Armed conflict in NW, SW as seen through Biya regime lenses!.

But why will the world not say the conflict is neglected? 

Innocent Cameroonians are executed in drinking pubs, in public transport, through roadside improvised explosive devices, even the same with a referee during a football match. 

Surprisingly, government has not issued an official statement on the recent wave of killings and kidnappings in the two English-speaking Regions of the country. 

In like manner, Parliament has remained mute for nearly a decade!

Is that not neglect, a “coping style avoidance”, as psychologists call it and explain that “it’s important to realise that it is impossible to ever truly ignore a problem”?

“Pretending a problem does not exist makes the issue grow larger and delays necessary healing or solutions,” they teach, based on research.

When the conflict started almost a decade ago with an innocuous strike by teachers and lawyers, it was ignored, then conceded with some concessions with the joker being the Major National Dialogue, which was staged some five years ago.

Like another trump card, the extra mile and much-trumpeted Bilingualism and Multiculturalism Commission, has failed woefully to end the killings, kidnappings, looting, lockdowns and Monday ghost towns that are crippling socio-economic life in the two crisis-hit Regions. 

Typical of Yaounde and its songbirds, the play to the gallery and singsong have been “the situation is normalising”. 

But at what pace and at what cost to human life; be they separatists hooligans, civilians or members of the defence and security forces who are all Cameroonian?

Speaking at a press conference in Yaounde last Thursday, SDF National Chairman, Hon Osih Joshua, in counting the cost expressed regret that this year marks 10 years since the beginning of the crisis.

He said the toll of the war is a national shame. Osih disclosed that more than 6,000 Cameroonians have been killed; about 648,000 internally displaced, with cumulative displacement approaching 900,000; some 80,000 refugees in Nigeria; more than 600,000 children deprived of school; about 2,000 people imprisoned in connection with the crisis and nearly two million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

He explained that due to the crisis, the Cameroon Development Corporation, CDC, once the nation's second employer, is on its knees, with tens of billions in losses; the South West Region stripped of its cocoa and industrial leadership; and the whole economy amputated, exports down, investment down, and growth lost year after year.

“I call this war useless because after ten years, no one has won, no one can win, and everyone has lost. The greatest scandal of this tenth year is not only the suffering- it is the habituation to the crisis. The SDF refuses that habituation,” Osih stated.

He continued that: “And we refuse it with a plan: the same plan we presented to Cameroonians at the 2025 presidential election: 100 days to end the violence in the North West and South West Regions. Its architecture is public and its logic is simple”.

As part of its plan on ending the crisis, he said the SDF is proposing the release of all crisis-related detainees not convicted of blood crimes, and a review of the detention conditions of the secessionist leaders in order to create an environment of confidence for dialogue.

The SDF is also pushing for an inclusive National Peace and Reconciliation Conference, made-up of traditional rulers, religious leaders, civil society, youth, political parties and separatist representatives with federalism, bilingual governance and power-sharing squarely on the table.

Other proposals include an Emergency Economic Recovery Fund for businesses, farmers and traders of the two Regions; the reconstruction of destroyed schools, hospitals, roads and markets, executed by local contractors and local workers; disarmament, vocational training and reintegration for ex-combatants and Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

They are all recommendations modelled on what Douala-based international legal adviser, Sir Dr Ntumfor Barrister Nico Halle, a peace crusader and other trouble shooters, put forward in the early start of the fighting.

The difference with Osih’s “sequenced and published plan” is that it has a partisan campaign gloss. 

“...Plans do not vote themselves into existence. If Cameroonians want the party that carries this solution to have the strength to impose it, that strength is measured in one place only: the ballot box...give the SDF a resounding majority, and give the North West and South West Regions their peace,” he said. 

Ironically, Osih has been in Parliament and even when his party’s NEC compelled him to table the issue for debate in the House, after he joined CPDM parliamentarians to sign a letter to the US Senate downplaying the impact of the conflict.

The Guardian Post applauds SDF’s plan, presented at the Yaounde press conference which he should take to Parliament as a Private Member’s Bill.

We also took note of the speech of the House Speaker, Rt Théodore Datouo, at his rally in Bafoussam last weekend.

“We should, more than ever before, unite to protect what has always constituted our strength: peace, stability, unity, dialogue, social cohesion and confidence in our shared future,” he said. 

That patriotic vision of the Speaker cannot be realised when two Regions of the country are in a conflict that occasionally metastasises and spills over to his Region of origin, and is ignored or concealed by Yaounde. 

That approach of pretending through silence in the face of slaughtering of innocent compatriots has failed. 

It is time Parliament should debate the proposal made by Hon Osih and compel the government to end the conflict through an inclusive dialogue. 

Keeping suspicious silence while innocent blood flows in bars, on highways and football pitches will only prolong the mayhem, whose victims have been from all of the country’s ten Regions. 

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3862 of Wednesday July 29, 2026