By NDI EUGENE NDI

More by this Author

Mr John Fru Ndi ,81, thought he had succeeded Cameroonian President Paul Biya. But 31 years later, he will go to his grave grieving of electoral theft.

Ndi had been a frequent loser in elections that followed the country’s controversial 1992 polls. In fact, Cameroonians routinely nicknamed him the ‘Odinga’ of Cameroon, relating his political misfortunes with that of Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga.

He died on Monday, just a month before turning 82. His party, the Social Democratic Front (SDF), said he had succumbed in the capital Yaounde due to “a prolonged illness”. According to the party’s first Vice National Chairman Joshua Nabangi Osih, the arrangement for his funeral will be announced soon.

Fru Ndi had a plentiful of political life, majorly known for defying military intimidation to find the SDF opposition party in 1990.  

He became President Paul Biya’s longest challenger. Biya, who has uninterruptedly ruled Cameroon since 1982, became a serial election winner in multicandidate elections since 1992. None of the polls Biya won were conceded by his rivals, alleging malpractices.

Read: Cameroon polls overshadowed by violence, boycott

Yet, Fru Ndi incarnated hope when he became the first main challenger in the country’s first multiparty elections. He claimed he won the 1992 election, but the incumbent Biya stole his victory. For that, he was later put under house arrest in his Bamenda residence for months after declaring himself winner of the vote. Official results showed Biya won the vote with 39.98 percent while Fru Ndi scored 35.97 percent.

Fru Ndi would come second again in subsequent elections in 2004 and 2011 which were still won by Biya.

In the last presidential election in 2018, Fru Ndi shocked his supporters when he decided not to participate. Instead, he endorsed Osih for the top office.

He had also announced he was going to step down as the party’s leader during a convention slated for next month – when he would have also been 82, a suggestion age was catching up on his political vigour.

He leaves behind a political party with waning weight and plagued by internal crises. The party currently has five MPs in the 180-member National Assembly, down from 18 in the last legislature.

Some top officials of the party who among other things accused Fru Ndi of using the party’s funds for his personal interest and being bought over by the ruling regime, are still in court hoping to seek redress after they were expelled.

Fru Ndi’s political weight waned following the bloody armed conflict in the Anglophone regions – his fief, that has killed over 6,000 people since 2017. In 2019, armed separatist fighting for the separation of English speakers kidnapped him and demanded that he recalls the party’s MPs from parliament.

Read: Biya fires military action warning to separatists

Fru Ndi hails from minority Anglophone region of the majority French speaking Cameroon. English speakers in the country have for years often felt isolated, something that may have fuelled the ongoing insurgency.

Ndi militated in Cameroon National Union (CNU) which later became the Cameroon Peoples’ Democratic Movement (CPDM). But later in life, he thawed relations with the government, probably as a strategy to win from within and copying the style of Odinga.

Lately, he had had some sort of bromance with Biya whom he met publicly for the first time in 2010. In 2012, it was rumoured that Biya was going to appoint the opposition leader into the Senate. However, this was not the case as Fru Ndi failed in the country’s first ever Senatorial elections in 2013. Nonetheless, the opposition leader had since been seen during occasions hosted by the president at the State House, sharing pleasantries with Biya on each occasion.

Earlier this year, after his party lost the Senatorial election in his Northwest region fief, one of Fru Ndi’s SDF members was appointed to the Senate by Biya.