That single fact strips French Cameroun’s leadership naked. It exposes an army fluent in repression but illiterate in legitimacy; officers adept at destruction yet incapable of victory. If training meant competence, this war would have ended years ago. If French tutelage worked, Ambazonia would not still stand. But it does. And that endurance is the final insult.
By Ali Dan Ismael Editor-in-Chief The Independentistnews
French Cameroun did not drift into this war.
It engineered it. Years before the first shot, Yaoundé abandoned politics and chose doctrine. Officers were groomed not to protect citizens but to subdue a people. The Ambazonian question was never treated as a political dispute—it was framed as a problem to be erased. Civilian demands were met with military curricula; petitions were answered with targeting manuals. This was not improvisation. It was premeditation.
A war-college mentality was imposed on an unarmed population. The assumption was simple: overwhelm early, terrorise fast, and break resistance before it matures. Paris approved. Colonial confidence was recycled as expertise. Old manuals, old myths, old arrogance—handed down as if history had learned nothing. What Yaoundé received was not strategy. It was colonial nostalgia disguised as competence.
Nine Years of Failure, Marketed as Force. Nine years later, the verdict is unavoidable. A state armed, funded, trained, and diplomatically insulated has failed—spectacularly—to defeat a population that began with nothing but refusal. Not nine days. Not nine months. Nine humiliating years. That is not resilience. That is institutional incompetence.
Elite units were unleashed on villages. Law was replaced with arson. Governance was substituted with mass graves. Schools were shut not because the regime was winning, but because it had already lost the argument. Terror became policy. Silence became proof of exhaustion. And still, Ambazonia did not collapse.
What kind of state trains for war and cannot even break civilians? France’s Doctrine: Expired, Exposed, Ridiculed. France’s real shock is not the brutality—it is the ineffectiveness. French military thinking still clings to the fantasy that fear ends resistance; that populations submit once pain crosses a threshold; that colonial arithmetic still works. It does not. Modern resistance does not require tanks when legitimacy is absent. It requires time, memory, and refusal.
France trained Yaoundé for a war that belongs in museums. Manuals built for yesterday’s colonies were handed to a regime facing a people who no longer seek approval, permission, or survival under occupation.
The results are plain: A bloated army feared only by civilians. A regime governing ruins instead of territory. A sponsor watching quietly as its client becomes a liability. France did not export strength.
It exported obsolescence.
The Ultimate Humiliation
Here is the truth neither Yaoundé nor Paris can escape: An untrained people outlasted a trained state. That single fact strips French Cameroun’s leadership naked. It exposes an army fluent in repression but illiterate in legitimacy; officers adept at destruction yet incapable of victory. If training meant competence, this war would have ended years ago. If French tutelage worked, Ambazonia would not still stand. But it does. And that endurance is the final insult.
Lockdown Verdict
French Cameroun prepared for annihilation. It achieved disgrace. France promised control. It delivered exposure. Ambazonia was meant to be erased quietly. Instead, it became the loudest proof of their failure. No war college can teach legitimacy.
No empire survives when the unarmed reveal how hollow its power really is. Lock it down.
Ali Dan Ismael Editor-in-Chief
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