By Tata Mbunwe
The Social Democratic Front party’s chairman and presidential candidate, Joshua Osih, was in Ndian Division, his area of origin, where he said he obtained ancestral blessings for his presidential campaign.
Honorable Osih, who is also a village Chief in Ndian, traveled to the divisional headquarters Mundemba there over the weekend, accompanied by other SDF officials.
He said the goal was to connect with his people and receive their blessings for his 2025 presidential campaign.
“Before launching this campaign, I returned to Mundemba, in Ndian,” Osih said.
“We braved the sea to reconnect with my roots, receive the blessing of my elders, and speak with the people: a moment of truth, among those who shaped me and who count on us.”
The Ndian visit came just days before the SDF’s official campaign launch. The party had announced it would launch its election campaign on September 26 in its birth place of Bamenda, North West Region.
Joshua Osih is the party’s presidential candidate for the October 12, 2025, election and he is facing off 11 other candidates, including incumbent Paul Biya, in power for 42 years.
This is the second time Osih is challenging Biya at an election. He came in the fourth place out of nine candidates in the 2018 votes, as Biya was declared winner with 71 percent.
The SDF, which has been the leading opposition party in Cameroon since 1990, has often attributed its poor performance in 2018 to poor voter turnout in the Anglophone Regions, where it has its base.
These two regions have been facing a secessionist armed conflict since 2017, with separatists banning elections and targeting voters and officials.
The prevailing conflict may still badly affect voter turnout in the English-speaking regions this October, as separatists continue to push against elections.
Many politicians have also remained scared of the Anglophone Regions and have limited avtivity to major towns.
Of the 12 candidates contesting for this year’s election, just five have carried out official visits to parts of the two regions and they ended in major towns of Buea, Limbe and Bamenda.
Joshua Osih’s visit to Ndian, an area characterised by both pirate and separatist attacks, to many, indicates that election candidates could still maneuver through the insecurity to reach voters in the hinterlands.
Osih has often prided himself as the only candidate who has traveled across the 10 regions of the country in recent memory to connect with the local population.
He leads a party whose ideology is a bottom-top approach to governance, geared at effectively giving back power to the people through a federal system of government.
He plans to revive the economy and curb youth unemployment through industrialization and home transformation, if elected.
Osih also promises to end the Anglophone armed conflict in the first 100 days in office, and use three years to resolve historical grievances of marginalisation by the minority English-speaking Cameroonians.
