Autocratic leaders in Africa like their numbers to be within the prime 90s, it sounds as if.
In October, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan received a extremely doubtful 98% of the presidential vote, perpetuating the ruling occasion’s grip on energy to 60 years. All through the similar month, Cameroonian President Paul Biya, who has dominated the rustic since 1982, secured an remarkable 8th time period in place of business. It’s going to permit him to serve till he turns 99.
In neither case had been elections deemed loose or honest, and in each circumstances protests and serious executive crackdowns adopted.
But, whilst the result was once in the long run the survival of incumbent governments, those elections are moderately telling concerning the converting fortunes of autocracy in Africa.
In 2019, I wrote a e-book titled “How Autocrats Compete” that used Tanzania and Cameroon as contrasting examples. The divergent origins in their respective autocracies sowed the seeds for the forms of demanding situations that every nation would ultimately face. Each nation’s governments, which observers extensively see as repressive and antidemocratic, have misplaced key resources of underlying power, making them extra prone than they’ve been in a long time.
The roots of two autocracies
“How Autocrats Compete” confirmed how Tanzania and Cameroon used to mirror two other traces of autocracy: party-based and a personalist.
For many years, Julius Nyerere was once the motive force in Tanzanian politics. An immensely in style anti-colonial chief, Nyerere in 1965 created a single-party state ruled through a strong and efficient political occasion equipment – first below the Tanganyika African Nationwide Union and later recast as Chama Cha Mapinduzi, or CCM.
Pedestrians stroll previous a billboard for Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, of the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi occasion, who just lately received reelection in an increasingly more autocratic nation.
AP Picture
The occasion attracted a large swath of rural electorate, had nationwide functioning establishments and a well-liked grassroots presence. Importantly, when Nyerere stepped down from energy in 1985 – then a precedent in African politics – he established an inner number one gadget to make a choice CCM’s long run presidential applicants.
Cameroon’s autocracy emerged from a lot other terrain. After independence, political energy was once closely centralized within the presidency. The primary supply of energy was once the president’s talent to make use of carrots and sticks to convey in combination a multiethnic coalition of elites right into a transactional courting.
Through 1972, all political events have been absorbed through the ruling Cameroonian Nationwide Union, later referred to as the Cameroon Folks’s Democratic Motion.
The ruling occasion performed a secondary function in comparison to the presidency, withering away and no longer even assembly for years. Underneath Cameroon’s first president, Ahamdou Ahidjo, energy was once orientated to the north of the rustic, whilst below Paul Biya it’s been orientated to the south.
Those other foundations for autocracy translated into distinctive diversifications to multiparty elections. In Tanzania, the ruling CCM may depend on well-liked turnout, and the candidate variety processes seemed to reduce elite discontent inside the occasion.
Supporters of the opposition presidential candidate protest at the streets of Garoua, Cameroon, on Oct. 26, 2025, all over the rustic’s newest – and disputed – presidential election.
AP Picture/Welba Yamo Pascal
Between 1995 and 2010, CCM and its presidential applicants may win determinative vote stocks whilst minimizing pricey repression and fraud.
Elections had been nonetheless no longer loose and honest, however there weren’t systematically prime charges of violence or coercion. If truth be told, on the time many regarded as Tanzania slightly of a democracy.
The similar may no longer be mentioned of Cameroon, the place elections had been to start with a lot more difficult for the ruling occasion and President Biya.
Within the Nineteen Nineties, the ruling CPDM suffered a barrage of defections and Biya received best 40% of the 1992 election.
However, in large part protected from world scrutiny, he may deploy extremely repressive equipment that allowed him to construct a picture of invulnerability. Former warring parties rejoined the CPDM, and the opposition wilted away to an enclave in majority Francophone Cameroon’s English-speaking areas. On the core remained Biya, with digital keep an eye on over all political and financial existence.
The erosion of hegemony in Tanzania
Once I wrote “How Autocrats Compete,” I argued that CCM’s core strengths in Tanzania would in the long run erode. As more youthful generations changed into got rid of from the mythology of Nyerere, CCM’s vote casting constituency would diminish.
And certainly, in step with Afrobarometer, the proportion of Tanzanians who felt on the subject of CCM declined from 91% in 2001 to 69% in 2012.
CCM’s benefits as a ruling occasion additionally incentivized opposition events to emulate it. There may be in depth analysis on how the principle Tanzanian opposition occasion Chadema mimicked CCM’s grassroots technique to occasion construction.
Those adjustments had been accompanied through higher factionalism inside CCM. The important thing second was once the 2015 election when front-runner presidential candidate Edward Lowassa was once disqualified and John Magufuli nominated as a substitute. Magufuli, noticed as an institutional selection, had no robust ties to any particular faction, and thus a tenuous seize over the occasion elite.
Folks protest an afternoon after the overall election following allegations of electoral irregularities in Tanzania on Oct. 30, 2025.
AP Picture, Document
The solution to all of those demanding situations has been for the ruling occasion to crack down on opposition and impose self-discipline. Since 2015, Tanzania has change into a demonstrably much less open position, ratcheting up the brutality in opposition to opposition elites and civil society writ massive.
In the meantime, to keep an eye on its personal elite, CCM has needed to prohibit its talent to move. In spite of guarantees of reform and conciliatory gestures, Hassan seems pushed through the similar political common sense – the occasion can’t lose and will not depend at the equipment of the previous. The one option to safe victory is thru a lot more overt repression.
The bounds of private rule in Cameroon
The customised nature of the Cameroonian executive has made the query of succession a perennial puzzle.
Absent any credible mechanism for opting for a successor, Biya’s resolution has been to kick the can down the street. In 2008, in spite of public discontent, he controversially got rid of time period limits, apparently signaling his willingness to stick in place of business indefinitely.
However Biya’s talent to carry in combination the historical multiethnic coalition has seemed significantly weakened lately.
Cameroon’s English-speaking areas, representing just about 1 / 4 of the inhabitants, grew extra vocal of their calls for for equality in Cameroon’s closely centralized political gadget. The federal government’s reaction has been violent, and because 2017 those areas had been mired in a civil war.
Biya has additionally confronted rising opposition from the the wing of his coalition representing the Bamileké, the most important ethnic crew that has in large part remained inside the ruling fold. Since 2012, when one in all its leaders, Maurice Kamto, defected to problem Biya, the federal government has robotically spoke back through arresting the opposition determine and plenty of of his supporters.
Cameroon President Paul Biya casts his poll in Yaounde, Cameroon, on Oct. 12, 2025.
AP Picture/Angel Ngwe, Document
Those elements, along side rising impatience over the query of succession, most likely influenced the verdict of the northern-based chief Issa Tchiroma to go away executive and problem Biya within the 2025 election. The north-south coalition have been an important axis of Biya’s coalition.
Given the scale and significance of the northern bloc, overt repression of Tchiroma was once a lot riskier for Biya. He may no longer merely disallow Tchiroma’s candidacy as he had achieved for Maurice Kamto.
So Biya’s executive rigged the effects.
To lift the prices of fraud, Tchiroma declared himself the winner in an instant after the election. Cameroon’s election control frame took a painstaking 15 days to claim Biya the victor with simply 54% of the vote, his lowest appearing since 1992. Given the most obvious factionalism and Biya’s weak spot, it will had been unattainable to say any higher of a victory.
The transferring tides of authoritarianism
Whilst every election may had been a victory for autocracy, those are other autocracies from what they had been twenty years in the past. Importantly, the electoral contests let us know that authoritarian governments are dynamic – or even doubtlessly in peril.
On the subject of Tanzania, there was a gentle unwinding of key resources of longevity in want of extra blatant and brutal equipment of authoritarian rule. Hassan vote percentage is a reminder of sham effects noticed in puts like Equatorial Guinea or Rwanda.
However, in Cameroon we’re witnessing the logical unfolding of a extremely personalised autocracy that has been unwilling to handle its personal inner contradictions. In each 2025 and 1992, Biya confronted a frayed political coalition that sensed his vulnerability. The variation this time is that Biya does no longer have any other 30 years forward of him to rebuild a political coalition.
On the finish of the day, those are autocracies in transition and coming into into a brand new established order that turns out a lot more fragile. It’s unclear what new equilibriums will emerge.
