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# The Anglophone Crisis: Is a Solution Still Within Reach?
- URL: https://www.bontehmagazine.com/the-anglophone-crisis-is-a-solution-still-within-reach/
- Published: 2026-08-31T17:26:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T17:26:03.000Z
- Description: Handing someone their own forgotten IOU and calling it a gift is not diplomacy. It is bad faith wearing a suit.
- Author: Ankiambom Nkesa Nkesa
- Tags: Opinion

In December 2016, Hon. Wirba Joseph stood before the Cameroon Parliament and borrowed a line from [Thomas Jefferson: when injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty](https://www.monticello.org/encyclopedia/when-injustice-becomes-law-resistance-becomes-duty-spurious-quotation?ref=bontehmagazine.com). He did not invent the thought, only the timing. Anglophone Cameroon had just begun to march, and the phrase spread through the streets faster than the government could decide whether to be alarmed by it. In hindsight it reads less like a warning and more like a prophecy nobody in power bothered to write down.

The government waved it off. What followed was not a footnote to that decision but the whole tragic body of the text: a crisis that turned lawyers and teachers on a sit down strike into a war with a death toll north of [three thousand and an internally displaced population approaching](https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/central-africa/cameroon?ref=bontehmagazine.com) seven hundred thousand. It began, almost quaintly, as a labor dispute. It has become one of the more thorough humanitarian failures on the continent, and it did not have to.

I want to be fair to the origins here, because the crisis is older than 2016\. It was seeded by colonial arrangement and grown by a state that never quite learned how to be anything other than centralized. That is the soil. What the Consortium's protests did was plant something in it, apolitical demands that the government's indifference eventually radicalised into secessionist ones. Repression met resistance, resistance armed itself, and by the end of [2017 Yaoundé had declared war on its own citizens and sent the army in](https://www.crisisgroup.org/brf/africa/cameroon/b130-cameroons-worsening-anglophone-crisis-calls-strong-measures?ref=bontehmagazine.com). The North West and South West have not seen it leave since.

What troubles me most, though, is not the crisis itself but the government's theatre of solving it. Take the [Major National Dialogue of September 2019](https://www.prc.cm/en/news/3779-nord-ouest-sud-ouest-paul-biya-convoque-un-grand-dialogue-national-eng?ref=bontehmagazine.com). On paper it was the state finally listening. In practice it was a conversation the government had with itself, dressed in the costume of a conversation with Anglophones. The people actually driving the conflict, separatist leaders such as [Sisiku Ayuk Tabe, were either in prison or in exile while the talking happened](https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jan/15/the-fight-is-existential-cameroons-anglophone-leaders-lead-a-revolution-from-behind-bars?ref=bontehmagazine.com). You cannot resolve a quarrel by inviting everyone except the people you are quarrelling with, and expect the resulting silence to be mistaken for peace.

The GND's signature achievement was to grant the [Anglophone regions a special status](https://africanarguments.org/2020/01/cameroon-grants-special-status-anglophone-conflict/?ref=bontehmagazine.com). This would be a concession if it were not already sitting, unused, in the 1996 constitutional amendment, a promise made and quietly shelved twenty three years earlier. Handing someone their own forgotten IOU and calling it a gift is not diplomacy. It is bad faith wearing a suit, and Anglophones have had enough of their fashion sense to recognize it immediately.

The bodies kept arriving after the dialogue closed. [Ngarbu in February 2020\. ](https://www.theafricareport.com/23679/cameroons-ngarbuh-massacre-revenge-blunder-or-manipulation/?ref=bontehmagazine.com)Ebam in March. [The Kumba school massacre that October](https://reliefweb.int/report/cameroon/cameroon-sham-trial-kumba-school-massacre?ref=bontehmagazine.com), children killed for the crime of attending class. Matau in January 2021\. Each atrocity is proof of the same underlying fact: there is no dialogue happening between Yaoundé and the separatists, only two sides waiting for the other to break first. The government is betting on a military win that nine years plus of trying has failed to deliver. The separatists are betting on independence and nothing short of it. Between two positions that rigid, the only certainty is more funerals.

So what would an actual conversation look like, if either side ever tired of losing this way.

It would start with trust, or the closest available substitute for it. Separatist leaders and fighters are in exile, in jail, or in the bush, and none of them are foolish enough to walk into a government meeting room unprotected. Any credible process needs an internationally staffed security arrangement just to get people safely to the table, followed by patient, local level conversations in the divisions before anyone attempts a grand national one. Skipping straight to the big dialogue, as the GND did, is a bit like proposing marriage before the first date.

It would also require the government to do something it has so far found unbearable: admit fault. A conciliatory president who acknowledges the Anglophone problem and the documented abuses of the security forces is not a weak president. He is simply one interested in an actual resolution rather than a ceremonial one. That admission should come with a reshuffling of the officials and commanders who have profited from the conflict's continuation, and the inclusion of credible, non-separatist Anglophones in their place.

Inclusion has to mean more than a seating chart. Every serious faction with a claim on the outcome, from the various self declared Ambazonian bodies to the traditional rulers, women's groups, and youth movements who rarely get invited anywhere, needs a real chair. And that inclusion means something specific and uncomfortable: releasing the political prisoners first, not as a reward for good behavior after a deal, but as the precondition that makes a deal conceivable at all.

The rest is less dramatic but no less necessary. The talks need a convener nobody suspects of favoritism, the UN, the AU, the Vatican or Switzerland have all offered, and any of them would do better than a government mediating its own dispute. The public needs to be let into the process rather than handed its conclusions after the fact. And whatever gets agreed needs a mechanism to actually happen, because the GND's real failure was not its guest list but its total absence of follow through. A dialogue without an implementation plan is just a very expensive way of talking.

None of this is complicated in the way the government pretends it is. It is only difficult in the way that admitting you were wrong is always difficult, which is to say, entirely a matter of will rather than capacity. Cameroon has the institutions to do this properly. It has simply chosen not to.

Better late than never, as the old line goes. I would only add that late is starting to look like a euphemism for a country that keeps mistaking exhaustion for patience.