THE TEMPTATION OF THE WORST.

There is an air of coup d’Etat hanging over Cameroon.

Faced with the awakening of the Cameroonian people, who are overwhelmed by poverty and a lack of prospects – which everyone is now experiencing – the CPDM regime is in dire straits on the eve of the 2025 presidential election. Indeed, it is now clear that the CPDM is afraid of losing power. It knows that it cannot win a transparent and free election in our country. Moreover, it is in a deadlock, unable, as things stand, to present either the outgoing President of the Republic or any other candidate for the upcoming presidential election. According to one of its members, a municipal councillor for the municipality of Monatélé in the division of Lékié, be cause the CPDM failed to hold its ordinary congress on 16 September 2016, the terms of office of its national president and all the CPDM’s governing bodies have since expired. Consequently, the person who is generally presented as the natural candidate of the CPDM cannot legally be that party’s candidate in the upcoming presidential election, according to their party’s statutes. Faced with this situation, the CPDM is stepping up its manoeuvres and provocations aimed at sowing discord in order to prevent the holding of peaceful presidential elections in our country.

At a press conference I gave on 10 May 2024 in Yaoundé, I already expressed my deep concern about the threats of an electoral coup and a military coup being plotted by the CPDM regime. With regard to the electoral coup, the best illustration of its active preparation is the arrogant refusal by the coalition composed of ELECAM, the Constitutional Council and the judicial authorities to publish the national electoral roll, in accordance with Article 80 of the Electoral Code. As for the threat of amilitary coup, which is also not a figment of the imagination, I must recall that on 3 September 2023, during a debate on the Équinoxe television channel, a CPDM member, the official representative of that party, declared: « If the CRM wins the presidential election in 2025, the army may stage a coup against KAMTO (…) ». Shortly after this serious statement, another official spokesperson for the CPDM posted on his Facebook account: ‘The UPC, the SDF, the UNDP, the PCRN, the AFP and others have never insulted the army of this country. If one of these parties wins the presidential election one day, the army will serve its leader. However, if the CRM or a party that has invested the CRM president wins, there will automatically be a coup. » Following these public calls for a military coup in the event that the CRM candidate wins the presidential election next October, the CRM filed a complaint against these two individuals on 23 September 2023 before the Court of First Instance in Yaoundé.

Although we have already entered the legal period for convening the electorate, this complaint remains blocked, without the CRM and its lawyers knowing the reasons why. This lends credence to the idea that the two individuals in question had simply made their party’s official position public and that, as a result, they would benefit from decisive political and judicial protection from the ruling power. These individuals continue to appear in the media, displaying the same zeal, as if calling for the overthrow of the constitutional order had become common place. Such impunity is worrying in a country that has already been shaken by an attempted military coup that left deep wounds. The closer we get to the presidential election in October, the more the CPDM regime is discovering the determination of a people, finally standing up, to bring about change through the ballot box and in peace, in particular by waging a relentless fight against electoral fraud and all the fraudsters who orchestrate it. The closer we get to the deadline in question, the more this regime is tempted by the worst, under the illusion that it can still hold on to power against the will of the people.

As you have seen, the popular success of the MK2025 meeting on 31 May in Paris literally sent the authorities into a trance, as evidenced by the fact that certain ministers abandoned their work, which we thought was absorbing, in favour of grotesque outbursts on social media. What is most surprising is their nervousness when legitimate disapproval is expressed at the indecent public exposure of a patriarch, or when, in the interests of appeasement and unity, a commitment is made to protect the incumbent President of the Republic and his family. It is as if they take pleasure in showing, in a shocking manner, a man who bears his age, like everyone else, and that they are preparing to mistreat him as soon as he ceases to hold his current office. This is not our view of things, and no lie will change the facts. Our knowledge of the historical experiences of nation building teaches us to be measured, in order to spare the country from cycles of revenge. Too much resentment has built up since the massacres of the UPCists, particularly from 1955 onwards, to the more recent ones in the English-speaking regions and the violence against CRM militants, for a patriotic Cameroonian leader who aspires to the heavy responsibility of leading the nation not to be concerned with appeasement or even healing the wounds of multiple memories. Rebuilding the unity of our country is one of my primary missions.

The shaking of the ruling power by the Paris meeting is further attested to by the false and childish construction made by the regime’s agencies around my reminder to Cameroonians that only determination and a sense of dedication can bring about the change through democratic alternation to which they aspire, as the brotherly Senegalese people courageously demonstrated with their bare hands, unfortunately at a heavy human cost. The regime’s demagogic spin on this purely factual statement rings hollow and further informs the Cameroonian people about the CPDM regime’s difficult relationship with the truth. Even the Secretary General of the CPDM Central Committee felt compelled to publish a long opinion piece on the subject on 10 June. On the same day, at the opening of the June 2025 parliamentary session, the President of the Senate and the President of the National Assembly, from the podiums of their respective assemblies, hypocritically condemned verbal violence, attacks on social harmony, and prophets of chaos. Need we remind you that the President of the National Assembly is the very same person who, together with several of his fellow ministers and in front of administrative authorities and security forces, organised the public burning of CRM T-shirts and scarves in Maroua on 14 July 2018? It is in this climate of feverishness on the part of the ruling power that there is renewed talk of coup plans being hatched in certain extremist circles of the regime. With regard to the electoral coup, inaddition to ELECAM’s arrogant refusal to publish the national electoral roll as required by Article 80 of the Electoral Code, the various manoeuvres by the Director General of this body to discourage Cameroonians from registering on the electoral roll, some hardliners are considering postponing the presidential election scheduled for next October during the current parliamentary session in June. Those behind such a plan should be reminded that since Sunday, 15 June, Cameroon has already entered the 2025 presidential election period, as from that date and at any time until 17 July at the latest, the electorate may be convened inaccordance with Article 86(2) of the Electoral Code. Therefore, any manoeuvre aimed at postponing this presidential election would be nothing less than an electoral coup d’état and thus an attack on the Cameroonian people, which would automatically trigger their legitimate defence.

As for a military coup, the more the CPDM regime realises that a majority of the Cameroonian people have resolutely turned their backs on it, the more the idea of a military coup will gain ground in some of its most fundamentalist circles. This scenario is the one that two official CPDM spokespeople mentioned above publicly revealed to Cameroonians in 2023, as we recalled earlier: the idea would be to allow the presidential election to take place, knowing in advance that the ruling party would lose, and then to create chaos with the aim of enabling a group of military officers to seize power, in order to prevent the person freely chosen by the Cameroonian people at the ballot box from becoming head of state. I reiterate that the two communicators who propagated this scenario of a military coup were never punished for it, either by their party or by the justice system, despite the complaint filed against them by the CRM. It is therefore fair to say that this military coup, announced in the event of the defeat of the CPDM candidate, is actively being prepared, now that the country has entered the legal period of the presidential election. It is in this context of the ruling regime’s blatant rejection of the democratic process that the UN saw fit to sign, on the sly, on 9 May 2025, an agreement with ELECAM, which claims to pursue the objective of lending credibility to the upcoming presidential election. However, the UN knows that ELECAM refuses to publish the national electoral roll, which, in addition to being a legal obligation, is the first element of credibility in an election. It was also in this atmosphere of an officially announced coup that, on Sunday 8 June 2025, an army general, head of the French gendarmerie, arrived in Cameroon for a two-day visit, during which, according to the press, he met with the authorities responsible for the country’s security and defence to discuss the upcoming presidential election. Are France and the UN truly aware of the role that the CPDM regime wants them to play in implementing its announced and acknowledged military coup plan in the event that its candidate in the presidential election is defeated at the polls? They will be held responsible if, unfortunately, the worst comes to pass as announced.

Done at Yaoundé on 16 June 2025 Maurice KAMTO,

candidate in the 2025 presidential election