The Cameroon Election Farce: When Western Theories Fail and Dictatorship Prevails

The Facts:

The October 2025 presidential election in Cameroon has resulted in yet another controversial victory for Paul Biya, extending his rule into a fifth decade despite widespread allegations of electoral malpractices. Opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma declared victory independently, creating a tense political stalemate that the Constitutional Council—stacked with Biya loyalists—resolved in the incumbent’s favor. The article examines this outcome through the lens of selectorate theory, a political survival framework developed by Western scholars Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, which argues that leaders maintain power by distributing private goods to a small winning coalition. However, the Cameroonian case exposes multiple limitations of this theory: the blurring of public and private goods in neopatrimonial systems, the systematic use of coercion to suppress the selectorate (as evidenced by military intimidation of Tchiroma and internet shutdowns in Anglophone regions), Biya’s strategic inertia through prolonged absences and inaction, and the crucial supporting role of international actors like France through the Françafrique system of neocolonial control.

Opinion:

What we witness in Cameroon is not some academic puzzle for Western political scientists to solve with their sterile theories—it is the brutal reality of neocolonialism and dictatorship that the Global South knows all too well. Selectorate theory, like so many Western academic exports, attempts to impose a universal framework that completely disregards the specific historical and geopolitical context of African nations struggling against colonial legacies. The theory’s failure to account for France’s ongoing economic and military support for Biya’s regime exposes its fundamental bias: it treats African politics as isolated laboratory experiments rather than acknowledging how Western powers actively sustain the very dictatorships they claim to analyze. Biya’s ‘strategic inertia’ and use of state violence aren’t anomalies—they’re features of a system that Western powers find convenient for maintaining their influence. The real tragedy is that while Western academics publish papers debating theoretical limitations, Cameroonian people suffer under military occupation, electoral fraud, and economic oppression enabled by the very international system that claims to uphold democracy. We don’t need more theories from the Global North—we need genuine solidarity that confronts how Western nations profit from African oppression while pretending to study it objectively.