YAOUNDE {AFP} Cameroonian President Paul Biya will on Tuesday mark 30
years at the helm, a guarantor of stability in a restive region to some
and one of Africa's worst dictators to others.
At 79, Biya
joins the select club of heads of state who have ruled for at least
three decades, just behind Equatorial Guinea's Teodoro Obiang, Angola's
Jose Eduardo Dos Santos and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Biya
was reelected with close to 80 percent of the vote last year and could
theoretically stand again in 2018 since parliament scrapped term limits
in 2008.
"Paul Biya, our president, the father of the
nation," goes a song that extols the west African state's "evergreen"
ruler and has been played in the run-up to Tuesday's anniversary.
Biya is only the second president of the country, since independence from France in 1960 after Ahmadou Ahidjo.
In
a country with huge ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity which
counts no fewer than 10 active rebellions, Biya is seen by some as a
unifying figure. Most of Cameroon has a French-speaking colonial legacy,
but it also has a smaller English-speaking part.
The
opposition sees nothing in Biya but a ruthless dictator sitting atop one
of the continent's most corrupt regimes and leaving most of the
population of the 20 million population to wallow in poverty.
"We
are one of a handful of countries in the entire world to have had the
same dictator for 30 years," said Joshua Osih, vice president of the
Social Democratic Front, Cameroon's main opposition party.
"For
30 years, we have been hoping for a better Biya and a better Cameroon
but for 30 years now, the country has been sinking," he told AFP.
Biya formed the Cameroonian People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) in 1985 and today its cronies hold a monopoly of key posts.
Biya
is a "master in the art of maintaining the status quo," wrote French
journalist Fanny Pigeaud in her book "The Cameroon of Paul Biya."
But
the ruling party denies accusations of despotism against Biya and
argues that the president has protected basic freedoms and allowed
political pluralism to flourish.
"The country is still
under construction and Biya will go down in history as the president of
freedom of expression and multipartyism," CPDM official Herve Emmanuel
Nkom said.
He argued that Cameroon's stagnant economic
performance was caused by the global downturn rather than a result of
inadequate government policies or graft.
A year before
Biya rose to the top job, Cameroon's growth rate stood at a heady 13
percent while the economy expanded by only 3.8 percent last year.
A
third of Cameroonians still have no access to drinking water and
electricity. Some economists say the jobless rate is around 30 percent.
"The country has been unable to harness a potential that is well recognised," Cameroonian analyst Mathias Nguini Owona said.
The Transparency International corruption watchdog twice ranked Cameroon as the world's most corrupt country.
Jean
de Dieu Momo, a lawyer and opposition candidate in the 2011
presidential election, argued that Biya had kept none of the democratic
promises made 30 years ago.
"His long reign has been marked by egregious and recurring human rights violations," he said.
The
opposition politician cited alleged extra-judicial executions in the
wake of a failed 1984 coup and a wave of murders and arrests following
"food riots" in 2008.
Repression of the riots, which broke
in protest at rising prices as well as Biya's moves to cling to power,
left 40 people dead, according to an official tally.
Rights group put the toll at 139 after some of the worst violence witnessed under Biya's rule.
Biya,
a Christian who studied in France, has also been criticised as an
absentee ruler, who is rarely seen in public and discloses little about
his political agenda.
Unlike his wife Chantal, whose
extravagant leonine hairstyles have achieved cult status on the
Internet, Paul Biya -- nicknamed "the Sphinx" -- keeps a low profile and
spends much of his time abroad, notably in Switzerland where two of his
sons attend school.
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