2025 presidential elections: Osih’s SDF’s support for CPDM.

With the prospect of opposition unity for the 2025 presidential elections in October next year looming, the Social Democratic Front, SDF party, which is embroiled in controversy, has decided to go it alone, to the advantage of the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement, CPDM party.

A banner has circulated announcing that SDF National Chairman Hon Osih Joshua will go to Europe this weekend.

He is introduced in the tract as a “candidate for the presidential elections of 2025”. Joshua Osih will meet the Cameroonian diaspora in Europe.

The advertising stunt claims that the event will take place solely in Brussels, Belgium.

Federalism, the Anglophone crisis, education, opposition coalitions, and dual nationality will all be covered.

Other subjects will cover the “relaunch of the economy, human rights in Cameroon, single counter for the diaspora, problems with the CFA and international tensions” .

Hon Osih embarked on a statewide tour following his disputed election as Chairman of the SDF party in October 2023, succeeding the party’s famous leader, the late John Fru Ndi.

The European trip is regarded to be an attempt to solidify his control in the political organization perceived as a “Anglophone party” that has lost its founding direction.

The news of the trip and its content, however, has sparked concern and left open issues.

How can he be a candidate for the party if no convention has been conducted to choose a candidate, as required by its statute?

Alex Gustave Azebaze, a well-known media mogul, has also questioned: “Why is it on the poster of his journey to Europe that we unexpectedly learn that Joshua Osih is once again a contender for the presidency of the Republic? Why doesn’t he properly declare it in Cameroon…? Has he been through the primaries?

If his party finally approves his candidacy, which is a foregone conclusion, Hon Osih will run for the second time, following his humiliating fourth place finish in 2018 behind incumbent Paul Biya of the CPDM, MRC candidate Prof Maurice Kamto, and now embattled PRCN leader Hon Cabral Libii.

Kamto and Libii are members of two opposition alliances, but Osih has not joined any, giving the impression that he is a pawn on the ruling party’s chessboard.

Even after he was elected in a dispute that resulted in the resignation of important SDF supporters, some pundits predicted he would transform the party into a “CPDM Section” or a member of the Presidential Majority.

His decision to run for president in 2025 is regarded as a vote of confidence in the ruling party.

The claim of his membership with the ruling party arose from a memo written in 2021 by 74 CPDM legislators, including him as the sole opposition official, to the United States Congress, criticizing their criticism of human rights breaches in the North and South West Regions.

Osih’s announcement as a candidate for the SDF, whose main fief of the North West and South West Regions has been abandoned, would undoubtedly serve the ruling party’s Machiavellian interests in ensuring an easy victory.

The Guardian Post, in its objective to promote democratic ideas in the country, has had need to remind readers that after years of one-party rule in Cameroon, with many freedoms constrained, John Fru Ndi founded the SDF in 1990. The party’s “founding fathers” aimed to “change” the system and provide “equal opportunities” and “power to the people”.

According to official figures, charismatic Fru Ndi attempted to enter Unity Palace in the 1992 presidential election, receiving around 36% of the vote versus incumbent President Paul Biya’s 40%.

However, the SDF claimed that their candidate’s victory was “stolen”. That performance under the banner of the Union for Change produced the opposition’s finest results to date.

With presidential elections approaching in October 2025, the opposition and Cameroonians have been calling for change in public discourse.

They have highlighted the necessity for a coalition to remove the CPDM from power.

Two organizations have formed and are reportedly in talks to combine.

When Hon Osih was asked about joining an alliance after taking over the SDF, he said: “It is premature and a little out of topic today to be dragging the SDF, which is a serious party, into discussing coalition options, whereas those options are not the priority of our party right now.”

When Osih signed the contentious CPDM memo to the US Congress in 2021, his party’s National Executive Committee, NEC, was humiliated by his actions and asked him to remove his signature or table the disagreement in the two Anglophone Regions for a debate in parliament. He didn’t move.

Question: Is he going to discuss the Anglophone problem in Europe, as advertised?

If Hon Osih does not want the SDF to follow Fru Ndi to his death, he should form an opposition alliance with the party’s remaining members.

With the ruling party in power for nearly four decades and the incumbent Head of State at 91 years old and still being persuaded to serve another seven-year term, as some Cameroonians think is his right, others believe change is necessary.

Mountains of debt, record inflation, unemployment, and shabby and chronically inadequate infrastructure are all contributing to the economy’s downturn.

Hon Osih’s desire to run for president will be nothing more than open support for the incumbent, much to the chagrin and dismay of the SDF’s residual supporters who still believe in Fru Ndi’s goal of “change”