By Tekuh Felix
There comes a point in the life of every nation when the question is no longer simply who won an election, but whether the country can continue pretending that an election has settled anything at all.
For Cameroon, that moment has arrived.
Paul Biya was declared the winner of the 12 October 2025 presidential election with 53.66 percent of the vote. His principal challenger, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, was awarded 35.19 percent. The Constitutional Council has spoken, and legally, that may be the end of the counting. But it cannot be the end of the argument.
Because a democratic mandate is not created merely by announcing a percentage.
Biya should step down because the 2025 election has failed the more important test: whether Cameroonians can reasonably believe that the result represents their freely expressed political will.
That is not a frivolous accusation. It is a question the authorities themselves have failed to answer convincingly.
The Truth Behind the Numbers
Cameroon’s electoral crisis is not just about manipulation, it is about mathematical cosmetics. By reporting results as percentages of a tiny, filtered subset of voters, the regime turns a nationwide boycott into a “landslide victory.”
In reality, the 2025 presidential poll reflects the collapse of national confidence in elections. The figures expose a government sustained by abstention, not endorsement.
The story of Cameroon’s 2025 presidential election is not written in the glowing percentages on government posters. It is buried in the silence of the 90 percent who refused to vote.
When the history of Paul Biya’s regime is finally written, statisticians will not save him. Numbers may not lie, but politicians do with numbers.
The first problem is the seductive simplicity of percentages.
A candidate can receive 53.66 percent of valid votes cast and still lack anything approaching a broad national mandate. The denominator matters.
Official figures conceal the depth of electoral non-participation, particularly in the conflict-affected North-West and South-West regions.
But an even more troubling problem emerges from the government’s own numbers.
While some divisions reported participation rates around 50–60 percent, others reported participation of 80, 90 and even 97 percent. More importantly, Biya’s margins increased dramatically in precisely those areas reporting extraordinary turnout.
This does by itself prove that ballots were fabricated. We should be intellectually honest about that. It raises a question that cannot responsibly be brushed aside: How did the divisions reporting the most extraordinary turnout become so decisive in producing Biya’s victory?
The numbers deserve an independent audit. And the burden of answering that question falls particularly heavily on a government that has controlled Cameroon for more than four decades.
The election was not fought on a level playing field
An election cannot be judged only by what happened when citizens entered polling stations. It must also be judged by what happened before election day. Who was allowed to compete? Who was excluded? Were institutions sufficiently independent? Could opposition candidates campaign freely? Could voters participate without intimidation? Could electoral complaints receive genuinely impartial consideration?
These questions matter because democracy is not simply the act of putting a ballot into a box. It is the existence of conditions under which citizens can make a meaningful political choice.
The 2025 election was conducted against a backdrop of deep institutional distrust and political exclusion. Among other controversies, prominent opposition leader Maurice Kamto was prevented from contesting after the Constitutional Council rejected his candidacy in favour of another candidate from the same party. We also recorded widespread perceptions of fraud and the violence that followed the election.
This is why the government’s preferred argument—that the Constitutional Council has declared Biya the winner—misses the point.
An institution can declare a result. It cannot manufacture public confidence in that result.
The most disturbing evidence is hidden inside the official numbers. Perhaps the most powerful challenge to the official result does not come from an opposition press conference. It comes from examining the numbers themselves.
When we put the Constitutional Council’s own divisional results and conduct a simple sensitivity test, it becomes clear that Biya stole the victory. When divisions reporting turnout above 90 percent were excluded, Biya’s lead narrowed considerably. When divisions above 80 percent were excluded, Tchiroma moved ahead. At a 70-percent threshold, the difference became even more pronounced in Tchiroma’s favour.
Again, this is not proof that every high-turnout division falsified votes. It is something more uncomfortable: The official national result appears unusually dependent on a relatively small group of divisions reporting exceptionally high participation.
In a functioning democracy, such a finding would trigger scrutiny, verification and transparent investigation. In Cameroon, we were instead given a declaration and expected to move on. We should not. The North-West and South-West cannot simply be statistical footnotes.
There is another reason why the 2025 result deserves extraordinary scrutiny: the conditions under which voting supposedly took place in Cameroon’s conflict-affected English-speaking regions.
For nearly a decade, the North-West and South-West have experienced armed conflict, displacement, insecurity, destroyed infrastructure and severe restrictions on ordinary civic life.
Yet the official electoral figures attribute substantial participation and decisive support for Biya in some of these areas.
That should automatically be labelled impossible. People can and did vote in conflict-affected communities, but the turnout was never massive, never!
But extraordinary claims require extraordinary verification. Where populations have been displaced and where insecurity has made ordinary movement difficult, the question is not merely how many votes were counted?
Where did those voters come from? Where were the polling stations? How many polling officials were present? How many voters actually signed the registers? How many polling-station results are independently available? Were the figures reconciled from the polling station upward?
These are basic questions of electoral credibility.
They are particularly important when the disputed figures are capable of determining who becomes president.
The aftermath made the legitimacy problem worse
If the election had produced an unquestioned result, Cameroon would today be discussing the country’s future under a newly renewed Biya presidency.
Instead, the country entered a period of post-election tension.
Tchiroma rejected the official outcome and claimed victory. Protests followed in several cities. Human Rights Watch reported that security forces used tear gas, water cannons and, in some cases, live ammunition against protesters. Reuters likewise reported that the disputed result triggered protests and clashes amid allegations of electoral irregularities.
This is where the government needs to understand the difference between legal authority and political legitimacy.
A government can possess the machinery of the state and still lack the confidence of a substantial part of the population.
It can command soldiers without commanding consent.
It can control institutions without controlling the national imagination.
It can win a legal battle and still lose the legitimacy battle.
And Cameroon cannot afford another seven years governed by that contradiction.
Biya’s greatest responsibility now is not to remain in power
Paul Biya has been president since 1982.
He has now been declared the winner of an eighth presidential term at the age of 92.
That fact should not be reduced to an argument about age. Age alone does not disqualify anyone from public office.
The deeper issue is what four decades of uninterrupted rule have done to political institutions.
A healthy democracy should be capable of producing leaders beyond one individual.
A healthy political system should not make the departure of one president appear synonymous with the collapse of the state.
A healthy republic should not require its citizens to choose repeatedly between the same ruler and instability.
After 44 years, Biya should understand that the most consequential political act of his presidency may now be knowing when to leave.
Stepping down is not surrender
There will be those who argue that asking Biya to step down amounts to disrespecting the Constitution.
That argument is too simplistic.
The Constitution is not an instrument for converting contested political power into permanent personal entitlement. Constitutionalism is ultimately about limiting power, protecting citizens and ensuring that government rests on lawful and legitimate authority.
The credibility of the 2025 election is seriously contested, and the responsible response is not to hide behind institutional formalities.
It is to confront the dispute.
That could mean an independent and transparent audit of electoral records. It could mean publication of polling-station-level results and electoral registers. It could mean credible investigation of disputed turnout figures. It could mean an inclusive political dialogue on the future of the country.
And if the evidence demonstrates that the announced result cannot be sustained, Biya should have the courage to relinquish power and allow a genuinely credible political transition.
That would not make him weak.
It would be statesmanship.
Cameroon needs an exit from the politics of permanent incumbency
The greatest danger is not that Cameroon changes its president.
The greatest danger is that Cameroon becomes convinced that presidents can never be changed through peaceful democratic means.
That belief is poisonous.
Once citizens conclude that elections cannot change governments, they eventually stop investing in elections. When institutional channels close, political frustration searches for alternative channels. When peaceful dissent is suppressed, anger does not disappear; it accumulates.
Cameroon has already seen enough of what happens when political grievances are allowed to deepen into conflict.
We do not need another cycle.
We need an exit.
And that exit should begin with the recognition that the presidency is not the personal property of Paul Biya, the CPDM or any political establishment. It belongs to the Cameroonian people.
The world should not confuse order with legitimacy
There is also a responsibility beyond Cameroon.
The international community must stop treating electoral declarations as sufficient evidence of democratic legitimacy.
International actors have often been tempted to prioritise stability over democracy. But there is a difference between a country being quiet and a country being stable.
A population can be silent because it is content.
It can also be silent because it is afraid.
Those are not the same thing.
Cameroon needs international partners willing to ask difficult questions about the credibility of the 2025 election rather than simply congratulating the declared winner and moving on.
The objective should not be to install one particular opposition politician in power.
It should be to ensure that Cameroonians—not electoral institutions captured by political interests—determine who governs them.
That distinction is crucial.
Biya’s final legacy is now in his hands
President Biya has governed Cameroon for more than four decades.
He can therefore leave office as the man who held onto power until the very end, presiding over another contested election and another period of repression.
Or he can leave as the leader who finally recognised that a country is greater than its president.
The choice is his.
But Cameroon cannot indefinitely survive on disputed mandates, institutional capture, political exclusion and the mathematics of electoral percentages.
The 2025 election has exposed something far more fundamental than a disagreement over numbers.
It has exposed a crisis of trust.
And trust cannot be restored by another presidential speech, another official communiqué or another declaration from another institution.
It requires accountability.
It requires transparency.
It requires institutional reform.
And above all, it requires political courage.
Paul Biya should step down.
Not because an opposition candidate claims to have won.
Not simply because Biya is 92.
Not merely because he has been president since 1982.
He should step down because Cameroon cannot build a credible democratic future on an election whose result remains deeply contested and whose official figures raise serious questions that have not been adequately answered.
If Biya truly believes that the people chose him, then he should welcome the scrutiny necessary to establish that choice beyond reasonable doubt.
If the numbers survive independent verification, the country should accept them.
If they do not, he should accept the consequence.
After 44 years in power, the greatest service Paul Biya can render Cameroon may be to prove that, finally, the republic is bigger than the man who has ruled it for most of its modern history.
Cameroon does not need another victory manufactured on paper.
It needs a government whose authority is believed by the people it governs.
And that begins with letting the people have the final word.
Tekuh Felix is a Cameroonian banker, political activist, and advocate for democratic reform. Born on 20 October 1981 in Ndoungue, Littoral Region, he became actively involved in the Anglophone crisis in 2016. In 2017, he co-founded Anglophone Youth for Change, promoting peaceful protest and constitutional reform. He later joined the Cameroon People’s Party (CPP) and became active in Stand Up for Cameroon, advocating good governance, social justice, and institutional reform. His activism led to repeated arrests, detention, and torture. He relocated to the United Kingdom in 2024 and continues his political activism while seeking protection from persecution in Cameroon.
