Cameroon's President Has Been on a 'Brief Stay' for Two Months, and It's Working

On June 7, Paul Biya, the 93-year-old president of Cameroon and the oldest sitting head of state on earth, left his country for what the government called a “brief private stay” in Europe. That was 73 days ago. The stay is, as of this writing, still brief.

Biya has ruled Cameroon since 1982, a span of 44 years, which is about the time it takes a dynasty to become furniture. He is believed to be in Switzerland. He has not been seen in public in nearly two months. And the government’s position, delivered by spokesman Sadi to RFI with the tone of a man reading a press release he wrote himself, is that the president is “healthy and hard at work.”

The phrase “hard at work” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence. The work, as it has become visible, includes a major reshuffle of the country’s military, announced from abroad. The work, as CNN put it last week, has left officials “publicly assuring Cameroonians that their president is still alive.” It is the register of a government that has decided the republic’s most important fact is a fact about a body.

In Cameroon, it is worth remembering, it is illegal to discuss the president’s health. So the question the country is not permitted to ask — “is the president well?” — has been replaced by the question the country is permitted to ask, which is “is the government still telling us the president is well?” And the answer to that question, for 73 days, has been yes, daily, in public, on the record.

There is a version of this story that is a warning, but the one I want to argue is the lesson, because the lesson is the one of us. The genius of the brief stay is not that it works — it works in the way that a locked door works, by being the only thing in the house that is locked. The genius is that it is unfalsifiable. As long as no one can confirm the president is gone, no one can confirm the power is vacant. Absence, under the brief stay, is not a state of the man. It is a policy position.

We have a name for the American version of the brief stay; we just do not call it that. We call it the second home. We call it “working from the cabin.” We call it the 14-hour day, which is the political term for a day that is, by the account of everyone in it, golf. The difference between the two is not the activity. The difference is the paperwork. In Cameroon the absence has a name, a spokesman, and a legal shield. In America it has a newsletter, a rally schedule, and a man in a golf cart. The two arrangements are, at the level of the institution, the same: the office continues, the person is optional, and the continuity is the product.

There is a version of the story that no press release contains. At one point, unable to attend a campaign event, the president reportedly sent statues of himself and his wife in his place, which is the only leadership transition in modern history that was completed by sculpture.

I do not know what happens next in Cameroon. I know what the government says will happen next, which is that the president is healthy, that he is working, and that the stay is brief, and I know that the government has said all three things for 73 days, and that the country has listened, and that the listening is, at this point, the story.

At press time, no end date had been announced for the brief stay. The stay is, in other words, brief in the way that a “short meeting” is brief: for as long as the host says it lasts, and the host, as the record shows, is in no hurry to say it ended.