THE PRODUCTIVE REPUBLIC SERIES Part III: Who Benefits from Bamenda’s Economy?The Main Market, Colonial Extraction, Public Assets, and the Struggle to Restore Economic Power to the People

Bamenda’s recovery cannot be measured only by reconstructed buildings, reopened roads, new power lines, rehabilitated markets, or recommissioned machinery. It must also recover public trust. It must recover local accountability. It must recover the principle that public borrowing creates public value. It must recover the dignity of work. It must recover confidence that rules will be applied transparently. It must recover the ability of the people to influence institutions built in their name. The city must not simply rebuild what was destroyed. It must correct what was distorted.

By Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News

This independent policy commentary examines the historical and institutional forces that have shaped Bamenda’s economy. It distinguishes lawful regional trade from political patronage, ethnic hostility, opaque market allocation, and centralized extraction. Historical details concerning the Cultural Centre, the financing of the Bamenda Main Market, stall allocation, and public revenues should be supported through archival research and an independent institutional audit.

The Question Development Debates Often Avoid

Parts I and II of this series addressed how Bamenda can restore electricity, protect enterprise, strengthen healthcare, recommission proven industrial capability, finance production, develop skills, and become the first demonstration of a countrywide productive economy. Part III asks a more uncomfortable question: Who will own, control, and benefit from the recovery?

A city can receive new roads, markets, electricity, warehouses, financing, and enterprise zones while its historically rooted population remains economically marginalized. A market may stand physically in Bamenda while the decisions governing its stalls, revenues, rents, maintenance, and redevelopment are controlled elsewhere. A road may pass through the territory while carrying raw materials and profits outward. A public corporation may employ local labor while strategic authority, procurement, finance, and accumulated value remain beyond local control. An economy can grow without empowering the people whose land, labor, taxes, and sacrifices sustain it. That is the difference between development and extraction.

Development expands the productive power, ownership, income, knowledge, and dignity of the population. Extraction uses the population’s assets while progressively separating the people from control over those assets. Bamenda’s economic reconstruction must therefore address more than production. It must address ownership, access, accountability, public-asset governance, and the distribution of economic opportunity.

The Republic must not rebuild Bamenda only to reproduce the same extractive relationships under new political names. Bamenda Has Never Been Economically Peripheral Bamenda has too often been treated by centralized administrations as a distant interior city that should be grateful for whatever limited attention it receives. That interpretation ignores history.

The people of the Bamenda Grassfields contributed substantially to the labor, agriculture, commerce, technical services, administration, consumption, and social networks that sustained the economy of Southern Cameroons. Their contribution extended far beyond the geographic boundaries of Bamenda.

Bamenda people worked within and supported the Cameroon Development Corporation. They participated in plantation production, transportation, trade, public administration, education, professional services, and the commercial systems that connected the highlands to the coast. The CDC did not grow through land and colonial capital alone. It grew through human effort. Workers planted, harvested, transported, processed, maintained, supervised, accounted, organized, and sustained the communities upon which the corporation depended.

Families supplied food and social support. Traders connected plantation communities to wider markets. Teachers, health workers, technicians, clerks, drivers, mechanics, and administrators contributed to the institutional system around the plantations. Bamenda’s contribution was therefore not marginal. It was part of the human foundation upon which one of the territory’s most important economic institutions developed.

The Cultural Centre as Recognition

Bamenda’s civic memory holds that Britain recognized the contribution of the Bamenda people to the CDC and the wider economy by providing a Cultural Centre along Commercial Avenue, near the old motor park and the area now associated with the city’s ceremonial or stadium complex. The precise archival history of this facility should be recovered and preserved. Its meaning, however, remains politically and economically significant. The Cultural Centre represented more than a physical building. It acknowledged that the people of Bamenda were workers, producers, taxpayers, consumers, organizers, and cultural custodians whose contribution deserved public recognition. But recognition is not the same as justice.

A Cultural Centre could not compensate for the absence of a comprehensive territorial development program. It could not substitute for a national university system, modern roads, dependable electricity, industrial infrastructure, sovereign finance, protected institutions, or secure constitutional arrangements. Britain could recognize Bamenda’s cultural and economic contribution while still failing to prepare Southern Cameroons for a secure political and economic future.That contradiction must remain central to any honest assessment of British administration. Britain acknowledged the people’s value. It did not build the complete institutional structure required to protect that value.

The Bamenda Main Market and Managerial Exceptionalism

The Bamenda Main Market represents another important part of the city’s economic memory. The Foncha administration, despite the relatively limited period during which Southern Cameroons institutions exercised meaningful authority, reportedly obtained financing to construct the market and repaid the resulting obligation. The complete documentary record should be assembled, including the lending institution, loan amount, repayment schedule, market revenues, administrative structure, and legal authority under which the project was undertaken. Yet the principle associated with this achievement remains extraordinary. The administration used credit to create a productive public asset.

The market generated commerce, employment, municipal activity, and revenue. The obligation was honored. This was managerial exceptionalism—not because borrowing itself is unusual, but because the borrowing reportedly connected public credit, productive infrastructure, revenue generation, accountability, and repayment. The government did not treat borrowed money as personal income. It did not present the loan as a foreign donation for which citizens should remain permanently grateful. It did not borrow merely to finance political consumption, administrative luxury, or ceremonial projects. It created an economic institution. The lesson is simple: Borrow for production. Build an asset that creates value. Protect the revenue. Maintain the asset. Publish the accounts. Repay the obligation. Reinvest in the people.

This financial discipline offers a sharp contrast with the political culture that later developed under centralized rule from Yaoundé. No French-controlled regime has produced an equally compelling example in Bamenda of locally accountable borrowing, productive municipal investment, disciplined management, and clearly demonstrated repayment under comparable constraints.

Successive administrations inherited the market and collected revenue from traders. Yet the governing system progressively weakened the local autonomy, fiscal accountability, maintenance discipline, and public trust that should have accompanied such an important asset. Bamenda’s reconstruction must recover the principles behind the original achievement.

Britain Recognized Bamenda—and Still Abandoned Southern Cameroons

Britain’s recognition of Bamenda’s contribution does not absolve Britain of its larger historical failure. Britain administered Southern Cameroons largely through Nigeria rather than preparing the territory systematically for independent statehood. It benefited from the territory’s labor, plantations, agricultural production, commerce, strategic location, and access to external markets. It participated in the creation and management of institutions that produced considerable economic value.

Yet Southern Cameroons entered the decisive constitutional period with inadequate roads, limited industrialization, insufficient energy infrastructure, weak sovereign financial capacity, and inadequate diplomatic and security preparation. Britain celebrated local service while leaving strategic national capability incomplete. It recognized culture while failing to construct a complete development state. It supervised elections and constitutional processes while leaving fundamental sovereignty questions dangerously unresolved. It administered a United Nations Trust Territory but failed to deliver the territory into a clearly protected and internationally secure political future.

It knew that Southern Cameroons would enter a relationship with a larger, French-backed neighboring state. Yet it did not construct the safeguards necessary to preserve the institutions, fiscal autonomy, political equality, and legal personality of Southern Cameroons. Britain left Southern Cameroons in tatters—not because the territory lacked disciplined people, professional talent, productive land, or administrative experience, but because the administering power failed to complete the institutional work required for sovereign survival.

The people inherited fragments of governance without the full protection of sovereignty. They inherited productive institutions without guaranteed control. They inherited constitutional promises without adequate enforcement. They inherited a relationship whose imbalance was visible from the beginning.

France and the centralized authorities in Yaoundé moved into the space Britain abandoned. French administrative, legal, military, monetary, educational, and commercial influence expanded as the institutions of West Cameroon were weakened, absorbed, or eliminated. The result was not merely a change from English to French administrative culture. It was a transformation in who controlled public institutions, financial decisions, economic priorities, and the distribution of opportunity.

From Local Asset to Centralized Instrument

An extractive system does not always destroy a public asset. Sometimes it preserves the building while changing who benefits from it. It retains the market but controls stall allocation. It retains the council but limits its fiscal authority. It retains local officials but makes their careers dependent upon appointments from above. It retains the appearance of decentralization but centralizes the important revenue, regulatory, and political decisions. It allows local people to trade but denies them meaningful influence over the rules governing trade. The asset remains in Bamenda. The authority over the asset moves elsewhere. This is extraction by institutional separation.

A centralized administration can collect revenue from a market without adequately maintaining it. It can appoint officials who do not answer meaningfully to traders. It can allocate stalls through opaque procedures. It can authorize redevelopment without publishing complete financial records. It can use local assets to reward political loyalty. The population continues to see the market every day, but it does not know how much revenue the market generates, where the money goes, who controls allocation, or whether maintenance expenditures correspond to collections. The physical presence of a public asset can therefore conceal the political absence of public ownership.

When Market Access Becomes Economic Dispossession

Sadly, many conflict-affected and historically rooted Ambazonian traders now believe that public-market administration has increasingly separated them from commercial opportunities created in their own city. Community allegations include opaque stall allocation, unauthorized transfers, informal subletting, political favoritism, rising rents, undocumented charges, and the accumulation of stalls by better-connected or better-capitalized intermediaries.

Some residents allege that traders originating from the West Region of La République du Cameroun and neighboring Nigeria have obtained valuable commercial positions while displaced, impoverished, or historically rooted Bamenda traders have struggled to obtain or retain stalls. These allegations require an independent audit. They must not become a justification for hostility toward Bamileke, Nigerian, or any other lawful traders.

Bamenda has always participated in regional commerce. Its economic future will depend upon open trade with Nigeria, other African markets, the diaspora, and the wider world. A person’s origin should not make that person an enemy. Lawful traders should enjoy security, contractual protection, and equal treatment. The injustice is not the mere presence of people from elsewhere. The injustice arises when a public asset built through local sacrifice is administered through secrecy, patronage, political connections, and arrangements that exclude displaced or vulnerable residents from reasonable economic access. The problem is not ethnicity. The problem is extractive governance.

The Regime’s Weaponization of Allocation

The Biya regime’s extractive philosophy has rarely depended upon open confiscation alone. It has often operated through administrative control. Control the permit. Control the title. Control the appointment. Control the contract. Control the stall. Control the revenue. Control the court. Control the official who decides who receives access. Under this system, a person may possess formal rights but lack the political relationships needed to exercise them.

A trader may be told that the market is public but be unable to discover the criteria used to allocate stalls. A displaced original occupant may return and find that the space has been transferred, sublet, reclassified, or claimed by someone with stronger administrative connections. A small local trader may face official rent, unofficial payments, political pressure, and the cost of dealing with intermediaries. Meanwhile, individuals with capital and connections may accumulate multiple spaces and rent them to others. This is how public infrastructure becomes a private rent-producing machine.

The regime does not need to remove the market from Bamenda. It only needs to separate Bamenda’s people from transparent control of the market. Economic dispossession can occur without formal eviction from the territory. It occurs when communities lose practical access to the institutions built from their labor, revenue, and historical sacrifice. An Open Economy Is Not the Same as an Extractive Economy

Southern Cameroons / Ambazonia should remain open to lawful trade, investment, migration, professional service, and regional enterprise. A new Republic should not reproduce exclusion in response to exclusion. It should not allocate rights according to bloodline, ethnicity, ancestry, language, or political affiliation. A productive economy grows when people can invest, trade, work, and create value under clear and equal rules. But openness does not require surrendering public assets to unaccountable networks. Equal treatment does not mean ignoring displacement, prior occupancy, local vulnerability, or the historical obligations associated with public property.

A fair market-allocation policy can protect lawful outside traders while also restoring opportunities to displaced original occupants, conflict-affected families, local producers, women, young entrepreneurs, farmers’ cooperatives, and businesses providing essential services. The proper principle is neither ethnic exclusion nor administrative dispossession. It is transparent economic justice.

The Bamenda Public-Market Audit

The future Bamenda Economic Reconstruction Authority should commission a complete and independently supervised audit of the Main Market and other publicly controlled commercial spaces. The audit should determine: The total number of stalls and commercial units;
the identities of registered occupants;
the dates and legal basis of original allocations;
the number of stalls held by each individual or enterprise; subletting and transfer arrangements;
official rents and fees; alleged informal payments; vacant, damaged, abandoned, or disputed spaces; displaced original occupants;
revenues collected annually; maintenance and capital expenditures; outstanding debts; allocation criteria; involvement of public officials;
conflicts of interest; reconstruction and redevelopment contracts.

The audit should distinguish between lawful occupation, good-faith tenancy, informal survival arrangements, fraudulent allocation, political favoritism, and speculative accumulation. The purpose should not be to conduct a political purge. It should be to establish a truthful public record. Reasonable personal and commercial privacy should be protected, but the overall allocation system, revenue flows, and conflicts of interest must be made public. No honest trader should fear transparency. Only those benefiting from secrecy should fear an audit.

Restoring Displaced and Vulnerable Traders

Following the audit, the administration should establish a lawful claims and appeals process. Priority consideration should be given to: displaced original occupants; traders whose documentation was destroyed during the conflict or market fires; conflict-affected local households; women responsible for household survival; young entrepreneurs; farmers’ cooperatives; local manufacturers and processors; persons with disabilities;
businesses supplying food, healthcare, energy, water, and other essential services.

Priority should be based upon documented prior occupancy, residence, displacement, vulnerability, productive contribution, and public value. It should not be based upon ethnic hostility. No lawful trader should lose a stall simply because that trader is Bamileke, Nigerian, or from another community. At the same time, no politically connected actor should be allowed to accumulate public stalls, manipulate allocation, sublet at excessive rates, or exclude vulnerable people through administrative influence.

The Republic must prove that justice and openness can coexist. One Trader, One Transparent Record Every stall should have a traceable public-administration record. The record should show the lawful occupant, allocation date, authorized use, rent, payment history, transfer restrictions, and applicable renewal conditions. No person or related group of companies should control excessive numbers of public stalls without a transparent commercial justification and competitive process.

Subletting should be regulated. Transfers should be recorded. Vacant stalls should be publicly advertised. Allocation decisions should be subject to appeal. Officials responsible for the market should declare financial interests and family relationships that may create conflicts. Market revenue should be deposited into auditable accounts rather than collected through uncontrolled cash systems. Digital payment options should reduce theft and improve financial reporting. A public market cannot serve the public when nobody can determine who controls it or where its revenue goes. Market Revenue Must Return to the Market The Bamenda Main Market should generate visible benefits for traders and the city.

A defined portion of market revenue should be reserved for:sanitation; fire prevention; drainage;
waste collection; lighting; security; water; refrigeration; structural maintenance; emergency repairs; childcare facilities; trader training; digital systems; public financial reporting. Traders should be able to see the relationship between the fees they pay and the services they receive. Market revenue should not disappear into an administrative system that treats Bamenda merely as a collection point. The market’s finances should be independently audited annually. The public should know how much was collected, how much was spent, what projects were completed, and what funds remain available.

The market should recover the managerial discipline associated with its creation. Borrow responsibly. Build productively. Collect transparently. Maintain continuously. Repay faithfully. Reinvest locally.

The CDC Lesson: Labor Without Ownership Is Not Enough

The history of the CDC provides a larger warning. Employment matters. Wages matter. Public services matter. But labor participation without ownership, institutional control, technological development, and reinvestment can leave workers vulnerable. A plantation economy may employ thousands while the most valuable decisions are made elsewhere. It may export bananas, rubber, palm oil, and other commodities while importing much of the machinery, finance, technology, and finished goods required by the population. It may create economic activity without creating a nation of owners. Southern Cameroons / Ambazonia must therefore move beyond the colonial model in which local land and labor generate raw products for external industries.

The productive Republic should increase local processing, local equity participation, professional management, technological capacity, pension ownership, cooperative investment, worker training, research, and community reinvestment. The objective should not merely be to reopen plantations. It should be to redesign ownership and value creation.

Public Assets Must Serve the Public

The Main Market, CDC assets, PAMOL, roads, schools, hospitals, water systems, electricity infrastructure, ports, airports, public land, and administrative buildings are not trophies for whichever faction controls government. They are public assets. Their purpose is to serve citizens, support production, protect essential services, and create lasting value. A government that uses public property to reward supporters is practicing extraction. A government that hides public accounts is practicing extraction. A government that collects revenue without maintaining the underlying asset is practicing extraction. A government that signs concessions without disclosing their terms is practicing extraction. A government that allows officials to acquire interests in assets they regulate is practicing extraction. The Government of the Federal Republic of Southern Cameroons (Ambazonia) must establish a different standard.

Every major public asset should have: a legal title and public mandate; an accountable governing institution; audited financial statements;
a maintenance plan; public performance indicators; conflict-of-interest protections;
procurement rules; citizen oversight; transparent concession and leasing arrangements. Public ownership without public accountability can become merely another form of elite control.

When Yaoundé Copies the Language but Preserves the System

A cynical observer can already predict what may happen after the publication of this series. The political establishment in Yaoundé may read the proposals, remove their Ambazonian origin, translate selected passages into bureaucratic French, rename the programs, establish a presidential committee, hold a conference, and present fragments of the framework as another great vision of the Head of State. The Bamenda Productive Recovery model may suddenly reappear under a national acronym.

The Productive-Cost Observatory may return as a central-government agency. Made in Bamenda may be diluted into a slogan promoting national production. The energy-reliability proposal may become another ministerial announcement. The market audit may be converted into a controlled administrative exercise designed to protect existing interests.

The government may even praise local enterprise while ensuring that procurement, finance, licensing, and major contracts remain under the influence of politically connected networks. This possibility should surprise no one. La République du Cameroun has repeatedly shown an ability to borrow the language of reform while resisting the redistribution of power required to make reform real.

It can speak of decentralization while controlling revenue from the center. It can speak of democracy while weakening meaningful political competition. It can speak of national unity while suppressing institutional difference. It can speak of entrepreneurship while directing major opportunities through patronage. It can speak of youth employment while financing conferences, slogans, and appointments instead of equipment, apprenticeships, and production. It can copy the vocabulary. It cannot easily copy the governing philosophy.

The Fru Ndi Precedent

Ni John Fru Ndi and the democratic opposition introduced language, expectations, and political demands that changed public discourse across La République du Cameroun. Ideas that were once treated as dangerous or impossible were later absorbed into official rhetoric. Multiparty politics became acceptable in language. Decentralization entered the administrative vocabulary. Electoral institutions were repeatedly renamed and reorganized. The regime learned to adopt enough of the opposition’s language to reduce pressure while preserving the essential architecture of centralized authority. It borrowed the clothing of reform without accepting reform’s discipline. This is the danger facing the productive-economy proposals.

Yaoundé may copy visible programs while rejecting the principles that make those programs work: local accountability; professional management; independent audits; transparent allocation; protected property rights; public access to information; county fiscal authority; competitive procurement; and consequences for corruption. It may copy the shell and discard the operating system. Copy the Name, Lose the Logic

An extractive state can build a market without empowering traders. It can construct a road without developing the communities through which the road passes. It can install electricity while preserving monopoly and political allocation. It can establish a development bank and use it to finance loyalists. It can announce local content while awarding major contracts to connected importers. It can praise innovation while demanding political control over intellectual property. It can speak of industrialization while continuing to export raw materials and import finished products. It can create a decentralization ministry while refusing to decentralize meaningful power.

That is why copying policy language will not produce the same results. The proposed productive model depends upon a different institutional culture. It requires government to publish accounts. It requires officials to disclose conflicts. It requires contracts to be enforced. It requires local institutions to control meaningful resources. It requires public assets to serve the public. It requires professional competence to matter more than political loyalty.It requires the population to be treated as owners and citizens—not merely taxpayers, voters, laborers, and subjects of administrative control. A regime trained to extract cannot become productive merely by repeating productive vocabulary.

The central problem is not that individuals from La République du Cameroun lack intelligence, imagination, or professional ability. Many are highly educated, technically capable, creative, and hardworking. The problem is the institutional environment in which talent has been trained and rewarded.

A France-centered postcolonial governing system has often taught officials to seek authorization from above, reproduce inherited structures, protect centralized authority, and maintain external relationships rather than experiment with accountable local development. It has rewarded brokerage more than creation. It has rewarded access to the state more than productive risk. It has rewarded the distribution of imported goods more than local manufacturing. It has rewarded loyalty more than independent judgment. It has rewarded extraction more than reinvestment.

The official learns to ask: Who approved this? Which minister supports it? Which network benefits? How will the center retain control? The productive Republic must ask different questions: What value will this create? Who will own the resulting asset? How many people will be trained? How will revenue be reinvested? What risks will the public bear? What results will be published? How will citizens hold the institution accountable? This is not simply a policy difference. It is a difference in governing philosophy.

France and Britain: Different Methods, Similar External Priorities

France and Britain did not govern Southern Cameroons in identical ways. Their colonial institutions, administrative methods, languages, and legal traditions differed. But both powers placed their strategic interests above the complete political and economic sovereignty of the people. Britain administered the territory with limited long-term investment and eventually left without securing the national institutions required for survival. France supported a centralized state system in Yaoundé that progressively absorbed the institutions of Southern Cameroons. Britain’s method was often neglect, administrative convenience, and withdrawal. France’s method was deeper institutional, and withdrawal. France’s method was deeper institutional penetration, centralization, and continued strategic influence. The outcomes converged around one central reality: The interests of Southern Cameroons were subordinated to external priorities.

A productive Ambazonian Republic must learn from both experiences. It should not romanticize British administration merely because it operated through the English language and common-law institutions.It should not accept French-centered centralization merely because it presents itself as national unity. The Republic must build institutions designed around the interests, dignity, security, and productive capacity of its own citizens. The Extractive Mentality Cannot Build the Productive Republic An extractive mentality views public office as access. It views a market as rent. It views a road as a contract. It views a state corporation as appointments. It views natural resources as concessions. It views citizens as taxpayers and political followers. It views the diaspora as a source of emergency donations. It views foreign investors as patrons. It views technology as something to import. It views public institutions as tools for rewarding loyalty.

A productive mentality sees the same assets differently. A market is an enterprise platform. A road is an economic artery. A public corporation is a national productive asset. Natural resources are inputs into value chains. Citizens are owners, workers, inventors, investors, and consumers. The diaspora is a source of capital, knowledge, networks, and partnership. Foreign investors are contractual partners—not political masters. Technology is something to develop, protect, adapt, manufacture, and export. Public institutions exist to create value and protect the public interest. This philosophical transformation is the true foundation of reconstruction.

Protecting Ambazonian Policy Leadership

The possibility that La République du Cameroun may copy these ideas should not lead Ambazonians to hide every policy proposal. An unpublished idea cannot educate the population, influence international opinion, or establish a record of policy leadership. The appropriate response is documented authorship, careful publication, intellectual-property protection, and faster institutional preparation.

Each major policy framework should carry: a publication date; clear authorship; a version number; an executive summary; defined institutions; implementation phases;
measurable indicators; protected technical annexes where necessary. Sensitive industrial, patent, security, financial, and infrastructure information should remain restricted. But the public principles should be communicated clearly. The world should know that Ambazonian thinkers are not merely describing historical grievances. They are developing serious proposals for energy, healthcare, finance, transportation, industrialization, public-asset governance, and accountable reconstruction.

Ideas can be copied. Documented leadership cannot easily be erased. Do Not Fear Imitation—Outperform It If La République du Cameroun adopts a useful proposal and genuinely improves the lives of people, that outcome should not be opposed merely because the idea originated in Ambazonian thinking. The objective is not to preserve suffering so that one side can maintain political ownership of a solution. But imitation must be distinguished from appropriation.

Constructive adoption acknowledges the problem, applies the policy transparently, and produces public benefit. Appropriation removes the origin, protects existing interests, changes the name, and uses the policy as political decoration. The strategic Ambazonian response should be to outperform imitation. Publish first. Design better. Protect the authorship. Build institutions. Measure results. Train professionals. Maintain transparency. The system that implements successfully will establish enduring credibility. The system that copies language without changing its incentives will expose its own limitations.

President Sako’s Public-Asset Leadership Test

President Samuel Ikome Sako’s leadership will be judged not only by whether he promotes economic growth, but by whether that growth creates accountable ownership and public benefit. His administration should commit itself to several principles. Public assets must not become factional property. Market stalls must not be political rewards. Investment funds must not become party treasuries. Contracts must not be distributed through loyalty networks. Inventors must not be pressured to surrender intellectual property. Diaspora investors must not receive unaccountable control over local communities. County institutions must possess meaningful economic responsibility. Public accounts must be published. Displaced people must have lawful access to claims and appeals. Lawful traders from all communities must receive security and equal protection.

A productive Republic must be open without becoming extractive. It must protect local participation without becoming ethnically exclusionary. It must welcome investment without surrendering strategic control. It must empower counties without destroying national unity. That balance will test the quality of Ambazonian leadership.

A Bamenda Public-Asset Restoration Commission

The Sako administration should establish a Bamenda Public-Asset Restoration Commission as part of the wider reconstruction framework.Its mandate should cover:the Main Market;other public markets; council property; abandoned or disputed public land Transportation facilities;
publicly financed commercial infrastructure;
selected former West Cameroon assets;
assets damaged or transferred during the conflict; revenue-generating facilities administered without adequate public accounts.

The commission should determine legal ownership, historic purpose, present control, revenue performance, maintenance condition, occupancy, disputes, and opportunities for productive restoration. It should recommend which assets should remain publicly managed, which should be leased competitively, which should be operated through cooperatives, and which may be suitable for transparent public-private partnerships. Its work should be professional rather than retaliatory. The goal should be restoration, not revenge.

From Subjects to Economic Citizens

Colonialism and centralized extraction reduce people to subjects. Subjects obey decisions. Subjects pay fees. Subjects provide labor. Subjects receive whatever services the administration chooses to deliver. Economic citizens possess a different relationship with the state. They have rights to information. They can challenge allocation decisions. They can inspect public accounts. They can organize cooperatives. They can own productive assets. They can enforce contracts. They can invest without political permission. They can question officials without losing access to public opportunity.

The transformation from subjects to economic citizens is central to the Ambazonian project. Independence will have little meaning if public assets remain inaccessible, accounts remain secret, officials remain unaccountable, and economic opportunity remains dependent upon political connections.

Restoring the Market to Its Original Purpose

The Bamenda Main Market should once again become a symbol of productive public management. It should not remain a monument to centralized control, opaque allocation, deteriorating infrastructure, and economic displacement. Its restoration should include: a complete structural and safety assessment;
transparent stall registration; an independent allocation audit; claims procedures for displaced occupants; fire-protection systems;
reliable water and electricity; drainage and sanitation; waste management; affordable refrigeration; childcare services; digital payment and accounting; enterprise training;
public financial reporting; support for local producers and farmers. The market should connect commerce to production. A portion of stalls should support goods produced within the Bamenda highland economy. Farmers’ cooperatives should have organized access. Local manufacturers should be able to display and sell their products. Women and youth enterprises should receive transparent opportunities.

The market must become an institution through which Bamenda creates wealth—not merely a location through which imported merchandise passes. Who Benefits Must Become a Public Question Every major economic project should answer one final question: Who benefits? Who owns the asset? Who receives the contract? Who provides the labor? Who acquires the skills? Who receives the profits? Who bears the environmental cost? Who pays the debt? Who controls the revenue? Who receives access? Who can inspect the accounts? Who has the right to appeal? These questions do not oppose investment or enterprise. They protect the legitimacy of investment and enterprise. A productive economy requires profit. But public assets and public risk must produce public benefit.

Bamenda Must Recover More Than Buildings

Bamenda’s recovery cannot be measured only by reconstructed buildings, reopened roads, new power lines, rehabilitated markets, or recommissioned machinery. It must also recover public trust. It must recover local accountability. It must recover the principle that public borrowing creates public value. It must recover the dignity of work. It must recover confidence that rules will be applied transparently. It must recover the ability of the people to influence institutions built in their name. The city must not simply rebuild what was destroyed. It must correct what was distorted.

From Extraction to Shared Prosperity

Bamenda’s people contributed to the CDC. They built commercial networks. They supported public institutions They demonstrated managerial competence. They sustained a market that became one of the city’s central economic assets.

Yet their history also records British neglect, constitutional abandonment, French-centered centralization, weakened local institutions, opaque administration, conflict, and economic displacement. The lesson is not that Bamenda should close itself to outsiders. The lesson is that openness must operate through justice. The lesson is not that every non-Ambazonian trader is an extractor. The lesson is that public assets must not be controlled through secretive systems that exclude the public.

The lesson is not that every policy copied by Yaoundé is worthless. The lesson is that a copied label cannot overcome an extractive institutional mentality. La République du Cameroun may attempt to copy the language of productive sovereignty. It may copy the names of the institutions. It may imitate the diagrams, slogans, and program structures. But unless it dismantles the incentives of patronage, centralization, secrecy, and external dependence, it will struggle to reproduce the results. It may copy the shell. It will fail to reproduce the soul. The productive Republic must therefore do more than criticize extraction.

It must demonstrate the alternative. Public assets must serve the public. Markets must serve traders and producers. Finance must serve productive enterprise. Energy must support healthcare and industry. Roads must connect farms to markets. Technology must be protected and commercialized. Government must publish accounts.Citizens must become owners.

That is how Bamenda can recover its economic power.That is how Southern Cameroons / Ambazonia can replace extraction with production, dependency with capability, secrecy with accountability, and dispossession with shared prosperity.

Ali Dan Ismael, Editor-in-chief The Independentist News