For Tchiroma, survival was never luck; it was calculation. His years behind bars taught him two enduring truths about the Biya system: open opposition invited annihilation, and proximity to power offered both protection and opportunity.
So he chose patience over exile, proximity over protest. Instead of retreating in bitterness, he re-emerged as a technocrat who spoke the dual dialects of the regime and the opposition.
By Louis Mbua, An Independentist Contributor
A Nation at the Crossroads
As Cameroon stumbles into the twilight of Paul Biya’s forty-plus-year rule, a quiet reckoning unfolds. The palace whispers of succession grow louder, the war in Southern Cameroons refuses to end, and the once-feared machinery of control creaks under the weight of fatigue.
Amid this uncertainty stands a man whose political life mirrors the contradictions of the republic itself: Issa Tchiroma Bakary — the survivor who turned victimhood into leverage.
The Irony of History
History has a strange sense of irony. In 1984, Biya’s regime accused an overwhelming majority of northern officers and civilians, commonly known as les Nordistes, of plotting a coup. Many were rounded up and executed after kangaroo trials in Yaoundé. Others, like the young railway engineer Issa Tchiroma Bakary of Regifecam Douala, were jailed for seven long years on suspicion alone.
He lived through one of the most brutal purges in Cameroon’s post-independence story — a purge that decapitated the northern elite, shattered Ahidjo’s legacy, and redrew the map of power. Yet, decades later, the same man branded a traitor would smile before the cameras inside Biya’s cabinet.
His return was no accident. It was strategy — pure Machiavelli blended with the patience of Sun Tzu.
The Anatomy of Survival
For Tchiroma, survival was never luck; it was calculation. His years behind bars taught him two enduring truths about the Biya system: open opposition invited annihilation, and proximity to power offered both protection and opportunity.
So he chose patience over exile, proximity over protest. Instead of retreating in bitterness, he re-emerged as a technocrat who spoke the dual dialects of the regime and the opposition. His survival instinct matured into disciplined craft: infiltrate to understand, endure to outlast.
It was not loyalty that kept him near Biya — it was reconnaissance.
The Infiltration Strategy
When multiparty politics resurfaced in the 1990s, most northern politicians ran to open opposition. Tchiroma charted a subtler route. He built or joined smaller parties, flirting with alliances when they served his ends and walking away when tides shifted.
To many, he appeared inconsistent; to the strategist, he was reading the field. His deeper purpose was intelligence-gathering — to become the bridge between the regime’s palace and the disenchanted north.
Biya’s greatest fear was northern unity. Tchiroma’s greatest advantage was to appear as the “acceptable northerner” — loyal in public, calculating in private. In that contradiction lay his safety.
Master of Political Optics
Every appearance and appointment carried layered meaning. When Biya named him Minister of Communication, it was theatre and symbolism intertwined: the once-accused now held the microphone of the state. To Biya, it looked like magnanimity; to Tchiroma, it was poetic inversion — the return of the accused to command the accuser’s voice.
During the early days of the Southern Cameroons crisis, he seemed to defend the regime to excess, famously declaring that “there was no Anglophone problem.” Yet the deeper observer saw an act of balancing: he was shielding the north from suspicion while gauging the regime’s unraveling from within.
Tchiroma’s mastery of optics calmed the regime’s paranoia while keeping his base alive. He never forgot the humiliation of 1984 — only learned to disguise it behind loyalty.
The Quiet Revenge
His revenge was not forged in anger but in endurance. Over years of public service, he built networks of civil servants, local chiefs, and young northern politicians shaped by Biya’s neglect. He gave the neglected region a patient voice within the system that had silenced it.
As cracks widened — succession battles, legitimacy crises, and the war in the west — Tchiroma remained the one figure Biya could neither dismiss nor fully trust. He understood Biya’s psychology: the obsession with loyalty, the terror of betrayal, and the blindness to generational change.
By staying close, he became indispensable. Stay close to your enemy while standing far apart in ideology — the timeless Sun Tzu rule.
Patience versus Power
Now, as Biya’s era limps to its end under age, war, and inertia, Tchiroma’s long game nears completion. His latest pronouncements reveal a man repositioning not as a courtier but as custodian of reckoning.
Yet his triumph is morally double-edged. The patience that kept him alive also kept him silent through years of state brutality. His resilience symbolises both tactical genius and the tragedy of a republic that rewards cunning over conviction.
Still, in the arithmetic of power, he has achieved what few dared: to outlast, out-learn, and out-maneuver the very order that once sought his death.
The Political Chessboard Reversed
Biya believed he had neutralised the north by decimating its elite and co-opting its survivors. He overlooked the oldest rule of politics: he who endures, rules.
Issa Tchiroma Bakary played the longest game — three decades of adaptation, infiltration, and study — until the hunter found himself surrounded by his former prey. When the moment came, the strike was not a shout but a whisper: a quiet claim to relevance that made the regime itself his stage.
In the grand theatre of Cameroonian power, Biya may still sit in the palace, but the north no longer bows in silence. And Tchiroma, through both action and symbol, has proven that revenge served cold is not shouted from rooftops — it is achieved at the very table where one was once condemned.
Epilogue: Lessons from a Long Game
In the end, Issa Tchiroma Bakary’s story is less about victory than about survival in a nation where institutions collapsed and only instinct endured. He mastered the art of patience because the system left him no other weapon.
His rise is both an indictment of Biya’s legacy and a warning to those who will follow: when a state turns cunning into a civic virtue, the clever survive — but the nation decays.
History may remember Biya for longevity, but it will remember Tchiroma for endurance — the man who learned to live inside the storm until the storm itself grew tired.
Louis Mbua, An Independentist Contributor
