Political Epitaph: Joshua Osih’s Fall from Grace in Southern Cameroons

The verdict is now clear: the Southern Cameroons have shut their political door on Joshua Osih. His relevance ended the day he chose ambition over justice and calculation over courage. He will be remembered not as a bridge-builder but as the man who watched the bridge collapse from the comfort of both banks.

By Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-Chief

A Promise Without a Plan

There are moments in a nation’s history when silence is not prudence but betrayal. Joshua Osih, once paraded as the Anglophone hope within the Social Democratic Front, has written his own political epitaph through arrogance, detachment, and failure to feel the pulse of a wounded people.

He promised to solve the Anglophone Crisis in one hundred days — yet never once explained how. He claimed empathy for a nation bleeding under occupation — yet refused to utter the name of that wound: Ambazonia. And when his own people demanded accountability and truth, he offered neither remorse nor recognition.

The Bamenda Betrayal

In Bamenda — the cradle of the SDF — Osih’s campaign launch revealed a politician adrift from his base. He avoided the hard truths, played safe before the occupier, and mistook neutrality for statesmanship. Even Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the regime’s loyal propagandist, showed more daring in his brief appearance among the same people Osih could not move.

The Legacy of Illusion

To understand Osih’s fall, one must return to 1992, when John Fru Ndi — the Lion Man himself — won the people’s mandate yet refused to establish a government in Buea, the rightful capital of the Southern Cameroons. Instead, he chose to attend Bill Clinton’s inauguration in Washington, believing the American president would help depose his European cousins in Yaoundé. That illusion became the cornerstone of his betrayal, the seed of his downfall, and the prelude to his pathetic death.

Fru Ndi failed to heed the counsel of his staunch adviser who warned: “Leadership cannot borrow legitimacy from strangers; it must rise from the soil of its own people.” Joshua Osih has now descended the same path — trading moral courage for foreign admiration — and history will not pardon him.

The Western Myth and African Naivety

Africans have too often misinterpreted the Democrats’ sentimental appeal to African Americans as genuine solidarity with African causes. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Joe Biden, the trajectory has been the same: there is no African interest within the Democratic establishment. Their rhetoric of inclusion ends at America’s shorelines. Democrats never wanted slavery to end; they merely wanted to manage it more elegantly. Each time African politicians look to Washington for moral salvation, they find the same polished indifference — diplomacy without depth, sympathy without substance. For Southern Cameroonians, that lesson remains bitter: no foreign party, however liberal it calls itself, will redeem a people unwilling to define their own destiny.

The Ambassadorial Contrast

The current U.S. Ambassador to Yaoundé under the Biden administration remains a portrait of that Democratic detachment — smiling through the ruins, attending regime ceremonies, and romancing a government accused of genocide. He stands as a symbol of polished diplomacy in the service of moral paralysis.

Contrast that with his Republican predecessor, who — during the height of the conflict — faced direct threats to his life for daring to engage Ambazonian voices and demand accountability from Yaoundé.
That man gave courage to the oppressed to speak, to organize, and to believe that freedom was not a forbidden dream. If politics is about interests, then Ambazonians in America must, by now, know where their pain can be heard: within the Republican Party, where truth is not muzzled by diplomatic correctness.

France Commands, Democrats Obey

Whatever France decides, the Democrats follow — without question. When Paris pushed for the dismemberment of Libya, Barack Obama obediently executed the order, cloaked in humanitarian rhetoric. Today, the same French president who engineered Muammar Gaddafi’s fall faces prosecution, yet the Democratic Party has never expressed remorse or reflection for that catastrophic mistake that plunged Africa into chaos. What were they thinking?

Despite pressure from so-called allies, Donald Trump had the courage to tell Europe to sit up and face the truth about the war in Ukraine — to own the wars they provoke and the consequences they export. But Joe Biden rushed forward without scrutiny, repeating the same script of loyalty without logic. It is a pattern: France commands, Democrats comply — Africa pays the price.

A Bridge That Never Held

The verdict is now clear: the Southern Cameroons have shut their political door on Joshua Osih. His relevance ended the day he chose ambition over justice and calculation over courage. He will be remembered not as a bridge-builder but as the man who watched the bridge collapse from the comfort of both banks.

The Silence That Condemns

History will list his name among those who could have spoken — and did not. In the chronicles of Ambazonia’s liberation, that silence will echo louder than any speech he ever gave. Like Fru Ndi before him, Osih will be remembered not for what he achieved, but for what he refused to do — and for the dream he helped bury.

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