President Biya to face a fractured opposition in October's presidential ballot

President Paul Biya, who has ruled Cameroon for the past 22 years, has confirmed that he will seek a new seven-year term in elections next month. Biya, who is now 71, confirmed his decision to stand in a televised speech on Wednesday. He will face a divided opposition which has proved unable to unite behind a single strong candidate. John Fru Ndi, the leader of the opposition Social Democratic Front (SDF), who nearly beat Biya in Cameroon's first multi-party election in 1992, has confirmed that he will challenge him again in the 11 October single round election. Fru Ndi is a former bookshop owner from the Anglophone southwest of Cameroon who leads the largest opposition party in parliament. He was chosen by the SDF to stand once more as its presidential candidate at a special party congress at the weekend. However, he refused to stand down when the Coalition for National Reconciliation and Reconstruction (CNRR), an alliance of Cameroon's 10 main opposition parties, decided on Wednesday to choose a different candidate instead. The CNRR threw its weight behind Adamou Ndam Njoya, 62, a Francophone Muslim political scientist from Foumban in western Cameroon. He served as education minister, minister for administrative reform and foreign minister for 13 years before Biya came to power in 1982. Both men told IRIN on Wednesday that they were talking about coming to a consensus arrangement, but neither man indicated that he was willing to stand down. "Our doors are open and John Fru Ndi remains an integral part of the coalition," Ndam Njoya said. Fru Ndi said he was "open to meet anyone," but criticised the CNRR's choice of candidate as tainted. The linguistic divide is important in Cameroonian politics, because Anglophones comprise only 20 percent of the country's 16 million population and often consider themselves distinct from the country's Francophone majority. The country was formed in 1961 from the union of the former French colony of Cameroon with an adjoining strip of territory that had formerly been administered by Britain. "The Anglophone marginalisation factor has influence the choice of the coalition candidate," one SDF leader grumbled privately. Biya, a secretive man accused by Transparency International of running one of the most corrupt regimes in Africa, kept the nation guessing about his plans until the last minute. But returning from a month-long trip to France, Biya said on Wednesday that he had been encouraged by a wide range of the Cameroonian people to seek a further term. Biya boasted in his brief televised speech on Wednesday that he had opened up Cameroon to multi-party democracy, preserved peace, unity and stability in the country and had kept the economy on track. But opposition parties accuse him of fiddling every election since 1992 to stay in power. Already there are doubts over the electoral roll to be used in next month's vote. According to the Interior Ministry, only 3.8 million voters had been registered by June - less than half the country's estimated eight million adults. Despite a change of name after Biya took over the reins of power from Cameroon's first president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, his Cameroon's People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) has ruled the country continuously since independence. At least five other candidates have registered nomination papers to stand in the presidential election, including Pierre Mila Assoute, 47, a dissident figure in the ruling CPDM. But none of them are viewed as serious contenders. Fru Ndi played a key role in forcing Cameroon to open up to multi-party politics in the early 1990's. He was officially credited with 35.9 percent of the vote in the 1992 election to Biya's 39.9 percent, but he boycotted the subsequent poll in 1997, saying it would not be free and fair. Political analysts said that since then his personal popularity in the country had waned.