Biya's 25 years in power: Cameroonians are divided as President Paul Biya marks 25 years in office. Tansa Musa reports from Yaounde.

Waving flags and chanting "Long Live Paul Biya", supporters of Cameroon's president marked the 25th anniversary of his rule in November but many citizens lamented generalised poverty, poor governance, widespread corruption and a lack of liberties.

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Seizing the opportunity, Biya, sub-Saharan Africa's fifth-longest serving ruler, urged more than 2,000 people gathered in front of his Etoudi presidential palace in the capital Yaounde, to work harder to revive the economy.

"Without entering into details, our achievements are overwhelmingly positive," the 74-year-old president told the crowd, who danced and waved national flags. "Peace and stability reign in Cameroon. Democracy and the rule of law are consolidated daily. Our economy has rediscovered the road to growth," he told his supporters, many of whom wore colourful shirts emblazoned with his image.

Hundreds of militants of the ruling Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) staged a 3km march through Yaounde. Traditional dance groups performed outside the national museum and a concert blared into the night. But in comparison to previous years, turnout at the celebrations was low. Some observers attributed this to a crackdown on corruption, which has made party bosses cautious about lavishing money on the celebrations. Others said there was little to celebrate.

Official statistics show that around a fifth of the people in the main cities of Douala and Yaounde are unemployed, but independent sources put it at over 40%. More than two-thirds of the active population scrapes a living in the informal sector, often by hawking goods in the streets.

Biya became president on 6 November 1982, as the successor of the first post-independence president, Amadou Ahidjo. He promised swift democratic reform, liberalisation of the economy, and a war on corruption. At the time, Cameroon had just started exporting oil. The economy was booming with a 7%-plus annual growth rate.

Today, 25 years later, the economy has foundered after a collapse in world commodities prices in the mid-1980s and mismanagement. In 1988, the president embarked on a series of World Bank/IMF-pushed structural adjustment programmes. Public sector wages were slashed by 70%, most of the country's public and parastatal companies were sold off, and over 40,000 workers made redundant. In April 2006, the IMF and World Bank ranked Cameroon among the world's heavily indebted poor countries.Today, more than 40% of Cameroon's 17 million people live below the poverty line.

On the political front, after weathering a military coup two years into his rule, Biya has imposed political stability, but the opposition and civil society complain of successive rigged elections and the muzzling of dissent. Amnesty International in a report last year denounced the detention of several journalists and politicians from the Anglophone and mainly-Muslim north--a centre of opposition to Biya's powerbase in the Christian, Francophone south.

In 1996, after 15 years in power, Biya amended the constitution to increase the term of office from five to seven years, renewable once. That automatically gave him another 14 years at the helm. After all this, his party members still want him to amend the constitution when his second seven-year term expires in 2011 to remove the limit on the presidential term. This, they say, is to give him more time to complete the "great ambitions" he has for the country.

Biya himself has refused to comment on the issue even though it is believed that he actually initiated the calls to amend the constitution again. However, the move has generated widespread opposition within the ruling party itself, and within the opposition and civil society. And that is not good for the health of the country.