85-year-old President Paul Biya was sworn in on Tuesday in Cameroon for a seventh term after disputed elections which have divided the country.
Biya pledged to uphold the “integrity (and) unity” of his country in a ceremony overseen by parliament speaker Cavaye Yeguie Djibril.
Biya has been ruling the country for 35 years and was declared winner in the October vote with 71 percent of the ballot.
The elections were marked by low voter turnout, violence and allegations of fraud.
Meanwhile, on the eve of Biya’s inauguration, students and three supervisors, including their headmaster, were abducted from a school in the Northwest Region, where anglophone separatists have launched an armed campaign for independence.
Cameroon’s 22 million people are mainly French-speakers, but around a fifth are Anglophone.