If we understand the playbook, we can defeat it. If we refuse manufactured rivalries, we can build trust. If we discipline our ambitions, we can build institutions. If we place the future above personal position, we can transform liberation energy into national power. Yaoundé survives by division. Ambazonia must rise through unity, maturity, and strategic discipline.
By Timothy Enongene
Associate Editor-in-Chief, Independentist News
Yaoundé – July 15, 2026 – The Republic of Cameroon has not maintained its highly centralized state power through broad democratic consent, economic excellence, or transparent governance. Its survival has depended, in large part, on an inherited political architecture rooted in colonial administration: divide, balance, reward, isolate, and control.
Across much of postcolonial Africa, the “divide and rule” method became one of the most durable legacies of colonial governance. Colonial administrators understood that unified communities were difficult to dominate. Divided communities, however, could be managed. Local elites could be cultivated, rivalries could be encouraged, chiefs could be elevated against one another, regional grievances could be manipulated, and ambitious men could be made dependent on central approval. The method was simple but devastating: prevent the emergence of a united regional front capable of challenging the center.
Cameroon inherited and refined this system. The centralized state in Yaoundé has long survived by ensuring that regional leaders, traditional authorities, intellectuals, ministers, and political figures remain locked in competition for access, appointments, favors, and recognition. Instead of allowing communities to build coherent development platforms, the system fragments them into camps. Instead of rewarding collaboration, it rewards proximity to power. Instead of encouraging regional unity, it manufactures suspicion among people who should naturally work together.
Former President Ahmadou Ahidjo used this architecture with remarkable discipline. His political system rested on centralization, surveillance, patronage, and carefully managed elite competition. He understood that if local elites were busy fighting one another for crumbs from the presidential table, they would rarely ask who controlled the table itself. Under Ahidjo, regional actors were drawn into a political machine in which loyalty to the center mattered more than accountability to local communities.
President Paul Biya inherited that system and has kept it alive in more subtle and durable forms. Under his long rule, political survival has often depended on the careful balancing of elites against one another: one minister against another, one notable against another, one traditional ruler against another, one region against another, one faction against another. The regime survives not only because it controls institutions, but because it has institutionalized distrust.
This structural manipulation becomes visible when one looks closely at regional political elites who have operated inside this machinery. In the Nkam Division, figures such as Hubert Njoh Mouelle and Pierre Moukoko Mbonjo represent highly educated and capable sons of the same soil. Yet within Cameroon’s political structure, men of this stature often function less as a united regional force and more as separate centers of influence carefully balanced by the state. When one gains prominence, another may be elevated as a counterweight. The result is not necessarily open hostility, but political neutralization. Their talents remain individualized rather than converted into a coherent development voice for Nkam.
The same pattern has appeared in parts of the North West, where historical political rivalries among prominent regional figures have often weakened the possibility of a unified voice. Personal ambition may play a role, but the larger machinery matters more. Ministerial appointments, party positions, development promises, access to state resources, and symbolic recognition are used to divide local loyalties. Communities are encouraged to choose camps. Families, villages, and local networks are drawn into political rivalries that serve the center more than the people.
This is the tragedy of the system. Many individuals caught inside it are not necessarily acting from personal hatred or malice toward their own communities. They are operating inside a political survival machine designed to reward compliance, breed distrust, and punish independent regional solidarity. The ruling system benefits when “children of the same soil” spend their energy fighting one another rather than organizing around roads, schools, hospitals, jobs, local industry, accountable governance, and regional dignity.
While they fight, the center remains untouched. Yaoundé watches, balances, promotes, demotes, flatters, ignores, and divides. It understands an old political truth: a house divided against itself cannot stand.
For Ambazonians, this lesson is urgent. The same playbook that has weakened regions inside the Republic of Cameroon can also be used to weaken liberation movements, diaspora organizations, traditional authorities, county structures, intellectual circles, civil society groups, and political platforms. The method does not require open conquest. It only requires mistrust, ego, rumor, rivalry, symbolic appointments, competing titles, and the slow poisoning of collective purpose.
Ambazonians must therefore study the anatomy of division. We must ask who benefits when leaders from the same county refuse to work together. Who benefits when activists spend more time attacking one another than building institutions? Who benefits when communities are fragmented by personality cults, factional loyalty, and imported suspicions? Who benefits when the energy of liberation is consumed by internal warfare?
The answer is clear. The oppressor benefits.
A mature liberation movement must learn to distinguish disagreement from division. Disagreement is healthy when it sharpens strategy, tests ideas, and protects accountability. Division becomes dangerous when it destroys trust, weakens institutions, and turns brothers and sisters into permanent enemies. Ambazonia cannot afford to reproduce the very political culture that has kept Yaoundé in power for decades.
The future requires a different discipline. Local leaders must learn to cooperate without surrendering their differences. Intellectuals must build shared platforms instead of private kingdoms. Traditional authorities must defend community dignity rather than compete for recognition from hostile power centers. Diaspora groups must coordinate instead of multiplying confusion. Political actors must understand that unity does not mean uniformity; it means the ability to pursue a common national purpose without allowing rivalry to become self-destruction.
The architecture of division has kept Yaoundé strong because it has kept communities weak. It has turned talent into rivalry, ambition into dependence, and regional pride into political fragmentation. Ambazonia must not fall into the same trap.
If we understand the playbook, we can defeat it. If we refuse manufactured rivalries, we can build trust. If we discipline our ambitions, we can build institutions. If we place the future above personal position, we can transform liberation energy into national power. Yaoundé survives by division. Ambazonia must rise through unity, maturity, and strategic discipline.
Timothy Enongene
Associate Editor-in-Chief, Independentist News
