Cameroon Opposition Elects First Woman Leader

Cameroon’s main opposition party, the MRC, has elected Tiriane Balbine Nadège Noah as its president, making her the first woman to lead the party and succeeding Maurice Kamto, who led it for 14 years. Noah won more than 96 per cent of the vote at an extraordinary elective congress in Yaoundé on Saturday.

The congress went ahead despite intense pressure on the authorities to ban the meeting. Supporters gathered at the party headquarters in the capital to choose a new leader and to denounce the restrictions they say the MRC faces. About 1,200 delegates took part. Noah, who had served as second vice-president and has been interim president since Kamto stepped down last month, ran unopposed after her only challenger withdrew. The result gives her a renewable five-year term.

Joseph Emmanuel Ateba, the party’s National Secretary in Charge of Party Reform, told Africanews that “in Cameroon, things are done in such a way that everything becomes extraordinary.” He said the MRC has been persecuted since its inception and is not allowed to exercise its rights, but added that the party was pleased the congress was taking place under good conditions after it was granted authorisation. Delegate Kuesbi Mefo Thierry said Kamto had trained people, naming Noah among the “great guardians” he had developed, and said the party was proud to make her its president.

In her speech to the convention, Noah said all the activists who “have paid with their lives, their freedom, their safety and their commitment” deserve recognition. She said the delegates’ conduct throughout the congress would be the finest political tribute to Kamto, whom she described as “a genuine democrat, a humanist and a man of peace.”

Kamto and his deputy stepped down in an effort to save the MRC, amid suspicions that the government was trying to dismantle the party. The report does not say what evidence underlies those suspicions, and it carries no government response. Africanews has previously reported on Kamto’s exclusion from the 2025 presidential election, which he denounced as a political plot and appealed in July 2025. Details of that dispute were not included in the material provided.

Noah’s term opens with the party looking ahead to the 2027 local elections, which the MRC has set as its next target.