Thandeka: "Did you hear Cameroon's president was gone for like two and a half months and nobody really knew where he was?"
Karabo: "Two and a half months? Who was running the country?"
Thandeka: "That's exactly the question everyone was asking."
They were catching up over coffee, turning over a story that raises a genuinely interesting question about how government actually works.
Seventy-four days in Geneva
In June 2026, Cameroon's 93-year-old president Paul Biya — the world's oldest serving head of state, in office since 1982 — left the country for what his government described as "a brief private stay in Europe." He didn't return until 20 August. That's roughly 74 days, spent largely in Geneva, Switzerland, and it became the longest recorded absence of his entire presidency, triggering serious questions about his health and who was actually governing Cameroon while he was away.
Cameroonian officials maintained throughout that Biya continued to monitor and exercise his constitutional powers from abroad. Opposition figures, meanwhile, floated the idea of an interim leader — though nothing came of it. Notably, Cameroon had no sitting vice president during this entire period.
Biya isn't the only one who travels a lot
Nigeria's President Bola Tinubu has faced his own scrutiny over time spent outside the country — one 2026 analysis estimated he'd spent approximately 237 days abroad since taking office in 2023, with France alone accounting for around 89 of those days. Unlike Biya's situation, most of Tinubu's trips have been official: diplomatic engagements, investment meetings, international summits. A single May 2026 trip covered France, Kenya and Rwanda in one go. There's no reliable evidence he lives in France — he's just there often, for work.
Can a president actually govern from another country?
In principle, yes. A head of state's constitutional authority doesn't simply evaporate because they cross a border. Modern governments run through ministers, civil servants, secure communications and delegated authority — a president can sign documents and make decisions from thousands of kilometres away just as they would from their own office.
The real issue isn't distance. It's whether a country's constitution provides a clear mechanism for exercising presidential power when the president is physically unavailable for an extended, uncertain period — which is exactly why Biya's absence became such a major political story, and why the missing vice president made it worse.
What if this happened in South Africa?
Imagine the South African president left the country for 74 consecutive days with no clear public explanation. The questions would come immediately: who's making decisions, can the president still sign into law, who acts if something happens to them, does Parliament need to step in, what does the Constitution actually say?
Those aren't hypothetical curiosities — they're the exact questions Cameroon has been grappling with this year, and a useful reminder that "the president is away" is a much bigger governance question than it first sounds.
Final thoughts
A president doesn't have to be standing on home soil to remain president. But the longer and less explained the absence, the more a country's institutions get tested on a question most constitutions handle awkwardly at best: what actually happens to a country's leadership when its leader isn't there to lead in person?
Creative Strategist at Chesly.Tech.
