41 Facts About Ahmadou Ahidjo

Ahmadou Babatoura Ahidjo was a Cameroonian politician who was the first President of Cameroon, holding the office from 1960 until 1982.

Ahmadou Ahidjo established a single-party state under the Cameroon National Union in 1966.

In 1972, Ahmadou Ahidjo abolished the federation in favor of a unitary state.

Ahmadou Ahidjo resigned from the presidency in 1982, and Paul Biya assumed the presidency.

Ahmadou Ahidjo was born in Garoua, a major river port along the Benue River in northern Cameroun, which was at the time a French mandate territory.

Ahmadou Ahidjo's mother was a Fulani of slave descent, while his father was a Fulani village chief.

Ahmadou Ahidjo's mother raised him as a Muslim and sent him to Quranic kuttab school as a child.

Ahmadou Ahidjo returned to school and obtained his school certification a year later.

Ahmadou Ahidjo spent the next three years attending secondary school at the Ecole Primaire Superieur in Yaounde, the capital of the mandate, studying for a career in the civil service.

Ahmadou Ahidjo's classmates are, among others, Felix Sabbal-Lecco, Minister under his government, Abel Moume Etia, first Cameroonian meteorological engineer and writer, as well as Jean-Faustin Betayene, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Federal Cameroon.

At school, Ahmadou Ahidjo played soccer and competed as a cyclist.

In 1942, Ahmadou Ahidjo joined the civil service as a radio operator for a postal service.

From 1953 to 1957, Ahmadou Ahidjo was a member of the Assembly of the French Union.

From 28 January 1957, to 10 May 1957, Ahmadou Ahidjo served as President of the Legislative Assembly of Cameroon.

In February 1958, Ahmadou Ahidjo became Prime Minister at the age of thirty-four after Mbida resigned.

Ahmadou Ahidjo was reassuring towards the Church and the Muslim aristocracies in the north of the country and succeeded in embodying the union of conservative currents concerned about the growing number of protest movements in the 1950s.

In March 1959, Ahmadou Ahidjo addressed the United Nations General Assembly in order to gather support for France's independence plan.

Ahmadou Ahidjo experienced a rebellion in the 1960s from the UPC, but defeated it by 1970 with the aid of French military force.

Ahmadou Ahidjo proposed and was granted four bills to gather power and declare a state of emergency in order to end the rebellion.

Ahmadou Ahidjo worked with Premier John Foncha of the Anglophone Cameroon throughout the process of integrating the two parts of Cameroon.

In July 1961, Ahmadou Ahidjo attended a conference at which the plans and conditions for merging the Cameroons were made and later adopted by both the National Assemblies of the Francophone and Anglophone Cameroons.

In December 1961, Ahmadou Ahidjo issued a decree that split the federation into administrative regions under the Federal Inspectors of Administration.

On 1 September 1966, Ahmadou Ahidjo achieved his goal of creating a single-party state.

The CNU was established, with Ahmadou Ahidjo maintaining that it was essential to the unity of Cameroon.

Therefore, Ahmadou Ahidjo approved all nominations for the National Assembly as head of the party, and they approved all his legislation.

Ahmadou Ahidjo placed the blame for Cameroon's underdevelopment and poorly implemented town and public planning policies on Cameroon's federal structure, as well as charging federalism with maintaining cleavages and issues between the Anglophone and Francophone parts of Cameroon.

Ahmadou Ahidjo's government argued that managing separate governments in a poor country was too expensive.

Ahmadou Ahidjo announced on 6 May 1972, that he wanted to abolish the federation and put a unitary state into place if the electorate supported the idea in a referendum set for 20 May 1972.

Ahmadou Ahidjo's power presided over not only the state and government, but as commander of the military.

In 1975 Ahmadou Ahidjo instituted the position of Prime Minister, which was filled by Paul Biya.

In 1979, Ahmadou Ahidjo initiated a change in the constitution designating the Prime Minister as successor.

Ahmadou Ahidjo was considered to be more conservative and less charismatic than most post-colonial African leaders, but his policies allowed Cameroon to attain comparative prosperity.

Ahmadou Ahidjo built up a clientelistic network in which he redistributed state resources to maintain control over a diverse Cameroon.

Ahmadou Ahidjo resigned, ostensibly for health reasons, on 4 November 1982 and was succeeded by Prime Minister Paul Biya two days later.

In January 1982, Ahmadou Ahidjo dismissed four CNU members who opposed Biya's presidency.

In exile, Ahmadou Ahidjo was sentenced to death in absentia in February 1984, along with two others, for participation in the June 1983 coup plot, although Biya commuted the sentence to life in prison.

Ahmadou Ahidjo died of a heart attack in Dakar on 30 November 1989 and was buried there.

Ahmadou Ahidjo was officially rehabilitated by a law in December 1991.

Biya said on 30 October 2007 that the matter of returning Ahmadou Ahidjo's remains to Cameroon was "a family affair".

An agreement on returning Ahmadou Ahidjo's remains was reached in June 2009, and it was expected that they would be returned in 2010.

However, as of 2021, Ahmadou Ahidjo remains in Dakar, buried alongside his wife, who died in April of that year.