By Ali Dan Ismael | Editor-in-Chief
June 23, 2025 – Washington, D.C. | Buea | Boston
When Dr. Benjamin Akih and his cohort of political revisionists, operating under the name English Cameroon for a United Cameroon, released their so-called “Boston Principles,” they masqueraded as peacemakers seeking a “lasting solution.” What they delivered instead was a eulogy for Southern Cameroons’ sovereignty, wrapped in academic prose and strategic amnesia.
Ambazonians can only term this a betrayal.
There is no country called “English Cameroon.” That construction is as colonial as it is false. The land in question is Southern Cameroons—a United Nations Trust Territory with its own legislature, judiciary, and identity—distinct from La République du Cameroun, with which it was never legally merged.
By renaming our identity, Dr. Akih’s group commits the first cardinal sin of reconciliation: erasing the truth to make the oppressor comfortable.
*Federalism as a Trojan Horse for Recolonization*.
The ‘Boston Principles’ are an outcome of a workshop in Massachusetts, populated by conflict resolution experts, former activists, and voices “from the ground.” But the framework they produced is not one rooted in justice—it is rooted in denial and submission, against the aspirations of the people of the British southern cameroons.
They frame the conflict as an internal political disagreement within Cameroon. That is patently false. This is not a civil war. It is a war of recolonization.
Southern Cameroons was a sovereign trust territory administered by Britain on behalf of the international community. The 1961 plebiscite was manipulated, the treaty of union never signed, and the federation illegally dissolved in 1972 by a regime that today has transformed into Africa’s longest dictatorship.
Federalism, as proposed by the ‘Boston Principles’, is not a solution. It is a return to the house of bondage, dressed in the garments of compromise.
*Biya’s Bloody Calculus: Not to Rule, but to Ruin.*
Let us also confront another brutal truth that the Boston Principles pretend not to see:
Paul Biya may no longer truly want Ambazonia—but he wants Ambazonia to bleed.
He wants its people scattered. Its villages torched. Its name erased. He wants the last child of Southern Cameroons to go to bed hungry, fatherless, without a school, without a flag. Why? Because the haunting echoes of his narcissistic vow—Je ne faillirai jamais (“I shall never fail”)—are now returning to crush him.
And as his political project collapses, he would rather drag Ambazonia with him into the abyss than concede to its inevitable freedom.
This is not the behavior of a president. This is the cruelty of a dying emperor punishing a colony for daring to rise.
*Voting as Redemption? Or Submission?*
Dr. Akih’s call for Ambazonians to “register to vote” in the upcoming 2025 presidential elections is an insult to the thousands:
Burnt alive in their homes
Raped and disappeared in black sites
Hunted down like dogs in forests
Forced into exile in Nigerian refugee camps and South American detention centers
This call to vote within a fraudulent system, built on our blood, is the ultimate act of betrayal. It is asking the oppressed to bless their oppression with a ballot.
And worse—it does so under the guise of peace.
*Dialogue Without Truth Is Not Peace—It Is Pacification*.
We are told the Boston Principles were informed by Northern Ireland and Iraq. But the analogy collapses under scrutiny:
In Northern Ireland, the dispute was internal.
In Iraq, the conflict was post-invasion.
In Ambazonia, the sovereignty of one nation was stolen by another, and no amount of dialogue can rewrite that.
The Boston Principles fail the most basic test of justice: naming the crime. They ask the victim to negotiate the terms of her own captivity, to normalize her colonizer’s presence, and to find dignity in a prison cell painted to look like a conference room.
*Conclusion: The Principles of Submission, Not Liberation.*
To all Ambazonians at home and abroad: this is the moment to stand firm. The ‘Boston Principles’ are not a roadmap—they are a detour into a dead end.
Reject this charter of compromise.
Reject the false hope of elections.
Reject the idea that we must remain in union with a state that denies our humanity.
Ambazonian freedom was declared on October 1, 2017. It must be defended—not diluted.
Biya may wish the people pain. His collaborators may dress that pain as politics. But the soul of a free people is not so easily sold.
The truth shall not be buried in Boston. And Ambazonian people shall not die in silence.
Ali Dan Ismael
Editor-in-Chief
The Independentist News
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