*Why neoliberalism is deepening a nation’s crisis

* Working masses must step forward to organise

* No to a military succession to Biya

By Abdullahi Bilal

For more than four decades, Paul Biya has ruled Cameroon with near total control. In the October 12, 2025, presidential election, the 92-year-old incumbent secured another seven-year term, marking his eighth term in power. The Constitutional Council declared Biya the winner with 53.66 percent of the vote, while his main challenger, Issa Tchiroma Bakary, claimed fraud and rejected the result.

His re-election extends a political system rooted in neoliberal restructuring, neo-colonial dependency, and entrenched elite rule — a system that has hollowed out public institutions, deepened social inequality, and undermined popular power. Even during the re-election campaign, Biya’s image was used in place of his physical appearance, a situation that underscored how few elites have captured the state and manoeuvred it for their own gains. However, in this decisive moment, there is a need for a people-centred movement to build a working-class political alternative, armed with a socialist programme rooted in democracy, national sovereignty, and working-class strength.

From State-Led Development to Market Fundamentalism

Cameroon’s post-independence economic model was never purely capitalist. Under President Ahmadou Ahidjo (1960–1982), the state controlled major sectors, regulated investment, and maintained parastatals to channel development. But from the late 1980s, a severe collapse in commodity prices, especially in oil and cocoa, triggered a financial crisis. In response, the government turned to the IMF and World Bank.

By the early 1990s, structural-adjustment programs forced sweeping reforms: drastic cuts in public spending, privatisation of state enterprises, and economic liberalisation. These changes weakened the state precisely where ordinary people needed it most. Public services deteriorated, social infrastructure crumbled, and many strategic sectors were handed over to private actors, including foreign firms. The neoliberal promise of “trickle-down” growth failed: instead, dependency deepened, the elite captured national resources, and popular institutions were hollowed out.

France’s Neo-Colonial Grip

At the heart of Cameroon’s crisis is its continued subordination to French economic influence. The country remains part of the Central African CFA franc zone — a system that severely restricts its monetary autonomy. A significant portion of foreign-exchange reserves must be held in an account controlled by the French Treasury, limiting Cameroon’s capacity to use monetary policy in favour of national development.

Moreover, French corporations dominate strategic sectors such as TotalEnergies and Perenco in oil extraction; Bolloré in transport, logistics, and infrastructure; European and Asian firms in forestry. These concessions are often negotiated under opaque terms by the Biya regime, and while profits are repatriated, local communities receive little in return.

The result is not just economic exploitation but a political architecture built to preserve foreign interests. Biya’s regime guarantees favorable concessions, and in exchange, elites aligned with him benefit from rent extraction. Meanwhile, the state remains unable to channel resource revenues into broad-based social development.

Biya’s Presidency: Power, Patronage, and Longevity

Paul Biya first assumed the presidency on 6 November 1982, succeeding Ahmadou Ahidjo. Over the years, he has methodically consolidated power through patronage, repression, and constitutional manipulation.

In 2008, Biya pushed through a constitutional amendment that abolished presidential term limits. This move effectively paved the way for indefinite rule.

In the 2025 election, despite his advanced age and limited public campaigning, Biya again leveraged the tools of the regime, control over state institutions, limited media freedom, and a loyal ruling party (the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM), to outmanoeuvre a fragmented opposition.

His victory speech was delivered in a heavily militarized parliament; critics described the inauguration as a “constitutional coup.”

In other words, Biya’s decades-long rule is not a quirk of history — it is the product of a well-honed authoritarian neoliberal machine that protects elite privileges and resists genuine democratic transformation.

It follows, therefore, that another seven-year rule, if he manages to be able to complete it, will only mean more social decay, unprecedented inequality and further youth marginalisation.

Despite the country’s resource wealth — oil, timber, agriculture — the lived reality for most Cameroonians is hardship. Public schools lack teachers and materials; hospitals are chronically underfunded; rural infrastructure remains poor; and roads are in disrepair. The neoliberal turn hollowed out the state’s capacity to provide, while extraction enriched a few elite.

Youth unemployment is one of the most urgent dimensions of this crisis. Official ILO-modeled figures for ages 15–24 stand at around 6 percent, but this is misleading. The vast majority of employed youth are engaged in informal labour — small trading, casual transport, or other precarious work — without basic protections or prospects for advancement. According to Cameroonian statistics, over 90 percent of youth work in the informal economy, and unemployment among young adults (ages 15–35) is as high as 39 percent.

This mismatch between formal opportunity and a growing, youthful population fosters disillusionment, radicalisation that could fuel the needed urgency to organise to end the Biya regime. But it is clear that from the past 42 years that the other wings of the Camerounian ruling class and the so call Bourgeoisie opposition to Biya have themselves in the past played one role or the other to entrench the rule of Biya, they have not in anyway been consistent and are incapable to provide the needed revolutionary leadership for the working masses, who have repeatedly again and again demonstrated their willingness to go into action against the regime.

Labour Resistance Under Repression

Workers in Cameroon have not passively accepted this neoliberal order. Despite legal and institutional barriers, trade unions continue to organise and strike.

Public-sector workers — teachers, civil servants, health workers — have repeatedly mobilized to demand unpaid wages, better contracts, and respect for labour rights. Transport unions and informal workers’ associations have also protested against arbitrary taxation and declining conditions. But these actions are met with systemic repression: bureaucratic obstacles to union registration, heavy-handed policing, limits on strikes, and legal harassment.

These struggles, though fragmented, carry the seed of a stronger working-class force, one capable of challenging elite dominance and building a genuinely democratic socialist alternative.

The Anglophone Conflict: A Crisis of Exclusion

Cameroon’s English-speaking regions (the Northwest and Southwest) remain mired in a brutal conflict rooted not only in political grievances but also in deep economic marginalisation. What began as peaceful protests in 2016, by lawyers, teachers, and civil society, escalated into violent confrontation after the state responded with force.

Anglophone communities feel systematically excluded from resource-sharing, infrastructure investment, and meaningful political power. The conflict has disrupted education, displaced hundreds of thousands, and deepened regional trauma. The Biya regime’s militarized response has only amplified a sense of state as predator, not protector.

The 2025 Election: A New Chapter or More of the Same?

The October 12, 2025, election was widely criticised for its lack of credibility. While Biya secured 53.66 percent of the vote, opposition leader Issa Tchiroma Bakary rejected the results, alleging widespread fraud.  Parts of the country erupted in protest, notably in Douala, Garoua, and Maroua, with reports of deaths, roadblocks, and heavy securitisation.

Tchiroma’s call for a three-day “ghost town” lockdown was largely observed in major cities as businesses shuttered, transport halted, and disillusionment surged.  Observers also noted that voters’ turnout, according to official records, was 57.76 percent, highlighting deep divisions in public legitimacy.

Shortly after being declared the winner, Biya was sworn in — in a ceremony described by critics as heavily militarised, with parliament largely emptied. Many saw it as the consolidation of power, not the promise of renewal.

A Socialist Vision for Renewal

In this fraught historical moment, Cameroon’s left workers, youth, peasant associations, and marginalised communities must organise not just to resist, but to present a compelling alternative. A socialist transformation is not only possible; it is essential.

1. Cameroonians must democratically reclaim financial and economic sovereignty by breaking from imperialist monetary dependence and nationalising the commanding sector of the economy, placing it under public and worker management and control.
2. Redirect national wealth toward social needs through universal education, healthcare, housing, productive infrastructure, and progressive redistribution, including agrarian reforms that empower small farmers.
3. Build genuine popular power rooted in organised workers, youth, women, and peasant movements capable of challenging elite domination and enforcing democratic accountability.

Paul Biya’s eighth term is not just a personal triumph — it is a reaffirmation of a deeply unjust, extractive system. But the scale of opposition, especially among youth and in historically marginalised regions, signals a growing rupture.

This election could mark the beginning of a real political challenge — not merely to Biya’s rule, but to the neoliberal order that underlies it. To be 92-year-old and claim to have won another seven years term in power is either preparing the ground for a palace coup when he surely passes on, or lay the ground for a crisis of succession among a tiny layers of cronies, who will battle themselves to the death to assume power after his demise, that this is likely to happen is only a question of sooner or later. The Movement for a Socialist Alternative calls on the working masses to prepare to organise, seek to assume power in its own name and for the interest of the entire working Camerounian masses. It must therefore prepare beforehand, if it proves incapable before then, to organise the necessary action to displace the Biya regime and replace it with a Workers’ led Socialist Cameroun. No trust whatsoever must be placed in any wing of the military hierarchy, which has, over the years, been used as a tool to prop up the misrule and oppression of the Biya regime. Rather, an appeal must be made to the rank and file of the military to join directly with the working masses for a struggle against oppression and imperialism.   

Cameroonians deserve a future where political power is not a lifetime appointment, under a Workers’ and peasants-led government, all public offices will be elected and subject to recall, and placed under the wages of an average skill worker. Public wealth and resources would cease to be exclusively preserved to tend to the corrupt practices of the Biya regime and its cronies, private profiteers, and French imperialism. Rather, it is employed to develop the means of production, end the rule of capital and domination of Imperialism over it, and set it up to meet the needs of the working masses.

While also supporting the democratic right of self-determination as currently raised in Southern Cameroun, and will support the conduct of a referendum to truly determine the swell of ground support for it. Marxists will still insist on the necessity for a united action of the working masses, as the crisis and problem in Cameroon has not just one-man rule by Biya, but in reality, a crisis brought about by Capitalism and imperialism, which is why Marxists call on the working masses to organise themselves independently. In this sense, trade unions must not limit their role to one of struggle or strike actions to improve working conditions, but come forward to pose the question of power and provide revolutionary leadership for the entire Cameroonian working class on the manifesto and programme of a Socialist Alternative.

Of course, the question of international solidarity with workers in neighbouring Nigeria and countries in the Sahel region, both in west and east Africa, will be key in going forward, to collectively draw experience and lessons from each other’s struggle, posing the Agenda of United struggle against Imperialism and the formation of a nucleus state for a Socialist African federation.