Claim: Cameroon President Paul Biya appoints his son as Vice President
Source: Social media, news portals
Verdict: False
Researched by Alfa Shaban
On April 4, 2026, a joint sitting of the Cameroonian Parliament passed a controversial bill that allowed the sitting President to appoint a Vice President, reinstating a position that was scrapped in 1972.
Political commentary before and during the vote centred on how the new law was going to allow incumbent Paul Biya to handpick a successor in his absence. The Vice President, according to the law, takes over in the absence of the President. Till the law was passed, the Senate President served in the President’s absence.
A day after the vote was passed, posts on social media suggested that Paul Biya had appointed his son, Franck, as the new Vice President. Some media houses, like Arise TV Nigeria, Citizen Tanzania and GhanaWeb, subsequently reported that the President’s son was the new Vice President, drawing critical reactions across social media.
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One of the earliest accounts that reported the issue was the @Aesalerte account on X, which alleged in a post dated April 5, 2026, that Biya had by decree appointed his son to three separate positions – as Vice President, head of the army and minister of defence.
The account shared a supposed decree dated April 4 and signed by Paul Biya as proof of the appointment of Franck to the three positions.
This report will interrogate whether Franck Biya has been or was appointed as Vice President.
Fact-check
GhanaFact used three distinct steps to verify whether a new Vice President was appointed on the same day lawmakers passed the bill. First, we probed the viral decree purportedly signed by the President. The document was dated April 4, 2026, the same day the Bill was passed. According to Cameroonian laws, a Bill passed by Parliament requires presidential assent to become law.
In this case, the Bill had yet to be signed into law, and thus an appointment could not be made in relation to it.
Secondly, we run checks across all social media handles of President Biya and the presidency, where signed decrees are usually posted. There was no evidence of any post specifically on April 4 or in the days that followed relating to the appointment of a Vice President.
Thirdly, no media house, local or international, reported on the appointment of a Vice President, except for reports on the reinstatement of the role of Vice President (here, here, here) FactSpace West Africa also noted that political activists and some media platforms on X had labelled the April 4 decree as a fake document.
A Cameroonian fact-checker, Laure Nganlay, affirmed that the document was fake: “The post of Vice President has been created (voted by the National Assembly and Senate during a Congress). Appointment is yet to come.”
Verdict
The claim that the son of the Cameroon president has been appointed Vice President is False.
