Will Issa Tchiroma Bakary Take The Presidential Oath? Cameroon One Country Two Presidents.

YAOUNDÉ, CAMEROON: Cameroon is currently paralyzed by an unprecedented constitutional crisis, teetering on a knife-edge of dual legitimacy. Two men now claim the presidency, each asserting the mandate of the Republic and accusing the other of violating the very charter they both invoke. This is more than a policy dispute; it is a profound schism in the foundational claim to state power.

President Paul Biya, the octogenarian who has held the nation in his grip for four decades, is set to be sworn in for the eighth time. In a now-familiar tableau, he will take the oath before a carefully curated audience, the same Parliament Speaker, the same subservient courts, and the established choreography of loyalty that has long been passed off as legality. For Biya's camp, this ceremony is the unwavering continuation of his forty-two-year rule.

Yet, a starkly rival claim has emerged. Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the self-declared victor of the recent October election, is preparing to take the identical constitutional oath before a rally of his supporters in Garoua. His argument is a direct challenge to the establishment: he contends he secured the majority of votes, and the institutions that invalidated his victory, such as the Constitutional Council are themselves illegitimate, having been captured by the ruling regime.

The Power of the People: Article 2 Invoked

Tchiroma’s gambit directly confronts not only the procedural framework of Article 7 (governing the presidential oath) but, crucially, the sovereign principle of Article 2 of the Constitution. Article 2 fundamentally states that “National sovereignty shall belong to the Cameroonian people.”

By choosing to swear himself in before the people, Tchiroma is leveraging Article 2 to argue that his authority flows directly from popular will, superseding a compromised legal process. This forces a high-stakes confrontation between the established legality (Biya’s procedural advantage under the current order) and Tchiroma’s claim to legitimacy (the popular mandate).

The Constitutional Dead End

The Cameroonian Constitution, particularly since the 2008 amendment that abolished presidential term limits, has acted less as a framework for arbitration and more as a weapon of containment for the ruling party. Article 7, which dictates the oath procedure, was drafted under the presumption that the regime would forever control the official ceremonies.

Tchiroma's parallel inauguration creates an insoluble dilemma: the law is blind to the concept of two simultaneous presidents, offering no mechanism whatsoever to adjudicate rival oaths. From a strictly legalistic standpoint, Tchiroma’s action is void.

However, political science dictates that in moments like this, legal theory yields to political reality. The real impact of Tchiroma's oath hinges entirely on its ability to generate consequences: military defections, international recognition, or mass disruption of the normal machinery of governance. Without such tangible shifts, it remains a purely symbolic act.

But in a tightly controlled, postcolonial state where the law has historically been a language of power rather than its restraint, symbols are often the fuse. By invoking the Constitution especially the core tenet of popular sovereignty in Article 2 against the regime, Tchiroma is gambling that he can force an immediate choice between the power of the institutions and the will of the people. The nation now watches to see which reality will prevail.

Once Tchiroma takes an oath it will trigger a constitutional standoff invoking two critical variables that traditionally dictate the outcome of African power contests: the military’s loyalty and the international community’s verdict. The stability of the dual-legitimacy crisis rests precariously on these two forces.

The Military Variable: A Non-Monolithic Force

In any African challenge to legitimacy, the military serves as the ultimate hinge. Cameroon’s armed forces, however, are far from a unified bloc.

• The Elite Guard: The highly trained Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), equipped by Western partners including the United States and France, remains directly accountable to the presidency and largely loyal to Paul Biya. This elite tier acts as Biya’s institutional shield.

• The Fraying Edges: Beneath this top layer, loyalty is increasingly frayed. The regular army is a heterogeneous entity: underpaid, regionally fragmented, and significantly exhausted from years of deployment against separatist factions in the Anglophone regions. This fatigue has translated into rising ambivalence toward the regime.

Issa Tchiroma Bakary’s northern origins grant him a natural base of empathy among officers from that region. Crucially, military success often hinges not on ideological alignment but on the army’s perception of the incumbent as unsustainable. If Biya's authority erodes further, passive neutrality could become active defection.

The risk of outright confrontation, however, is immense. Cameroon’s complex ethnic geography increases the likelihood of a civil war over a clean political transition. A northern mutiny could quickly merge with the existing Anglophone conflict, creating a devastating, ungovernable mosaic of regional rebellions. For this reason, the opposition's highest short-term hope is for passive neutrality soldiers refusing to enforce curfews or fire on demonstrators. Even this hesitation would accelerate the drainage of Biya’s authority.

The International Equation: Caution and Complicity

The precedent animating Tchiroma’s camp is the 2010 Côte d’Ivoire crisis, where Alassane Ouattara’s parallel presidency was eventually validated by decisive French intervention. Yet, the parallels are weak: Ouattara had United Nations backing, control of a northern armed faction, and a French President actively working for the removal of Laurent Gbagbo.

Tchiroma possesses none of these advantages.

France's Calculus: Paris regards Biya as a reliable fixture, predictable, commercially convenient, and a stable African bread basket. There is no appetite in the Élysée for an intervention that could risk instability or install a potentially nationalistic, untested figure. The young generation of Cameroonians views this neutrality as complicity, reading France’s continued support for the aging leader as an attachment to a fading colonial playbook.

The African Union (AU): The AU’s reaction has been overtly cautious. Its principle of “non-interference” habitually translates into a defense of incumbents, not insurgents. Without sustained, heavy external pressure which is not materializing, Tchiroma’s oath has minimal chance of receiving international recognition.

The opposition’s strategy is therefore pivoted toward erosion: a slow, grinding process of delegitimization fuelled by administrative paralysis and international fatigue with Biya, rather than outright external endorsement.

The Domestic Front: From Gesture to Movement

Once Tchiroma executes the “People’s Oath” inside Cameroon, the domestic picture could become significantly more fluid. If broadcast widely via social media, the gesture could harden into a movement. Local figures mayors, civil union leaders, and student groups, could begin symbolically aligning themselves with the "legitimate president."

This is a strategy of corrosion, not control. Its immediate effect is to introduce paralyzing uncertainty into the bureaucracy: civil servants hesitate to execute decrees, and governors adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Rumours of ministers discreetly engaging Tchiroma's emissaries underscore the emerging cracks within the establishment.

Biya’s reaction remains an exercise in repression by routine: arrests, curfews, and internet blackouts. This is the tired reflex of a regime that mistakes silence for stability. Yet, the machinery of coercion is slower, and public compliance thinner, than in decades past.

Scenarios Ahead: The Meaning of an Oath

Analysts project three major scenarios:

Containment: Tchiroma’s movement loses momentum due to lack of military backing and international recognition, eventually fading into a moral victory—the path Biya is a specialist in navigating.

Dual Power: The crisis hardens into a de facto split between two competing centres of authority: the legal (Biya) and the popular (Tchiroma). The resulting bureaucratic paralysis competing chains of command and appointments is inherently unstable and precedes either an enforced settlement or state collapse.

Escalation: A single, violent clash between soldiers and protesters transforms the symbolic defiance into armed resistance, potentially using the restive Anglophone regions as tinder. This scenario, ironically, is the only one likely to force foreign actors, particularly France and the U.N., off the sidelines.

Tchiroma’s oath redefines the language of opposition by striking at the regime’s rituals the heartbeats of authoritarian rule. By duplicating the ceremony outside state control, he shifts from a candidate challenging a result to a president denying the regime's authority to exist. This profound shift restores the idea that sovereignty belongs to the people, not the bureaucracy.

For now, the two oaths one before Parliament, one before the people cast a long shadow over Cameroon. The nation's future hinges on whether Tchiroma can translate moral legitimacy into functional authority through patience and discipline, or if his "ghost" presidency will be absorbed by the same fatigue that has quashed African rebellions before. The spell of Biya’s inevitability is broken, and Cameroon exists in the liminal space between obedience and awakening.

The core of the current crisis is a profound struggle over narrative control, weaponizing the most fundamental ritual of the state: the oath.

The Meaning of an Oath: Striking the Illusion

In authoritarian systems, rituals from controlled elections to scripted inaugurations are the regime’s heartbeat, functioning not as exercises in democracy but as hypnotic demonstrations of continuity and inevitability.

Issa Tchiroma’s decision to perform an identical constitutional oath outside the state's controlled framework will constitute a direct and surgical strike at this illusion. The act, whether or not it confers immediate power, instantly redefines the language of opposition. Tchiroma is no longer merely a candidate contesting a rigged result; he is a president denying the regime's authority to exist.

This subtle but seismic shift fundamentally changes the public's imagination of power. It pulls the long-dormant concept of popular sovereignty back from the legal archives, declaring that authority belongs to the people, not the bureaucratic machinery that administers them.

The End of France?

The constitutional crisis unfolding in Cameroon represents more than a threat to regional stability; it poses an existential challenge to the French economic and strategic playbook in Central Africa. This dual-legitimacy showdown forces the Élysée to look in the mirror and confront the exhaustion of its old methods, particularly its preference for predictable autocracy.

The stakes for France are brutally simple: the crisis directly jeopardizes its unfettered access to Cameroon’s vital resources, a flow essential for the survival of the French economy. By clinging to the aging Paul Biya, Paris buys short-term continuity for its military bases and commodity streams, but simultaneously anchors itself to a fading, decaying political order.

This calculus is widely resented on the ground. The young, globally connected generation of Cameroonians views Paris’s deliberate neutrality not as statesmanship, but as complicity with a regime whose time has passed. The French dilemma is now agonizingly sharp: does it continue to shelter a predictable, aged partner, or does it risk the instability that comes with acknowledging the nationalistic turbulence of democratic reform?

For now, the strategic assessment favours the known decay of Biya over the untested, nationalist promise of opposition leader Tchiroma.

However, as Biya’s legitimacy drains away, this position of neutrality becomes increasingly untenable. French policymakers can clearly see the path taken by the three Sahel states—Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso—which recently ejected French military forces and influence. Paris is absolutely determined that this precedent will not be repeated in resource-rich Cameroon.

Yet, the clock is ticking. Every former colonial power eventually faces the same reckoning: the moment when local actors stop seeking external endorsement for their power and begin declaring independence of narrative. For France, tethered to a system that is rapidly losing the popular will, that moment of strategic humiliation is fast approaching. The choice is no longer between supporting Biya or not, but between managing a transition on its own terms or being swept away by a wave of popular, anti-French reform.

A Precarious Balance: The Duel for Belief

Cameroon now exists in the shadow of its two competing oaths: one performed before the loyalist Parliament, the other before the people. Both claim the mantle of the Constitution, and neither can now erase the other.

The country’s future will be decided not by who holds the legal text, but by who commands belief. Tchiroma’s path is narrow: if he can translate his moral legitimacy into functional authority through discipline and broad-based unity, his “ghost” presidency could evolve into a true parallel state. If he fails, the movement will be absorbed by the familiar fatigue that has claimed so many African challenges before it.

Yet, a fundamental precedent has been set: the spell of inevitability around Biya’s rule is irrevocably broken. The regime may still govern, but it no longer reigns unchallenged. Cameroon has entered the liminal space between obedience and awakening, a dangerous realm where words, once safely scripted, have begun to mean too much.

Cameroon’s Dual-Oath Crisis Will Mark the End of an Era

The confrontation now unfolding in Cameroon has moved beyond politics. It is no longer a contest between two men, but between two visions of sovereignty one born of colonial inheritance, the other of self-determination. The dual-oath crisis has become a reckoning with the ghosts of subjugation that still haunt the postcolonial state.

Whether the outcome is containment, collapse, or conflict, a Issa Tchiroma’s rival inauguration will open a permanent fault line through the foundations of the republic. By replicating the state’s ultimate ritual of authority, the presidential oath and relocating it to the public square and social meda, he would have exposed the central fiction of Paul Biya’s four-decade rule: that longevity equals legitimacy. The illusion of inevitability has shattered. The era of unchallenged continuity is over.

Cameroon’s question is no longer if the Biya order will fall, but how it will fall and what will emerge in its place. The struggle between captured institutions and an awakening populace has turned existential. Tchiroma’s gesture is not just symbolic defiance; it is a declaration of war on the politics of permanence. The state now exists in open contradiction with itself a house divided whose centre can no longer hold.

Across Africa, nations are confronting their own versions of this reckoning. In the Sahel, military and civic movements alike have rejected the architecture of neocolonial dependence. Cameroon stands at the same threshold. Its future depends on whether its people seize this moment as one of liberation or retreat into the familiar paralysis of fear.

Failure would not merely extend Biya’s tenure; it would condemn another generation to political stagnation and economic servitude. The machinery of dependency external interests enriched by domestic exhaustion would grind on, draining the promise of a country where most citizens are young, restless, and poor.

Every Cameroonian student, farmer, civil servant, entrepreneur who believes in real independence must now decide whether to defend the status quo or to claim the sovereignty Article 2 of their Constitution guarantees them. The state’s fate will not be determined in courtrooms or summits but in the collective resolve of its citizens.

The time for passive complicity is over. Cameroon has entered the decisive chapter of its modern history a confrontation not just with a regime, but with the idea that freedom can coexist with submission. This is the battlefield on which the nation’s true independence will be either secured or surrendered.