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319 Chapter Nineteen Regional Imbalance in Northern Cameroon Kees Schilder National integration is a concept which is often associated in African studies with political ideals belonging to the 1960s rather than the 1990s. At that time, existed highstrung expectations about the transformation potentials of politics ‘to change things for the better’. The essential task of the politicians of a country was to define and attain objectives which were believed to reflect common interests. This would lead to the emergence of a national political community and culture, in which the inhabitants could identify with the country as a whole and with the one-party state as its institutional expression. We now know that the actual political reality is quite recalcitrant. It is true that the pre-existing political communities all over Africa have become more and more integrated into wider networks of intercourse with other social groups, due to the increased significance of commerce, cash crop production, health facilities, schools, world religions, and urbanization. In spite of this integration, it has proved to be extremely difficult for most African states to develop into genuine political communities. Cameroon is no exception. In almost all situations, the people living in Cameroon today do not consider the state as an institutional complex of their own society with which they can identify as “we Cameroonians”. In recent years, the power and authority of the Biya regime has become threatened by the rise of regionalism and ethnicity, economic collapse, and restless soldiers. The delegitimation of the one-party state is self-evident today any question by now. This is hardly surprising, considering the authoritarian nature of political life in Cameroon. The political alienation of large sections of the population, and the autonomous power position of the ruling classes. The so-called democratization movement has not fundamentally changed this situation. Parliament is as powerless as before. Political power is still centralized and concentrated in the hands of a small ruling group. Politics is still an elitist struggle for personal rewards with minimal or no benefits for the common people. And the raison d’être of the 320 powerful police and army forces is not primarily to guarantee law and order. but rather to control the masses and push them to political conformity and indifference. The former head of state, Ahmadou Ahidjo, was a ‘nation-builder’. Although he developed a vague nationalist ideology, stressing the centrality of independence and the promise of swift development, he was far too pragmatic to believe that such a nationalist appeal could be strong enough to overcome the existing regional and ethnic tensions in Cameroon. He preferred guaranteeing the support and allegiance of the political elite of the different regions in the country by means of a meticulous balancing of their representation at the top levels of the state apparatus according to proportionality. This patronage system, called the policy of equilibre regional, resulted in a country-wide coalition of political forces which in combination with the use of repressive means accounts for the remarkable stability of the Ahidjo regime during the 1960s and 1970s. It did not, however, contribute to national integration. Bayart’s concept of ‘hegemonic project’ (1985) is much more appropriate to describe relations between the political capital and the different regions. As an analytical term the concept of equilibre regional or regional balance has several flaws. It presupposes that regions are well-defined political units, and that their boundaries correspond to the major political cleavages in the country. In fact, regional boundaries are quite flexible since they are the product of political negotiations. Furthermore, the existing political disunity in Cameroon is not only produced along regional lines. In each region exist political tensions, which must also be taken into consideration in any political analysis. The current Anglophone-Francophone conflict in Cameroon attracts much attention from national and international observers. It is true that the substantial minority of Anglophones generally argues for more regional self-determination. However, it is equally true that many politicians in the Southwest province hesitate because they are afraid of Northwestern domination after such a political transformation. In the debate which is currently taking place in Cameroon about democracy and new visions of the future, the North-South axis must not be forgotten. I focus in this paper on the relation between the national political elite in Yaounde, and the regional political elite in northern Cameroon 1 . I will argue that the intra-regional cleavages in the North are extremely important to understanding the ‘hegemonic projects’ of...

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