Biya and the Legacy of Division: Why Ambazonia Must Unite, Organize, and Prepare for the End of an Era

A ruler’s departure cannot liberate a divided and unprepared people. But a united, disciplined, diplomatically mobilized, and institutionally prepared people can transform the departure of a ruler into the beginning of a nation. The era of waiting must end. The era of national readiness must begin. Ambazonia must stand together—and Ambazonia must be ready.

By Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News

The Question History Is Asking

Paul Biya’s era is approaching its inevitable end. No ruler lives forever. No political order, however entrenched, can escape time, institutional decay, and generational change. Yet Ambazonians must not mistake the eventual departure of one ruler for the collapse of the system he built and sustained.

Regimes prepare for succession. Entrenched interests prepare to survive. Political elites prepare to reposition themselves. Foreign governments prepare to protect what they call stability. Security institutions prepare to preserve their influence. The question confronting Ambazonia is therefore brutally simple: Are we preparing too?

Biya has governed La République du Cameroun since 1982. Following the disputed presidential election of October 2025, official results awarded him 53.66 percent of the vote, and he was sworn in for another seven-year term in November. At the age of ninety-three, however, the physical limits of human life make political transition unavoidable, regardless of official ceremonies, constitutional arrangements, or carefully managed appearances. His departure may come through incapacity, resignation, constitutional succession, or death. No one can responsibly predict the precise moment. What can be said with certainty is that the struggle to control the post-Biya order has already begun. Reuters reported on the disputed election and inauguration.

Ambazonia must not wait for an announcement from Yaoundé before deciding what it wants, who can credibly speak for it, and how it will respond. Political openings are often brief. By the time the public recognizes that history has moved, powerful interests may already have negotiated the new arrangement behind closed doors. The decisive question is not whether Biya’s end is near. The decisive question is whether Ambazonia will meet the coming transition united, organized, and ready.

The Architecture of Division

Paul Biya did not create the constitutional injustice inflicted upon the former British Southern Cameroons. Its foundations preceded his presidency. They were laid through an unequal political union, the progressive centralization of authority, the dismantling of the federal structure, and the steady erosion of Southern Cameroons’ inherited legal, educational, administrative, and cultural institutions. But Biya inherited that system in 1982 and perfected its politics of division.

Under his rule, centralization became more than a method of government. It became an instrument of political survival. Southern Cameroonians were absorbed individually into the machinery of La République du Cameroun while their collective identity and bargaining power were systematically weakened.

Appointments, contracts, titles, promotions, and ceremonial influence were selectively distributed. Individuals were elevated while the people were diminished. Loyalty to the presidency was rewarded; loyalty to the historical rights of Southern Cameroons was treated as disobedience or subversion.

Southern Cameroonians could become ministers, governors, directors, parliamentarians, professors, generals, and senior officials. Yet they were not permitted to exercise meaningful authority on behalf of Southern Cameroons as a distinct political community. Their personal advancement was frequently presented as proof of collective inclusion, even as the institutions that protected their people were being dismantled. This was not genuine equality. It was incorporation without self-government, representation without effective power, and visibility without sovereignty.

Division was encouraged between the named Northwest and Southwest, between counties and communities, between political elites and ordinary citizens, between traditional authorities and civic movements, and between those at home and those in the diaspora. In time, these divisions spread into the restoration movement itself. Organizations multiplied. Leaders competed for titles. Personal rivalries overshadowed national strategy. Accusations replaced coordination.

Every fracture weakened the collective ability of Ambazonians to act as one people. Every internal quarrel created space for manipulation. Every struggle for personal supremacy postponed the struggle for national freedom. The lesson is painful but unavoidable: a divided Ambazonia has always been easier to dominate than a united Southern Cameroons.

From Assimilation to War

When lawyers and teachers began protesting in 2016, they were not initially calling for war. Lawyers sought to defend the common-law system against its continuing erosion. Teachers sought to protect English-language education from administrative and cultural assimilation. Their demands concerned professional standards, institutional integrity, and the survival of systems inherited from the former British Southern Cameroons.

These grievances could have opened the way to serious constitutional dialogue. Instead, the state answered civic protest with repression. Arrests, intimidation, internet shutdowns, militarization, and violence transformed professional grievances into a wider political awakening. The state’s response revealed that the degradation of Southern Cameroons’ institutions was not an isolated administrative failure. It was the consequence of a centralized political order unwilling to recognize genuine constitutional equality.

The conflict that followed devastated communities, displaced families, interrupted education, destroyed livelihoods, and exposed civilians to grave abuses by state forces and armed non-state actors. Human Rights Watch has documented abuses against civilians by both government security forces and separatist groups. UNHCR reported that Cameroon as a whole had approximately 969,000 internally displaced people by June 2025, alongside hundreds of thousands of returnees, refugees, and asylum-seekers. Human Rights Watch, UNHCR.

Behind every statistic is a human life: a child denied education, a farmer separated from the land, a family driven from its home, a patient unable to reach medical care, or a generation growing up amid uncertainty and fear. Yet suffering alone does not produce liberation. Sacrifice without organization can end in exhaustion. Courage without discipline can be wasted. Anger without a national strategy can be manipulated or turned inward.

The suffering of Ambazonia must therefore be transformed into unity, institutional preparation, diplomatic leverage, humanitarian responsibility, and national purpose. The Departure of Biya Will Not Automatically Bring Freedom When Biya leaves power, the institutions and interests surrounding him will attempt to survive. A new face may be presented as evidence of a new beginning while the underlying machinery of domination remains intact.

A successor may promise dialogue, reconstruction, decentralization, pardons, development projects, or national reconciliation. Familiar Southern Cameroonian personalities may be recruited to market a refurbished version of the same political arrangement. New ministries and commissions may be announced. Limited concessions may be offered to divide moderates from restorationists and the Northwest from the Southwest.

International partners, fearing instability in Central Africa and the Gulf of Guinea, may prioritize continuity in Yaoundé over justice for Ambazonia. They may embrace any successor capable of promising order, protecting established commercial interests, and cooperating on regional security. The language of stability may once again be used to postpone the rights of a people.

There may also be a fierce contest among ruling-party factions, military commanders, security networks, business interests, regional blocs, and members of the presidential establishment. In that moment, Ambazonia could become an organized national force whose demands cannot be ignored—or a fragmented spectator watching others negotiate its future. That choice is to be made now.

The greatest strategic mistake would be to wait for Biya’s departure before building unity, identifying minimum national objectives, establishing credible representation, and preparing for different transition scenarios. A people that begins organizing only after the political opening appears may discover that the decisive arrangements have already been completed. Biya’s departure will create uncertainty. Whether that uncertainty becomes an opportunity for Ambazonia will depend on what Ambazonians do before the transition begins.

Readiness Is Greater Than Armed Capacity

Ambazonia must be ready to fight for its future, but the word fight must be understood in its complete national meaning. A liberation struggle is not sustained by weapons alone. It is fought through political organization, disciplined civic resistance, diplomacy, strategic communication, economic coordination, humanitarian service, lawful community protection, international advocacy, and the construction of credible institutions.

Military action without political discipline can increase civilian suffering and weaken international legitimacy. Diplomacy without organization and leverage can become an endless conversation. Leadership without accountability can reproduce the very domination the movement claims to oppose.

National readiness must therefore rest upon a simple and memorable foundation: One people. One minimum national platform. One diplomatic message. One transition plan. One unbreakable commitment to protect civilians and prevent factional war.

Ambazonian organizations do not need to agree on every personality, title, tactic, or historical interpretation before they cooperate. Unity does not require uniformity. What they need is agreement on the essential national objectives: protecting the population, preserving Southern Cameroons’ identity, securing humanitarian access, obtaining the release of political detainees, demanding accountability for atrocities, pursuing credible internationally supported negotiations, and establishing a political process through which Ambazonians can freely determine their future.

Readiness also requires a coordinated diplomatic strategy. African governments, the African Union, the United Nations, the Commonwealth, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the European Union, and neighboring Nigeria must hear a coherent national case. Ambazonian representatives must communicate with evidence, discipline, consistency, and professional credibility.

The world must no longer hear several organizations advancing contradictory positions while attacking one another more aggressively than they confront the political system responsible for the conflict.

A Movement Seeking Statehood Must Demonstrate Statecraft. The true test of readiness is not only whether a movement can resist. It is whether it can govern responsibly.

Who will protect civilians during a political transition? Who will keep hospitals, schools, markets, electricity, water, telecommunications, and transportation operating? Who will prevent looting, revenge killings, arbitrary arrests, land seizures, and factional warfare? Who will protect minorities, political opponents, and citizens who remain uncertain about the restoration movement? Who will collect and spend public funds transparently? Who will ensure that armed authority remains subordinate to constitutional civilian leadership? These questions cannot be postponed until the morning after. They must be answered now.

Ambazonian constitutional scholars, lawyers, economists, engineers, educators, health professionals, security specialists, business leaders, traditional authorities, women’s organizations, youth representatives, humanitarian networks, and local administrators should already be developing practical transition plans.

The nation needs provisional frameworks for public administration, justice, community policing, economic continuity, humanitarian relief, infrastructure protection, public finance, and constitutional government. It needs rules governing the relationship between political leadership and defense structures. It needs independent financial oversight and credible procedures for choosing transitional representatives. A flag, anthem, declaration, or presidential title cannot substitute for functioning institutions. A movement seeking statehood must demonstrate the capacity for statecraft.

The First Battlefield Is Unity

The most urgent Ambazonian battle is against internal fragmentation. Unity does not mean blind obedience to one leader. It does not require the elimination of legitimate disagreement. It means building a disciplined structure through which disagreements can be debated and resolved without destroying the national cause.

Leaders must stop treating every disagreement as treason. Organizations must stop behaving as though the liberation of Ambazonia depends on the permanent elevation of one personality. Political authority must rest on transparent mandates rather than self-declaration. Public contributions must be independently audited. Armed groups must respect civilian life, humanitarian principles, and legitimate civilian authority.

The diaspora must support the homeland rather than turn the suffering of those at home into material for factional competition abroad. Those who fund the struggle have the right to demand accountability, but financial contributions do not entitle anyone to endanger civilians, silence criticism, or claim ownership of the national cause. No foreign government will respect a movement that cannot respect its own people. No population will confidently entrust its future to leaders who cannot account for money, control their language, restrain their supporters, protect civilians, or cooperate in the presence of a common danger.

Biya’s system benefited from every Ambazonian quarrel. The most powerful rejection of his legacy would therefore be the construction of a national culture of solidarity, accountability, and institutional discipline.

A National Readiness Compact

Ambazonia should urgently establish a National Readiness Compact bringing together political organizations, civil society, traditional authorities, women, young people, professional associations, business leaders, humanitarian networks, the diaspora, and responsible defense representatives. The compact should not attempt to resolve every ideological or leadership dispute. Its immediate purpose should be to establish minimum rules of national conduct:

No deliberate attacks on civilians. No inter-factional violence. No political assassinations or intimidation. No ethnic or county-based incitement. No forced financial collections. No unauthorized diversion of public contributions. No interference with humanitarian assistance. No use of children in hostilities. No retaliation against families for the alleged conduct of relatives.

The compact should establish a joint transition-planning council, a unified diplomatic working group, an independent financial oversight body, a humanitarian coordination mechanism, and a secure national communications system. It should also create a process for investigating internal abuses and resolving disputes without violence.

These institutions need not replace existing organizations immediately. Their purpose would be to coordinate those organizations around minimum national responsibilities and to ensure that no political opening finds Ambazonia without a credible plan. This is how separate movements begin acting like one national liberation front. This is how resistance becomes political leverage. This is how a liberation movement becomes a government in waiting.

Courage Must Be Joined to Restraint

The transition at the end of the Biya era may create an extraordinary opening. It may also produce confusion, repression, manipulation, opportunism, or wider conflict. Ambazonia will therefore need both the courage to seize legitimate political opportunities and the restraint to avoid actions that destroy the nation it seeks to establish.

This is not the hour for reckless rumors, unverified declarations, premature celebrations, or indiscriminate violence. It is the hour for vigilance, reconciliation, documentation, organization, humanitarian preparation, and strategic diplomacy.

The struggle must remain directed against structures of domination—not against civilians because of their language, ethnicity, birthplace, occupation, or political uncertainty. Ambazonia cannot build freedom through collective punishment. It must demonstrate that its future republic will be governed by law, constitutional order, pluralism, accountability, and respect for human life.

How Ambazonians conduct the struggle will influence the character of the nation that emerges from it. A movement that normalizes impunity before independence will struggle to establish justice afterward. A movement that silences dissent during liberation may suppress opposition in government. A movement that disregards civilian life cannot convincingly promise human dignity. The methods must therefore remain worthy of the nation Ambazonia intends to build.

The End of a Ruler, the Beginning of Responsibility

Paul Biya’s eventual departure will close a long chapter, but it will not write the next one for Ambazonia. That responsibility belongs to Ambazonians. The coming transition will not wait for Ambazonia to settle every quarrel. It will not pause while leaders compete for titles, organizations attack one another, or the diaspora debates who should stand first. History does not automatically reward those who suffered the longest or sacrificed the most. It rewards people who transform grievance into organization, sacrifice into strength, and political opportunity into coordinated national action.

Biya’s enduring legacy may be division. Ambazonia’s answer must be unity. His system may have governed through fear. Ambazonia’s answer must be courage. His regime may have weakened institutions. Ambazonia’s answer must be constitutional preparation. His government may have scattered the people. Ambazonia’s answer must be solidarity across every county, community, organization, and continent.

Let no Ambazonian believe that someone else will prepare the nation. Let no leader place personal ambition above the survival of the people. Let no organization mistake factional dominance for national liberation. Let no armed actor imagine that a weapon provides authority over the people. And let no political opening find Ambazonia asleep.

This is the hour to reconcile, organize, protect, mobilize, and prepare. Not tomorrow. Not when Yaoundé announces a transition. Not after powerful interests have already negotiated the future behind closed doors. The work must begin now.

A ruler’s departure cannot liberate a divided and unprepared people. But a united, disciplined, diplomatically mobilized, and institutionally prepared people can transform the departure of a ruler into the beginning of a nation. The era of waiting must end. The era of national readiness must begin. Ambazonia must stand together—and Ambazonia must be ready.

Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News