Cameroonians are reacting to the death of John Fru Ndi, the historic opponent of President Paul Biya. The leader and founder of the Social Democratic Front (SDF), the main opposition party in parliament, passed away on Monday at the age of 81 after a long illness. Fru Ndi contested against Biya in the presidential elections of 1992, 2004, and 2011, securing the second position on each occasion.
“Ni John Fru Ndi of the SDF, the guiding figure who laid the path we tread. Against all odds, he advocated for the reintroduction of a multi-party system in Cameroon on May 26, 1990, along with a range of individual and collective freedoms granted to the entire Cameroonian people,” shared Marcel Tadjeu, Chairman of the Douala 5 SDF electoral constituency.
Fru Ndi commenced his political career in the 1980s as a member of Biya’s RDPC. He established the SDF in 1990 when Cameroon officially ended one-party rule. Presently, his SDF holds only five seats in the current parliament, a significant decline from the 18 seats it held in the previous legislature. The party lost influence to the all-powerful Cameroonian People’s Democratic Movement (RDPC) led by 90-year-old Biya, who has governed Cameroon since 1982.
Born in 1941 in Baba Il, near Bamenda in the northwest, which was under British mandate at the time, Fru Ndi hailed from the primarily English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions. These regions became part of Cameroon in 1961, a year after the French-speaking regions gained independence from Paris. Since 2017, they have been afflicted by conflicts between the army and separatists following the declaration of independence by the latter, driven by decades-long grievances over perceived discrimination by the country’s French-speaking majority.
While Fru Ndi advocated for a federal solution instead of outright independence for the Anglophone regions, President Biya resisted calls for greater autonomy and responded with a severe crackdown. This stance earned Fru Ndi the ire of most radical separatists and further subjected his positions as an opposition leader over the years to scrutiny.
“A lot of Cameroonians died when I was still very young. But today, we understand that he was corrupt. He might have been influenced by the powers that be because, in reality, you need to be resilient,” expressed Mathieu Epoune, a computer scientist in Yaounde. “Nevertheless, he should have been an exemplary figure. However, what I recall about him, it’s true, we don’t speak ill of the dead, but what I remember is that he aspired for change, but in the end, he became corrupt.” Epoune added.
Known as “The Chairman,” Fru Ndi’s SDF has frequently faced internal crises, and in recent years, his leadership position was contested by a faction of senior party officials. In 2019, his house was set ablaze, and he was briefly abducted by an armed group that demanded the withdrawal of his MPs from parliament. Both the army and armed groups in the Anglophone regions are regularly accused by the United Nations and international NGOs of committing crimes against humanity.