Fifty-six days after President Paul Biya left Cameroon for what the Presidency called a “brief private stay,” the Constitution provides no deadline for his return, and the official empowered to activate the procedure for permanent incapacity has never been appointed.
Today, Sunday, 2 August, marks 56 days since President Paul Biya left Cameroon. It is now the longest uninterrupted absence of his 43-year presidency. His previous record ran from 2 September to 21 October 2024—49 elapsed days, or 50 calendar dates when both the departure and return dates are counted. The current absence exceeded that record on 27 July and is still running.
When the Presidency announced his departure on 7 June, it said the 93-year-old leader was travelling to Europe with his wife, Chantal Biya, for a “brief private stay.” He was accompanied by Civil Cabinet Director Samuel Mvondo Ayolo, Special Adviser Vice Admiral Joseph Fouda and Chief of State Protocol Simon Pierre Bikélé.
Nothing about the announcement suggested that nearly two months later, the President would still be outside the country.
Since then, Cameroonians have not seen him in public. He has not addressed the nation. No photograph or video showing him carrying out official duties has been released. No date has been announced for his return.
For weeks, the central question has been: when will Paul Biya return to Cameroon?
But as the absence continues, a more unsettling question must now be asked.
What if Paul Biya simply chooses not to return?
What happens if the “brief private stay” becomes a permanent arrangement?
What if Cameroon continues receiving decrees, telegrams and borrowing authorisations bearing the President’s name, while the man himself remains in Geneva, unseen, unheard and beyond any meaningful public scrutiny?
The disturbing answer is that Cameroon’s Constitution contains no automatic mechanism that would force him to return.
There is no constitutional 45-day rule, whatever social media insists.
There is no 60-day deadline.
There is no limit of any length after which a president loses office because he has remained abroad.
The Constitution establishes Yaoundé as the seat of the country’s institutions. It does not state that the President must remain physically in Yaoundé, live in Cameroon for a minimum number of days, or return after any specified period abroad.
Absence itself does not create a vacancy.
That means the country could, in law, continue being governed from a Geneva hotel for months or even years, provided the President remains alive, does not resign and is not formally declared permanently incapable of performing his duties.
The constitutional clock that does not exist
The revised Article 6 of the Constitution recognises only three circumstances capable of creating a vacancy at the Presidency of the Republic: death, resignation, or permanent incapacity duly established by the Constitutional Council.
Remaining abroad is not one of them.
Remaining silent is not one of them.
Failing to appear before the public is not one of them. Neither is refusing to announce a return date.
No legal clock began running when Paul Biya’s aircraft left Yaoundé on 7 June. On day 10, nothing happened. On day 30, nothing happened. On day 45, nothing happened. And on day 56, there is still no provision that automatically transfers his powers, requires Parliament to intervene, or declares the Presidency vacant.
This is why the debate cannot be reduced to whether Biya is entitled to take a holiday. Presidents travel routinely. The issue is whether a head of state can remain abroad indefinitely, exercise every power of his office remotely, avoid all direct contact with the citizens he governs, and still face no enforceable constitutional requirement to return.
The government’s explanations have not settled the question; they have multiplied it. For this absence, Communication Minister René Emmanuel Sadi declared on 18 June that the President is in Geneva but “not staying in any hospital establishment” and continues to work. During the 2024 disappearance, senior ruling-party figure Jacques Fame Ndongo said the President examines files wherever he is, and Labour Minister Grégoire Owona described that absence as annual leave to which the President is entitled as a worker.
Each explanation produces the same questions. If he is merely on leave, who is exercising the presidential functions that cannot wait? If he is working normally, why can he not be seen doing so? If he can examine files and authorise billions of francs in borrowing, why can he not speak to Cameroonians? And if his stay abroad is entirely voluntary, what prevents him from making Geneva his permanent seat of government?
Three months that redesigned the succession, then emptied it
To understand why this absence is different from every previous one, the calendar of the months before it matters.
On 17 March 2026, Théodore Datouo replaced Cavaye Yeguie Djibril as President of the National Assembly, ending 34 years of the same man at the head of the lower chamber. That same day, the Lamido of Rey Bouba, Aboubakary Abdoulaye, was elected President of the Senate, succeeding Marcel Niat Njifenji, who had led the chamber since its creation in 2013. In a single day, the leadership of both chambers of Cameroon’s Parliament, the institutions closest to the presidential succession, was transformed.
On 4 April, Parliament approved a constitutional revision restoring the office of Vice-President.
On 7 June, the President left for Geneva.
Whether that sequence was preparation, coincidence, or a move in the succession war that Yaoundé’s political class conducts in whispers is a question this newspaper cannot answer and Cameroonians are entitled to ask. What is beyond dispute is what the sequence produced: a freshly installed parliamentary leadership, a brand-new succession office at the centre of the Constitution, and, four months later, nobody appointed to fill it.
The trap inside the new succession law
The April amendment radically changed the succession system. Under the previous arrangement, the President of the Senate would temporarily assume presidential powers upon a vacancy, and a new election would be organised within 20 to 120 days. Under the new system, a Vice-President would complete the remainder of the presidential term if the office fell vacant through death, resignation or permanent incapacity. The officeholder is appointed and dismissable by the President, not elected alongside him, and not confirmed by Parliament.
Yet almost four months after the revision, Paul Biya has appointed no one.
Cameroon has a constitutional office of Vice-President, and no Vice-President.
That omission becomes grave when the procedure for establishing permanent incapacity is examined. The accompanying April amendment to the law governing the Constitutional Council designates the Vice-President as the authority who refers the question of the President’s permanent incapacity to the Council, which must then decide by a two-thirds majority.
In other words: the official legally designated to initiate the process for establishing that the President can no longer govern does not, at present, exist.
Consider what that means if Paul Biya were permanently incapacitated but alive.
The Vice-President cannot make the referral, because there is no Vice-President. The Prime Minister has not been given that authority. The President of the Senate cannot simply declare the President incapacitated. Parliament cannot remove him for staying abroad. And the Constitutional Council, whose members the President appoints, is not empowered to open the question on its own initiative. Whether any residual referral pathway from the old framework survives the April revision is, at best, untested legal terrain; no institution has claimed one, and none has ever attempted to use one against this President.
The procedure designed to protect Cameroon against presidential incapacity may therefore be impossible to activate, because the President left vacant the office placed at its centre.
The Constitution does provide a residual role for the Senate President where both the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency are vacant. That is what makes Aboubakary Abdoulaye, a reigning traditional monarch, sovereign of the Rey Bouba lamidat, elected to the Senate’s perchoir eleven weeks before the President’s departure, the constitutional fallback of the moment. But in a case of suspected incapacity rather than confirmed death or resignation, the difficulty arrives earlier: the vacancy must first be formally established. Without a Vice-President to make the referral, the machinery may never begin to move.
Cameroon has built a succession system that depends on an official whom the President alone can appoint, and whom he has chosen not to appoint.
Temporary incapacity, but only if Biya activates it
The Constitution also addresses temporary incapacity. The revised Article 10 provides that when the President is temporarily unable to carry out his duties, he may expressly charge the Vice-President, the Prime Minister, or another member of government with discharging some of those responsibilities.
Here again, everything depends on the President himself. He must accept that he is temporarily unable to perform his duties. He must issue the express delegation. He must decide who receives which powers. No other institution can compel him.
If a president refuses to acknowledge incapacity, or if those controlling access to him insist he continues to work normally, the clause remains dormant. The person whose ability to govern is in question retains sole control over whether that question has any constitutional consequence.
The Constitution, in short, assumes an incapacitated president who volunteers his own incapacity, or an appointed Vice-President present and willing to act. It never provided for a president who remains abroad, delegates nothing, appoints no deputy, and continues to be presented as fully operational.
Government by signature
Despite the President’s physical and public absence, official documents have continued to appear in his name.
On 22 July, the Presidency published decrees authorising financing for the Adaptive Safety Nets and Economic Inclusion Project and additional works on the Yaoundé Municipal Lake project. On 30 July, two further decrees authorised financing for a regional health-security programme and the Dja Integrated Rural Development Project.
The documents prove that the Presidency continues producing official acts in Biya’s name. They prove nothing about where the decisions were examined, how they were transmitted, under what circumstances they were signed, or who witnessed the President’s approval.
The presidency’s defenders will answer that this is normal: files have always travelled to the President through the Secretariat-General and the Civil Cabinet, wherever he is, and a decree signed abroad is as valid as one signed at Etoudi. That is true for a president whose existence and capacity nobody has reason to doubt. It is a different proposition after 56 days without a single image, a single address, a single publicly announced Council of Ministers, a single audience or working session shown to the nation. Validity is a legal question. Authentication is an evidentiary one. The state is currently asking Cameroonians to accept the first while threatening and discouraging scrutiny of the health and capacity questions surrounding the second.
The danger is not hypothetical. In June, an unidentified individual reportedly carried forged presidential decrees announcing a government reshuffle into the premises of state broadcaster CRTV and attempted to have them aired. The documents bore what appeared to be the President’s signature; they were identified as false only after CRTV contacted the Civil Cabinet. National Assembly Speaker Théodore Datouo condemned the incident as an affront to state institutions.
If a fake decree can reach the state broadcaster, the public has a legitimate interest in how genuine ones are authenticated. Who carries the files to Geneva? Who presents them? Who witnesses the signature? How do the documents return? What independent process confirms the decisions originate with Paul Biya himself?
These are not questions about the President’s health. They are questions about the chain of custody of presidential authority. A country cannot be governed indefinitely through documents whose origin its citizens are forbidden to scrutinise, especially when the reshuffle the President himself promised at the end of 2025 has never materialised, and the one office the new Constitution required him to fill remains empty.
The state’s answer has been silence and threats
The government’s handling of earlier questions makes the present situation more alarming, not less.
During the 2024 disappearance, Territorial Administration Minister Paul Atanga Nji issued a circular declaring media discussion of the President’s health strictly prohibited. Regional governors were instructed to monitor traditional and social media; those who persisted were warned they would face the “full force of the law.”
The circular answered no questions about the President’s capacity to govern. It attempted to suppress them. And its precedent hangs over the present absence: Cameroonians know that asking too directly can attract threats, surveillance, or accusations of destabilising the state.
The result is an environment in which officials may endlessly assert that the President is well and working, while journalists and citizens face pressure for asking to see the evidence.
But the capacity of a head of state to perform his constitutional duties is not a private matter. When the President remains abroad for 56 days, authorises loans in the nation’s name, commands the armed forces and holds the exclusive power to appoint the very official on whom succession depends, his ability to govern is a legitimate question of public interest. The state cannot demand unlimited trust while withholding all verifiable information. It cannot treat presidential silence as normal and public questioning as dangerous.
Other countries show how this ends
Cameroon is not the first country to confront a president formally in office and functionally absent.
In Nigeria, President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua flew to Saudi Arabia for treatment in November 2009 without transferring power to Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan. The absence hardened into constitutional crisis until, in February 2010, the National Assembly invoked a “doctrine of necessity” found nowhere in the constitution and recognised Jonathan as acting president, a political improvisation to unblock a legal machine that had seized.
In Algeria, Abdelaziz Bouteflika remained President for almost six years after his 2013 stroke, rarely seen, while decisions flowed in his name. What ended his rule in 2019 was not constitutional clarity but the street and the army.
And Cameroon has its own precedent. In October 2024, after 49 days away, Biya returned to a carefully staged airport welcome, supporters mobilised along the route, and offered not one word of explanation for where he had been, what had happened, or why his government had threatened those who asked.
The lesson is not that every prolonged absence ends the same way. It is that constitutions with weak or politically captive incapacity procedures do not prevent crises. They postpone them, until forces outside the written constitution decide the outcome.
The price of a permanent Geneva presidency
The constitutional cost of the absence runs alongside a financial one.
In its investigation of 8 July, MMI News priced the delegation configuration long described by the InterContinental’s own former management, a cleared floor plus some thirty additional rooms, at the hotel’s published rates and those of an independent booking network, on identical terms. The result: £62,816 to £75,262 per night, rooms only. The full method, every rate capture, and comparison prices drawn from the Cameroonian state’s own public tenders are set out in that investigation and in our day-50 update.
By day 56, the estimated rooms-only cost stands at between £3,517,696 and £4,214,672, approximately 2.69 to 3.22 billion CFA francs. The estimate excludes aircraft, transport, security, food, allowances, medical costs and every other expense of the delegation.
The Presidency, the hotel and its parent group IHG were invited on 8 July to correct these figures with the actual invoice and delegation list. None has responded.
Project the arrangement forward one year and the rooms alone would cost an estimated £22.9 to £27.5 million, roughly 17.5 to 21 billion CFA francs annually. At the state’s own tender prices, that is hundreds of health centres, more than 1,700 classrooms, or the annual minimum wage of over 24,000 Cameroonian workers. Every year. Indefinitely.
At that point the Geneva presidency ceases to be a journey. It becomes a permanent institution of the Cameroonian state, financed without a published budget, accountable to no one.
Those who hold the exact bills, room lists and delegation records can publish them. Until they do, they cannot complain that journalists and citizens estimate what is hidden from the people expected to pay for it. Official silence does not make the expenditure disappear. It only makes accountability harder.
Four possible endings
The first is a staged return, on the October 2024 model: an arrival, a motorcade, a brief appearance, no explanation. It would end the current count and resolve nothing, since nothing would prevent another departure weeks later. Cameroon would settle into a revolving-door presidency: brief appearances at home, ever-longer government from abroad.
The second is indefinite remote rule. Decrees, telegrams, military decisions and borrowing authorisations continue to arrive from Geneva while ministers insist the President is fully in command. No constitutional deadline exists to stop it.
The third is a formal acknowledgment of temporary incapacity with an express delegation of powers under Article 10. That requires Biya himself to activate it. No delegation has been announced.
The fourth is death or permanent incapacity abroad. Death would open a vacancy, and immediately test what the residual succession provisions mean with the vice-presidency unfilled. Permanent incapacity would be worse still, because the official designated to put the question to the Constitutional Council does not exist.
If the written system cannot respond, the matter will be decided politically rather than constitutionally: elite negotiation, parliamentary improvisation, military arbitration, popular mobilisation, or a war among the clans already fighting in the dark. That is the price of leaving constitutional questions unanswered until the moment of crisis.
A republic cannot be reduced to one man’s return ticket
Paul Biya may return tomorrow. He may return for the week’s high-profile pastoral visit which is already underway, remain briefly, and depart again.
But a country’s constitutional stability cannot depend on guessing when one man will board an aircraft.
The question is no longer the President’s travel schedule. It is whether Cameroon has become so dependent on Paul Biya personally that he can remain outside the country indefinitely without any institution being able, or willing, to demand transparency, activate a transfer of authority, or establish whether he remains capable of his duties.
The Constitution declares Yaoundé the seat of the nation’s institutions. Its authors provided for death. They provided for resignation. They provided, imperfectly, for incapacity. They never imagined needing to write down that the President should govern from his own country.
In that silence, a republic can be governed from a hotel for as long as its President draws breath, his entourage transmits documents, and the national treasury bears the cost.
After 56 days, Cameroon is no longer merely waiting for Paul Biya to return.
It is confronting a harder possibility: that nothing in the system he built can compel him to come back.