INSIDE THE CRTV FAKE DECREE SCANDAL THAT HAS EXPOSED THE RAW BRUTALITY OF CAMEROON’S SUCCESSION WAR
On the morning of June 22, 2026, a man walked into the headquarters of Cameroon Radio Television in Yaoundé’s Mballa II district carrying sealed envelopes. Inside were two documents presented as official presidential decrees: one nominating a vice-president of the Republic, the other announcing a major cabinet reshuffle. Both bore what appeared to be the official seal of the Presidency of the Republic, a signature attributed to Paul Biya, and a meticulous official layout. The man asked that the decrees be read on the 5 p.m. national radio bulletin. He was arrested before a single word went to air. What has unfolded in the days since is not simply the story of a failed forgery. It is a window into the violent, factional, and entirely ungoverned power struggle consuming a country whose president is incapacitated in a Geneva clinic and whose succession remains constitutionally unresolved.
The man arrested was identified as Johann Adriel Sitchom Kuate, a thirty-something former student of the Faculty of Mines and Petroleum Industries and an administrative contractor with no apparent political profile. The forged decree, numbered 2026/202 and dated June 8, 2026, nominated Sitchom Kuate himself to the post of vice-president. He reportedly told investigators that God had revealed to him he would become Cameroon’s chosen vice-president, and that he had decided to make that prophecy real. Yaoundé political circles dismissed this explanation before the ink was dry on the arrest report, and they were right to. The pertinent question was never who delivered the envelopes. It was whose name appeared on the original documents before Sitchom Kuate’s name was substituted in.
The last decree signed by Biya bore the number 201. The forged document carried the number 202. The sequential numbering is not the work of a religious fanatic acting alone.
That question was answered, with considerable political courage, by Valere Bessala, president of the Jouvence party, who stated publicly that Oswald Baboke, deputy director of the Civil Cabinet at the Presidency of the Republic, was the figure whose name originally appeared on the forged vice-presidential decree. According to Bessala, Baboke was not the perpetrator of a coup attempt but its intended victim: a man set up, framed, and then “sacrificed” once the operation was intercepted and its exposure threatened those who designed it. Bessala pointed to two details he described as telling. Sitchom Kuate was arrested at CRTV, where the police have jurisdiction, not the gendarmerie. He is being held in gendarmerie custody, with no complaint from his family. The decree number was 2026/202. The last document Paul Biya signed was numbered 201. These are not the fingerprints of an isolated religious fanatic.
Oswald Baboke is not a peripheral figure. He has been at the Presidency since 2000, rising through the Civil Cabinet to become deputy director in March 2018, a position he has held for eight years. He shares his academic formation at the Institut des Relations Internationales du Cameroun with Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, the Secretary General of the Presidency and the most powerful official in the Cameroonian state. Both men are regularly described as pillars of the network surrounding First Lady Chantal Biya, whose inner circle has long been understood to be one of the two principal factions competing for positioning around the president’s succession. Baboke, like Chantal Biya herself, is from the East region. He oversees the Chantal Biya Foundation and co-directs official ceremonies at the Etoudi palace. He is, in the language of Cameroonian political analysis, one of the people who whispers in the president’s ear. He is also, it now appears, a target.
The timing of the operation is not coincidental. As Global Echos has reported, Paul Biya departed Cameroon on June 7 following a health incident at the National Day reception on May 20 that required the immediate intervention of his medical team. He is currently in Geneva, where he has been receiving treatment at a private clinic. The government has denied he is hospitalised. Those denials have become structurally indistinguishable from every previous denial issued during every previous Geneva stay, a pattern we documented in detail earlier this month. A president who is medically incapacitated abroad, whose vice presidency remains constitutionally unfilled despite a constitutional amendment creating it in April 2026, and whose government has been promised a reshuffle since December 31, 2025 without a single appointment being made: that is the vacuum into which the CRTV operation was inserted. Vacuums of this kind do not produce amateur mystics. They produce calculated moves by organised factions.
The response from Baboke’s circle has been revealing. On June 30, his wife Crescence Baboke broke months of silence to publish a lengthy statement denouncing what she described as a “methodical disinformation campaign” against her family. She enumerated the accusations point by point: illegal gold trafficking toward Dubai, forged decrees, billions linked to petroleum products. Her invocation of scripture and her comparison of her family’s accusers to Judas and the Pharisees was the language of a household under political siege, not of one mounting a public relations exercise. The same week, forensic WhatsApp records from the phone of murdered journalist Martinez Zogo emerged showing direct contact between Zogo and Baboke in the weeks before Zogo’s abduction and killing in January 2023, a case whose full chain of command has never been judicially resolved. The Baboke network is being attacked on multiple fronts simultaneously, and the CRTV incident was the most brazen strike of all.
What the CRTV affair has confirmed is something Global Echos has argued across its coverage of Cameroon and the continent’s entrenched leadership systems more broadly: the real danger of a prolonged, opaque, and medically compromised presidency is not the absence of a leader. It is the presence of multiple competing factions, each with access to state institutions, each willing to use those institutions as weapons, and none constrained by law, accountability, or any functioning independent check on their behaviour. The gold sector has been looted through the same institutional capture, as our investigation into Cameroon’s missing gold established. The security services have been weaponised in the same way. The judiciary, including the Special Criminal Tribunal, has long functioned as a tool of factional combat dressed in legal clothing. What is new is the velocity. Biya is in Geneva. The vice presidency is empty. A cabinet reshuffle six months overdue has still not been announced. And in that void, someone walked into CRTV with a sealed envelope and tried to manufacture a fait accompli. The only reason Cameroon avoided an institutional catastrophe on June 22 was the vigilance of a single journalist who read a document and felt something was wrong. That is a very thin margin between order and chaos for a country of 27 million people.
