The political class, sensing the ground give way beneath them, has reached for an old reflex: internal purges instead of structural reform. Blame prosecutors. Blame ministers. Blame immigrants. Blame the opposition. Blame anyone—except the system itself.
By Ali Dan Ismael Editor-in-Chief
France is discovering—too late—that empires do not collapse with a bang. They rot, then they fall. What is now branded as a witch hunt—the sudden zeal to investigate, prosecute, reshuffle, and scapegoat—has emerged not from moral awakening but from panic. The books no longer balance. The illusions no longer sell. The creditors are watching. And the myth of French exceptional stability is cracking under the weight of decades of denial.
France did not stumble into this financial precipice by accident. It marched there deliberately, shielded by arrogance and anesthetized by the false profits of imperial leftovers. For generations, Africa subsidized French comfort—through extractive contracts, currency manipulation, rigged trade, and political puppetry masquerading as “cooperation.” Those streams are drying up. Some have already been dammed shut.
Now the reckoning begins.
The political class, sensing the ground give way beneath them, has reached for an old reflex: internal purges instead of structural reform. Blame prosecutors. Blame ministers. Blame immigrants. Blame the opposition. Blame anyone—except the system itself. That is what dying establishments do when they can no longer pay their bills but still want to preserve their myths.
This is not accountability. This is cannibalism.
France’s crisis is not merely fiscal; it is civilizational. You cannot finance a modern welfare state on yesterday’s empire while pretending sovereignty movements, multipolar trade, and global transparency are passing inconveniences. You cannot preach democracy abroad while engineering dependency behind closed doors. And you cannot keep selling “stability” when your own treasury trembles.
The witch hunt will intensify because the fear will intensify. Each arrest, each inquiry, each media spectacle will be framed as renewal. But renewal requires truth—and truth requires admission. Admission that Françafrique is dead. Admission that the old monetary tricks no longer work. Admission that influence built on coercion is not influence at all. History is ruthless with empires that confuse motion for progress.
Yaoundé’s Panic Mirrors Paris
What is unfolding in Cameroon today is the provincial echo of France’s imperial crisis. The investigation ordered against Fuh Calistus Gentry, interim Minister of Mines, is not an isolated corruption story. It is a stress fracture in the architecture of occupation.
Following accusations of trafficking in the issuance of mining permits, the presidency authorized an initial probe into the management of the mining sector. The inquiry, launched on November eleven, twenty twenty-five by the Superior State Control, is expected to escalate to the Special Criminal Court.
The numbers alone expose the rot. Appointed in twenty twenty-three as interim replacement for Dodo Ndoke, Fuh Calistus Gentry reportedly amassed personal assets estimated at nearly ten billion CFA francs in less than two years. Ainsi va la République. This is not reform. It is panic discipline. When the center weakens, the system turns inward, devouring its own managers to preserve the illusion of control.
Why This Matters for Southern Cameroons
This development is of direct and strategic importance to Southern Cameroons. Much of the mineral wealth at the heart of these scandals is tied—directly or indirectly—to territories under military occupation, including Southern Cameroons. Licenses are issued in Yaoundé for land it does not legitimately govern, resources it does not lawfully own, and communities it represses with force. This is not governance. It is extraction under duress.
Every corrupt permit, every illicit concession, every offshore account built on stolen subsoil wealth strengthens the Ambazonian case: an occupying regime cannot lawfully dispose of the resources of a people it subjugates. Corruption here is not incidental. It is systemic. It is the operating logic of occupation.
France’s Shadow and the Breaking Order
France’s financial descent and Yaoundé’s corruption crisis are linked by a long, uncomfortable history. French commercial interests, intermediaries, and legal protections have long benefited from opaque resource arrangements in Cameroon. As France loses fiscal room and political cover, those arrangements are coming under strain—and scrutiny.
What was once protected by silence is now exposed by necessity.
This is what the end of empire looks like: not a clean break, but a series of frantic investigations, selective prosecutions, and desperate performances meant to reassure markets and intimidate populations. None of it addresses the core truth—that the model itself has failed.
The Meaning of the Moment
France is not collapsing because it is being attacked. It is collapsing because it refused to change when change was still affordable. What we are witnessing now is not reform, but triage—performed too late, with shaking hands, at the edge of a cliff.And Yaoundé, long sustained by that same imperial architecture, is discovering that when the metropole weakens, the client state bleeds.
For Southern Cameroons, this moment must be documented, not romanticized. Each scandal is evidence. Each investigation is a confession. Each exposed theft underscores the illegitimacy of rule imposed by force.
The witch hunt in Paris. The panic in Yaoundé.
The silence breaking everywhere else. .History is moving. And those who understand power know this truth: when empires begin to investigate themselves, it is not strength on display—it is fear.
Ali Dan Ismael Editor-in-Chief
