Following the death of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Paul Biya constitutes the longest ruling non-royal head of state. He has twice changed the term limit laws to allow him to stay in power since he first took office on November 6, 1982, since the surprise resignation of then-Prime Minister Ahmadou Ahidjo.
Biya was educated by Catholic missionaries in a seminary near to his village in southern Cameroon from a young age, and it was their hope that he would become a priest. Instead, Biya chose to study law and political science at the University of Paris in France and returned to Cameroon after graduation to work in the civil service sector.
Biya didn’t have any children with his first wife, Jeanne-Irène Biya, but she adopted his child from another relationship, Franck Biya. Jeanne-Irène died in July 1992, and Paul went on to marry Chantal Biya on April 23, 1994. The couple have three children together, and Chantal is 38 years Paul’s junior.
Chantal Biya is well-loved around Cameroon, known for her magnificent mane of orange hair, her outgoing nature, and her charity work around the country. However, the two have also become known for their lavish lifestyle, taking extravagant vacations and spending their enormous fortune.
Paul Biya’s personal fortune is somewhere in the range of $200 million, making him the richest man in Cameroon. His wealth is mostly based in Europe, where he owns several mansions, and the money has not increased his popularity in Cameroon, where 48% of the population live below the poverty line.
Each of Biya’s presidential victories have had some sort of controversy attached from the very beginning – when he first became president in 1982, it was within the context of a single party system, and he didn’t even accept multi-party politics until the early 1990s. Since then, the 1997 election was boycotted by main opposition parties, the 2004 election was won among allegations of widespread fraud, and Biya was only even able to run in the 2011 election due to a constitutional amendment that allowed him a third term.
After the country’s national football team, the Indomitable Lions, reached the quarter finals of the 1990 World Cup, Biya adopted the nickname of the “lion man” of Cameroon. He even had a lion and lioness named after him and Chantal at the Myog Beti Zoo in Yaounde, though Paul’s lion died in 2007.
Two coup attempts in 1983 and 1984 attempted to dislodge Biya from the presidency, but were unsuccessful. Former president Ahidjo was fingered as the culprit and was sentenced to death in absentia by a military tribunal — but as he was already in exile since 1982, the sentence was never carried out. Ahidjo eventually died in Senegal and was not allowed to have his body returned to Cameroon for burial.
Biya has become notorious for his lengthy absences, carefully constructed to be under 40 days so as not to accidentally allow the presidency to be declared vacant. He took particular flack for a vacation in France in 2011 where it was alleged that he was spending $40,000 a day on 43 hotel rooms, but this is not unusual for the Cameroonian president. Oftentimes, when Biya travels abroad to Europe for global summits, he won’t return for weeks at a time without ever passing on word to his country where he has run off to.
Though Cameroon claims to be a democracy, Biya’s regime maintains sweeping executive and legislative powers, as well as considerable control over the judiciary. Courts can only review a law’s constitutionality at his request, and little is done in the National Assembly besides approving Biya’s own policies.
