Boko Haram

A crackdown by armed forces in Cameroon has killed at least four opposition supporters amid protests over the declared re-election win by President Paul Biya.

Protesters calling for fair results from the African country’s contested presidential election held on October 12 have hit the streets in several cities as 92-year-old Biya prepares for an eighth term, which could keep him in power until 2032 as he nears 100.

Biya, whose election win was finally confirmed by Cameroon’s Constitutional Council on Monday, is Africa’s oldest and among the world’s longest ruling leaders. He has spent 43 years – nearly half his life – in office. He has ruled Cameroon, a country of 30 million people, as president since 1982 through elections that political opponents said have been “stolen”.

What’s behind the deadly protests?

Supporters of opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma Bakary of the Front for the National Salvation of Cameroon party have defied a ban on protests, setting police cars on fire, barricading roads and burning tyres in the financial capital, Douala, before the announcement of the election result. Around 30 activists have been arrested.

Police fired tear gas and water cannon to break up the crowds that came out in support of Tchiroma, who had declared himself the real winner, and called for Biya to concede.

Samuel Dieudonne Ivaha Diboua, the governor of the region that includes Douala, told the AFP news agency that the protesters attacked police stations in the second and sixth districts of the city.

Several members of the security forces were wounded, and “four people unfortunately lost their lives,” he said. Tchiroma’s campaign team confirmed the deaths on Sunday were of protesters.

Opposition supporters claim the results of the election have been rigged by Biya and his supporters in power. In the lead-up to the announcement of the result, the current government rejected these accusations and urged people to wait for the result.

Who is the main opposition in Cameroon?

The Union for Change is a coalition of opposition parties that formed in September to counter Biya’s dominance of the political landscape.

The forum brought together more than two dozen political parties and civil society groups in opposition to Biya with an aim to field a consensus candidate.

In September, the group confirmed Tchiroma as its consensus candidate to run against Biya.

Tchiroma, 76, was formerly part of Biya’s government, holding several ministerial positions over 16 years. He also served as government spokesperson during the years of fighting the Boko Haram armed group, and he defended the army when it stood accused of killing civilians. He was once regarded as a member of Biya’s “old guard” but has campaigned on a promise of “change”.

What happened after the election?

After voting ended on October 12, Tchiroma claimed victory.

“Our victory is clear. It must be respected,” he said in a video statement posted on Facebook. He called on Biya to “accept the truth of the ballot box” or “plunge the country into turmoil”.

Tchiroma claimed that he had won the election with 55 percent of the vote. More than 8 million people were registered to vote in the election.

On Monday, however, the Constitutional Council announced Biya as the winner with 53.66 percent of the vote.

It said Tchiroma was the runner-up with 35.19 percent.

Announcing the results on Monday, the council’s leader, Clement Atangana, said the electoral process was “peaceful” and criticised the opposition for “anticipating the result”.

What are the main criticisms of Biya?

Under Biya’s rule, Cameroon has struggled with myriad challenges, including chronic corruption that critics say has dampened economic growth despite the country being rich in resources such as oil and cocoa.

The president, who has clinched wins in eight heavily contested elections held every seven years, is renowned for his absenteeism as he reportedly spends extended periods away from the country.

The 92-year-old appeared at just one campaign rally in the lead-up to this month’s election when he promised voters that “the best is still to come.”

He and his entourage are often away on private or medical treatment trips to Switzerland. An investigation in 2018 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project found Biya had spent at least 1,645 days (nearly four and a half years) in the European country, excluding official visits, since being in power.

Under Biya, opposition politicians have frequently accused electoral authorities of colluding with the president to rig elections. In 2008, parliament voted to remove the limit on the number of terms a president may serve.

Before the election, the Constitutional Council barred another popular opposition candidate, Maurice Kamto of the Cameroon Renaissance Movement, from running.

Some opposition leaders and their supporters have been detained by police on a slew of charges, including plotting violence.

On Friday, two prominent leaders, Anicet Ekane and Djeukam Tchameni of the Union for Change, were arrested.

The African Movement for New Independence and Democracy party also said its treasurer and other members had been “kidnapped” by local security forces, a move it claimed was designed “to intimidate Cameroonians”.

Analysts also said Biya’s hold on power could lead to instability when he eventually goes.

What is the security situation in Cameroon?

Since 2015, attacks by the armed group, Boko Haram, have become more and more frequent in the Far North Region of the country.

Furthermore, since gaining independence in 1960 from French rule, Cameroon has struggled with conflict rooted in the country’s deep linguistic and political divisions, which developed when French- and English-speaking regions were merged into a single state.

French is the official language, and Anglophone Cameroonians in the northwest and southwest have felt increasingly marginalised by the Francophone-dominated government in Yaounde.

Their grievances – over language, education, courts and distribution of resources – turned into mass protests in 2016 when teachers and lawyers demanded equal recognition of English-language institutions.

The government responded with arrests and internet blackouts, and the situation eventually built up to an armed separatist struggle for an independent state called Ambazonia.

The recent presidential election was the first to take place since the conflict intensified. Armed separatists have barred the Anglophone population from participating in government-organised activities, such as National Day celebrations and elections.

As a result, the Southwest and Northwest regions saw widespread abstention in voting on October 12 with a 53 percent turnout. The highest share of votes, according to the official results, went to Biya: 68.7 percent and 86.31 percent in the two regions, respectively.

What will happen now?

Protests are likely to spread, observers said.

After the deaths of four protesters before the results were announced, Tchiroma paid tribute “to those who fell to the bullets of a regime that has become criminal during a peaceful march”.

He called on Biya’s government to “stop these acts of barbarity, these killings and arbitrary arrests”.

“Tell the truth of the ballots, or we will all mobilise and march peacefully,” he said.

Maiduguri, Nigeria – Sometimes, it feels to Zara Ali as though her daughter was born already sick in the womb.

On a recent weekday, the 30-year-old mother clutched the ill toddler in her lap as she sat outside a government hospital in Maiduguri, the capital of northeast Nigeria’s Borno State. The two had just finished yet another doctor’s appointment in hopes of curing the child.

Although cranky as any other sick two-year-old, it is Amina’s hair – brownish and seemingly bald in several spots – that’s a visible sign of the malnourishment doctors had previously diagnosed. Yet, despite months of treatment with a protein-heavy, ready-to-eat paste, Ali says progress has been slow, and her daughter might require more hospital visits.

“She gets sick, gets a little better, and then falls ill again,” she said, frustrated. Already, Ali and her family have had to move homes several times because of the Boko Haram conflict. They were displaced from Damboa town, about 89km (55 miles) away, and now live in Maiduguri as displaced persons.

Adding to her woes is the reduced access to care in recent months as several aid clinics she visits for free treatment have begun to scale back operations, or in some cases, completely shut their services. “Honestly, their interventions were really helpful, and we need them to come back and help our children,” Ali said.

Amina is only one of some five million children across northeast and northwest Nigeria suffering from malnourishment in what experts have called the region’s most severe food crisis in years. The troubled northeast region has, for a decade and a half, been in the throes of a conflict waged by the armed group Boko Haram, and prolonged insecurity has disrupted food supplies. In the northwest, bandit groups are causing similar upheavals, resulting in a hunger crisis that state governments are struggling to contain.

Compounding the problem this year are the massive, brutal funding cuts roiling aid organisations, which have often stepped in to help by providing food assistance to the 2.3 million displaced northeast Nigerians. Many of those organisations were dependent on funds from the United States, which, since February, has reduced contributions to aid programmes globally by about 75 percent.

The World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations food aid agency and the world’s largest provider of food assistance, was forced to shut down more than half of all its nutrition clinics across the northeast in August, Emmanuel Bigenimana, who leads northeast Nigeria operations, told Al Jazeera from the agency’s site in Maiduguri. Some 300,000 children are cut off from needed nutrition supplements, he said.

Already, in July, WFP doled out its last reserves of grains for displaced adults and families, Bigenimana added, standing by a row of half-empty tent warehouses. A few men removed grain sacks from the tents and loaded them onto trucks bound for neighbouring Chad, a country also caught in complex crises. For Nigeria, he said, which is in the lean season before harvest, there was no more food.

Insecurity fuels food crisis

Northeast Nigeria should be a food basket for the country, due to its fertile, savannah vegetation suitable for cultivating nuts and grains. However, since the Boko Haram conflict broke out, the food supply has dwindled. Climate shocks in the increasingly arid region have added to the problems.

Boko Haram aims to control the territory and has been active since 2011. The group’s operations are mainly in Borno, neighbouring states in the northeast, and across the border in Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. It gained global notoriety in 2014 for the kidnapping of female students in Chibok. Internal fractures and Nigeria’s military response have reduced the group’s capacity in recent years, but it still controls some territory, and a breakaway faction is affiliated with ISIL (ISIS). More than 35,000 people have been killed in attacks by the group, and more than 2 million are displaced.

Before the insecurity, families in the region, particularly outside the urban metropolis of Maiduguri, survived on subsistence farming, tilling plots of land, and selling surplus harvest. These days, that is hardly an option. The military has hunkered down in garrisoned towns since 2019 to avoid troop losses. It is hard to find cultivating space amid the trenches and security barriers constructed in such places, security analyst Kabir Adamu of intelligence firm Beacon Consulting, told Al Jazeera. Those who venture outside the towns risk being targeted by armed fighters.

In rural areas not under army control, Boko Haram operates as a sort of government, exploiting villagers to generate money.

“The armed actors collect taxes from them to use land for farming,” Adamu said, adding that for rural farmers, those taxes often prove heavy on the pockets. In more unlucky scenarios, farmers have been killed if they were believed to be military informants. In January, 40 farmers were executed in the town of Baga. Fishermen have similarly been targeted.

The vicious cycle has repeated itself for years, and the compounding effect is the current food crisis, experts say.

Just 45 minutes from Maiduguri, in Konduga town, farmer Mustapha Modu, 55, tilled the earth in anticipation of rainfall on a cool weekday. He had just returned from a short journey to Maiduguri, braving the risky highways to buy seedlings in hopes of a good season.

Even as Modu planted, he worried that harvest might be impossible. There are widespread fears that Boko Haram fighters often lie in wait and then pounce on farmers to seize harvests. At one time, he said, his family of three wives and 17 children depended on handouts, but those hardly reached Konduga any more, so he had to do something.

“It’s been a long time since we saw them in our village,” Modu said of food aid distributors. “That’s why I managed to go and get some seedlings, even though the insurgents are still on our neck.”

Aid cuts risk more ‘violence’

The UN and its agencies were the focus of aid cuts from Washington in April, leading to the WFP receiving zero aid from the US this year, Bigenimana said. Like the US, other donors such as the European Union and the United Kingdom have also cut back on aid, instead diverting money to security as tensions remain high over Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The agency catered to some 1.3 million displaced people and others in hard-to-reach areas, fringe locations accessible only by helicopter. For children, the agency ran several nutrition clinics and supported government hospitals with ready-to-use food, a protein mixture made mostly of groundnut, which can rapidly stabilise a malnourished child.

Funding cuts caused the WFP to begin rationing supplies in recent months. In July, resources in Nigeria were completely emptied. At least $130m is required for the agency to speedily get back on track with its operations here, Bigenimana said. Extended lack of support, he said, could push more people into danger.

“People are attempting to go and get firewood to sell outside the secure points,” the official said. “Even when we delay distribution on normal days, people protest. So we are expecting that, and it could get violent.”

Multiple other NGOs across the region were also hit by the Trump aid cuts. They not only provided food aid or nutrition treatment, but also medical services, and crucial vaccines children need in the first years of life to guard against infectious diseases like measles.

Analysts like Adamu, however, criticise aid groups for what he said is their failure to create a system where people don’t rely on food aid. In Borno, the state government has, since 2021, gradually shut down camps for internally displaced people and resettled some in their communities. The aim, the government argues, is to reduce dependency and restore dignity. However, the move faces widespread backlash as aid agencies and rights organisations point out that some areas are still unsafe, and that displaced people simply move to other camps.

“They should have supported the government on security reforms for the state,” Adamu argued. That, he said, would have been a more sustainable way of empowering people and would have eased the food crisis.

Rain time, sick time

For now, the food crisis looks set to continue, and children in particular appear to be bearing the brunt, especially as heavy rains arrive.

Muhammad Bashir Abdullahi, an officer with medical aid group Doctors without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, told Al Jazeera that more malnourished children are being admitted to the organisation’s nutrition facility in Maiduguri since early August. It is possible, he said, that the shuttered services in other organisations were contributing to the higher numbers.

“We used to admit 200 children weekly, but last week we admitted up to 400 children,” Abdullahi said. MSF, which is not dependent on US aid, has recorded more than 6,000 malnourished children in its Maiduguri nutrition centre since January. Typically, children receive the protein paste, or in acute cases, a special milk solution. Abdullahi said more children are likely to be admitted in the coming weeks.

Back at the government hospital where Ali was seeking treatment for her daughter, another woman stopped outside the clinic with her children, twin baby boys.

One of them was sick, the mother, 33-year-old Fatima Muhammad, complained, and is suffering from a swollen head. This is the third hospital she was visiting, as two other facilities managed by NGOs were overwhelmed. Unfortunately, her son had not been accepting the protein paste, a sign that medical experts say signals acute malnutrition.

“His brother is sitting and crawling already, but he still cannot sit,” Muhammad said, her face squeezed in a frown. She blamed herself for not eating enough during her pregnancy, although she hardly had a choice. “I think that’s what affected them. I just need help for my son, nothing more.”

Buhari, remembered for an anti-corruption drive and faltering economy, leaves behind a contentious legacy.

Nigeria’s former President Muhammadu Buhari has died in London at the age of 82 following a long illness.

“President Buhari died today in London at about 4:30pm (15:30 GMT) following a prolonged illness,” President Bola Tinubu’s spokesperson announced on Sunday via the social media platform X.

Buhari made history in 2015 when he became the first opposition candidate in Nigeria’s modern era to defeat a sitting president at the polls, unseating Goodluck Jonathan in what was widely praised as the country’s most credible election.

A retired major general, Buhari first ruled Nigeria in the 1980s after taking power in a military coup. He later rebranded himself as a civilian politician, adopting a softer image in flowing kaftans and declaring himself a “converted democrat”.

Known for his austere style and fiery rhetoric against corruption, Buhari was seen by his supporters as a reformer. “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody,” he often declared, seeking to position himself above Nigeria’s entrenched political factions.

Yet his presidency struggled to contain rising insecurity. While he promised to defeat Boko Haram and restore order, armed violence spread far beyond the northeast. Gunmen, separatists, and criminal groups operated with impunity across large parts of the country by the end of his tenure.

Still, Buhari leaves behind a legacy as a symbol of democratic change in Nigeria, even if the transformation he promised remained incomplete.

A mixed legacy

Buhari is being remembered as both a pivotal figure in the country’s democratic evolution and a deeply flawed leader when it came to economic management and security.

Speaking to Al Jazeera from London, Alexis Akwagyiram, managing editor at Semafor and a longtime observer of Nigerian politics, said Buhari will be remembered for achieving what many thought impossible: winning power as an opposition candidate.

“He was the first opposition candidate since the return to civilian rule to win at the ballot box,” Akwagyiram said, referencing Buhari’s 2015 victory over Jonathan. “History will remember him favourably for that.”

Yet Akwagyiram was blunt about the failings that marked Buhari’s time in office. He described the former general as “very ineffective” in managing Nigeria’s economy, citing his insistence on maintaining a strong naira, which led to a convoluted system of multiple exchange rates and two recessions during his tenure.

“His handling of the economy wasn’t great,” Akwagyiram noted, pointing to his fallout with former Niger Delta insurgents that led to renewed attacks on oil infrastructure. Combined with low global oil prices and the COVID-19 pandemic, these factors pushed Nigeria – once Africa’s largest economy – down to fourth place.

On security, Buhari’s record was equally disappointing, Akwagyiram said. Although elected with a promise to crack down on Boko Haram, an insurgency in Nigeria’s northeast only expanded under his leadership. A rival faction, the ISIL affiliate in West Africa Province (ISWAP), also emerged and spread, while armed kidnapping gangs flourished in the northwest.

“All that happened was Boko Haram and ISWAP both proliferated under his tenure,” Akwagyiram said. “The armed forces were spread thin across the country and became weakened overall.”

Despite the criticisms, Akwagyiram highlighted why Buhari resonated so strongly with many Nigerians. “He had the personal brand of integrity and honesty,” he said. “In a political climate renowned for corruption, that was appealing.”

Buhari’s austere image and northern support base helped him build a national coalition that twice propelled him to the presidency, a rare feat in Nigerian politics.

“He didn’t try to enrich himself,” Akwagyiram said. “That’s something history will look on favourably.”

More than six million people in the Lake Chad Basin are caught in a cycle of violence, displacement, and ecological disaster.

As Boko Haram exploits shrinking resources and fragile security, communities face impossible choices — return home under threat or stay in limbo.

In this episode of Pinch Point, explore how conflict, climate change, and geopolitics are shaping this crisis.

Renewed violence by armed groups Boko Haram and ISIL (ISIS) has forced thousands of people to leave their homes in Nigeria.

Despite repeated government pledges, the military has been unable to end the unrest.

So why is it continuing – and what threats does it pose?

Presenter: 

Elizabeth Puranam

Guests: 

Kabir Adamu – Managing director at Beacon Security and Intelligence in Abuja

David Otto – Deputy director of counterterrorism training at the International Academy for the Fight Against Terrorism in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Ovigwe Eguegu – Peace and security policy analyst at Development Reimagined in Abuja