2025 Election: Osih Promises 3 Million Jobs in One Year, if Elected

The Social Democratic Front’s chairman, Joshua Osih, has an ambition to create 3 million jobs within the first year of his mandate if he is voted as Cameroon’s third president in this October’s election.

Hon. Joshua Osih made this disclosure in the town of Mutengene this Friday, June 13, during a rally that was aimed at celebrating the SDF’s 35th anniversary and laying down the groundwork for this year’s presidential election.

“Our ambition is to create not less than 3 million jobs within the first year of our mandate,” he said to the hearing of hundreds of militants and sympathisers who had gathered at the Mutengene CBC School Field for the event.

He advanced what he viewed as a simplistic approach to achieving this.

He said the reason for unemployment in Cameroon is because of the country’s lack of industries to transform its produce.

Heavy reliance on imported finished goods while exporting raw materials, he said, is the reason why Cameroon has failed to become an industrialised nation under President Paul Biya’s over-42-year rule.

“What explains the fact that we export timber and then buy plastic chairs to sit on?” he rhetorically asked the crowd, addressing them in Pidgin English.

Osih believes the quickest way to job creation is industrialisation.

“Our children have no jobs because we don’t transform. What we need in Mutengene, in Cameroon, is to transform what we produce,” he insisted.

Youth unemployment in Cameroon was at 3.52 percent in 2024, according to the economic website, Statista. This refers to the share of the total workforce that is currently without work but actively searching for employment.

Tens of thousands of youths in the country leave the university but wander in joblessness; those who manage to find what to do end up with menial jobs that are either unrelated to what they studied or barely pay them the minimum wage.

This has left many Cameroonians in a precarious state of poverty, with over 23 percent of citizens living below the international poverty line of (less than US$ 2.15 per person per day).

The World Food Program predicts this could reach 25 percent by 2026 and will affect 8 million people.

This poverty is all worsened by armed conflicts in the country’s two Anglophone regions and the Far North, which have plunged 3.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the WFP.

The organisation attributes the rising poverty to weak economic growth against faster population growth, combined with the rising cost of living.

Talking about the armed conflict in the Anglophone Regions, where over 6,000 have been killed since 2017, Joshua Osih said he will end it in 100 days after his election in October.

He strongly criticised what he viewed as President Paul Biya’s lack of concern for Anglophones. He questioned Biya’s sense of compassion and willingness to resolve the conflict, as he has failed to step foot in any of the two regions since the conflict started in 2017 and has refused dialogue with separatists.

He said the key to ending the conflict is dialogue. The Biya government says it cannot dialogue with Anglophone separatists, whom it calls terrorists.

The conflict started after Anglophone Cameroonians voiced out socio-political grievances, including marginalisation. But the government forcefully cracked down on the protests, causing an escalation into armed conflict.

For years, the SDF party has been proposing a Federal form of government as a permanent solution to long-standing grievances by the minority English-speaking Cameroonians.

Joshua Osih says federation is the solution.

At the Mutengene rally, he remembered the SDF’s founding father, the late Ni John Fru Ndi, for his courageous and charismatic leadership until his death in 2023.

He said the SDF must win this year’s election so that Fru Ndi’s sacrifice, and that of six people killed during the party’s launch in 1990, doesn’t go in vain.