On Saturday, 17 February, 2018, the AFP news service ran a report that separatist groups in Nigeria’s neighbour, the Republic of Cameroon, had declared war in their push for an independent country. This declaration, not by the official separatist group, is the result of growing frustration with what people in the region see as Yaounde’s attempts to wipe out their identity.

Until a few years ago, Cameroon seemed like an oasis of calm in a region buffeted by storms of violent insurgencies; the proliferation of small arms; increasing ethnic division; and crushing poverty. It had not experienced any major challenges to its external sovereignty and internal cohesiveness, and the regime of Paul Biya, while imperfect, added a veneer of certainty and predictability in the Sahel region of West and Central Africa that was anything but, it was an Illusion.

In 1961, a year after independence, the United Nations held a referendum giving English speaking people in West Cameroon region the choice of either joining Nigeria or the new Republic of Cameroon. The political marriage made sense as the territory had already been administered as one by Germany before 1914, so they had a lot of similarities in terms of a shared colonial experience and territorial management. Most of the ethnic groups were found in both West and French Cameroon, so West Cameroonians wanted to reunite with their brothers who had been separated from them by arbitrary colonial borders. But, the English speakers soon found it was not a marriage of equals. Mumblings of an independent Ambazonia have been around since the 1980s but only gained real traction with the current political crisis.

More: https://www.naijiant.com/guestcolumn/crisis-along-nigeria-cameroon-border/