Paul Biya Death Rumours: The Cameroon President Who Keeps “Dying” and Living

Paul Biya has been pronounced dead more times than most leaders are pronounced anything. The Cameroonian president has been killed off on social media, on diaspora television and in beer-parlour conversation across the decades, and each time he has reappeared to bury the obituary rather than the other way round. When he does eventually answer nature’s call, he will go down as the head of state who had several lives.

At 93, Biya is the oldest sitting head of state in the world and has ruled Cameroon since 1982, making him the longest continuously serving non-royal leader anywhere. He was sworn in for an eighth term in November 2025. None of that longevity has settled the recurring question that follows him from one European clinic to the next: is Paul Biya alive, and if so, where?

2004: “I’ll see you in twenty years”

The pattern was set two decades ago. In 2004, word went round that Biya had died, and in parts of the country the reaction was not grief but celebration, as though an old iroko had finally come down. The jubilation did not last. Biya was abroad at the time, and on 9 June he stepped onto the tarmac at Yaoundé-Nsimalen, arriving from Switzerland to a delirious crowd. The ghost, he told them, saluted them. Then came the line Cameroonians still quote: some people, he said, were interested in his funeral, and he was giving them a rendezvous in twenty years. A few months later he stood in a presidential election and won it comfortably, leaving his detractors to nurse their disappointment.

What nobody clocked in the moment was the arithmetic. Twenty years from that June afternoon is 2024, the very year the most serious death scare of his rule would arrive.

2020: a long silence and Kamto’s march

The second act came in 2020, when Biya vanished from public view for a prolonged stretch and his government offered little to fill the silence. Into that vacuum stepped Maurice Kamto, the opposition leader who maintains he was the true winner of the 2018 vote. Kamto called supporters onto the streets in September 2020 in protests the authorities treated as an attempted insurrection. Many Cameroonians were once again convinced their president was gone. The presidency, true to form, did not rush to reassure them. It managed the story instead, letting the doubt run.

2024: fifty days, a banned subject and a triumphant return

The most dramatic episode arrived in 2024, the year his own twenty-year appointment fell due. Biya left Cameroon in early September for the China-Africa forum in Beijing, then simply did not come home. As the weeks stretched on he skipped the United Nations General Assembly and a Francophonie summit in Paris. On 8 October a US-based separatist broadcaster, ABS, aired a video declaring him dead, and the claim tore through the networks faster than the government could contain it.

This time the silence broke. Communications Minister René Emmanuel Sadi issued a formal denial, calling the rumours pure fantasy and the imagination of their authors. The director of the civil cabinet, Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, spoke from Geneva to insist the president was working and in good health. When that failed to convince, Interior Minister Paul Atanga Nji went further and banned Cameroonian media from any debate or reporting on the president’s health, calling it a national security matter and warning that violators would face the full weight of the law. It was a striking admission of how little the official word was trusted.

Biya finally landed in Yaoundé on 21 October 2024, after close to fifty days away. Thousands lined the route from Nsimalen for a leader many had spent weeks mourning, yet the man himself offered almost nothing in return. He waved at the crowd from his vehicle but did not speak to the public or address his long absence at all. For the people who had waited hours at the airport, a fleeting glimpse through tinted glass was the whole reward.

June 2026: Geneva, a clinic and the old questions

The cycle is turning once more, and on schedule. Biya left Yaoundé on 7 June 2026 for Geneva, the city where he has spent so much of his presidency that it has become a second seat of power. The departure followed an episode of ill health at the 20 May National Day reception at the Unity Palace. On 17 June the magazine Jeune Afrique reported that the president was being treated at a private clinic in the Swiss city.

The government’s response was the familiar one. On 18 June, Sadi dismissed the report as malicious and unfounded speculation, insisting that the head of state was in Geneva but not admitted to any medical facility, that he continued to monitor the affairs of the country with due diligence, and would return to Cameroon as soon as possible. By late June he had been in Switzerland for more than two weeks, with the same political business that fills any Biya absence, including talk of a vice-presidency for his son Franck, reportedly following him abroad.

Why the rumours never die

There is a reason these stories keep finding fertile ground. The health of the president is treated in Cameroon not as a matter of public accountability but as something close to a state secret. The taboo runs deep: in 1998 the late publisher Pius Njawe was jailed for two years simply for suggesting in print that Biya might have suffered heart trouble at a football final. A government that criminalises the question should not be surprised when the public answers it with rumour.

The diaspora has learned to exploit that silence, and the presidency, for its part, has learned to wait it out. Each cycle follows the same rhythm. An absence, a death claim from abroad, a flat official denial that convinces almost no one, a media blackout, and then a return staged for the cameras. The communication is so thin that the rumour usually moves faster than the truth, and the truth, when it arrives, comes wrapped in a motorcade and a wave.

When the news is finally real

The cruelty of all this is reserved for the day the report is finally true. A man cannot play dead this many times without teaching his people to disbelieve the announcement when it counts. When Paul Biya does eventually go, a great many Cameroonians will assume it is one more prank, one more rehearsal, and will wait for the limousine to roll out of the airport with that practised half-wave behind the glass.

For now, the script holds. The president is in Switzerland, the rumours of grave illness are circulating again, the government has issued its denial, and the country waits. If history is any guide, it will not be long before the networks bury him once more, and not long after that before he lands in Yaoundé, very much alive, like a big boy. The man who once gave his mourners a twenty-year appointment seems in no hurry to keep it.

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