepped his own daughter. In a video posted to Facebook on Saturday, Brenda Biya — a rapper and entrepreneur long estranged from the presidential household — claimed her father is dying and suggested the regime’s end is near. It was not the first time: she wrote “PB is dying period” in early May, offering no diagnosis and no medical source. Her claims carry the weight of the family name but come with a caveat: Brenda has made dramatic public statements before and reversed them, including a September 2025 video urging Cameroonians not to vote for her father, which she later retracted and followed with praise for him.
Her latest intervention lands on top of a report the government has spent weeks trying to bury. On 16 June, the pan-African magazine Jeune Afrique reported that Biya had collapsed at the 20 May National Day reception at the Palais de l’Unité, was flown discreetly to Geneva on 7 June, and was being treated at a private clinic — officially lodged at the InterContinental Hotel — reportedly for a knee problem. Citing sources inside the presidency, the magazine described a health situation serious enough that doctors had urged hospitalisation for weeks.
Government spokesman René Emmanuel Sadi rejected the account on 18 June, calling it “malicious and unfounded conjecture” that offends the basic principles of professional journalism. But the denial was narrow. Sadi confirmed Biya is indeed in Geneva, allowed that he might use the stay for “routine medical consultations,” and insisted he continues to run the country from abroad. However, he offered no proof of life beyond the assurance itself. Jeune Afrique has not retracted its reporting.
Governing from a distance — again
None of this is new. A 2018 investigation estimated Biya had spent roughly four and a half years of his presidency outside the country, much of it in Switzerland. His absences are routinely described as “short stays” in state media even when they run for months, and his September 2024 disappearance grew serious enough that the government was forced to publicly deny he had died. What is different this time is who is filling the vacuum: reports place his son, Franck Biya, increasingly floated as a potential successor, moving between Monaco, Paris and Geneva as the succession question, long whispered, edges into the open.
That opacity has bred a cottage industry of speculation. Cameroonian bloggers now issue near-daily predictions of the president’s death, a grim ritual that says less about Biya’s actual condition, which no one outside a Geneva clinic can verify, than about a state that has made his health a secret and left citizens to guess. The regime’s silence is not neutral. It is the reason the rumours never stop.
Forty-four years, and a country that has known no one else
Biya has been president since November 1982 — forty-four years. He is the oldest serving head of state in the world, the second-longest-serving president in Africa after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang, and the longest-serving non-royal leader currently in office anywhere. He was born in 1933, before the Second World War, before the first moon landing, before the internet existed. He has outlasted hereditary monarchs: Eswatini’s King Mswati III has reigned about 40 years, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI about 27.
For most Cameroonians, he is the only president they have ever known. The country is strikingly young — a large majority of the population is under 25 — which means Biya has ruled for well over twice the age of the median citizen. Someone born the year he took power is now 44, old enough to have grandchildren of their own, in a country where a single man has occupied the presidency for their entire life. It is a governing class that ages with him: critics note that Biya’s appointments skew toward his own generation, a shrinking cohort in a nation whose future belongs overwhelmingly to people born long after 1982.