Pope Leo XIV (L), President Biya (R)
When the Anglophone crisis broke out in the North West and South West Regions in 2016, the government faced a test of both will and wisdom.
President Paul Biya answered with both. On January 4, 2019, he made a consequential appointment: Chief Dr Joseph Dion Ngute, a jurist, academic, and son of the South West Region was named Prime Minister, Head of Government with an unmistakable mandate: bring peace back to the troubled regions.
PM Dion Ngute did not govern from a comfortable distance. Armed with President Biya’s message of dialogue and reconciliation, he took to the roads of the North West and South West Regions in a series of meet-the-people tours, speaking to communities, traditional rulers, civil society, and appealing directly to armed separatist fighters to lay down their weapons.
His message was clear and humanising: guns do not dialogue, people do. He collected proposals, listened to grievances, and channeled them toward the seat of the nation, Unity Palace.
These were not ceremonial gestures. They were the groundwork for the most consequential political event in modern Cameroonian history: the Major National Dialogue.
The Major National Dialogue
In a historic move, on September 10, 2019, President Paul Biya addressed the nation and announced the holding of a major national dialogue, insisting it take place within the constitutional framework of one and indivisible Cameroon.
Twenty days later, under the chairmanship of PM Dion Ngute, approximately six hundred delegates converged at the Yaounde Conference Centre for five days of deliberation across eight commissions covering bilingualism, education, the judiciary, decentralisation, disarmament, reconstruction, and more.
Chief Dr Joseph Dion Ngute challenged those assembled to “make history” and find solutions to “the problems that have separated us physically and intellectually in recent years”.
When he formally closed the Dialogue on October 4, 2019, the nation had a framework. In his end of year speech that year, that is two and half months after the major national dialogue, President Paul Biya announced a new Cameroon.
Among the key outcomes of the dialogue were: the granting of Special Status to the North West and South West Regions, creating bicameral Regional Assemblies with Houses of Chiefs and Houses of Regional Representatives; a national commitment to strengthen bilingualism and decentralisation; the creation by presidential decree of a Follow-Up Committee to implement the Dialogue’s recommendations; disarmament initiatives for ex-combatants; and the foundation for what would become the Presidential Plan for Reconstruction and Development of the NW/SW Regions, PPRD.
Peace is not merely the absence of gunfire. It is rebuilt schools, functioning courts, and restored livelihoods. President Biya understood this, and in 2020, months after the Major National Dialogue created the Presidential Plan for the Reconstruction and Development of the North West and South West Regions, PPRD-NW/SW.
With the United Nations Development Programme as initial implementing partner, the plan injected resources and momentum into communities hollowed out by years of insecurity. It is was christened as a build back better plan.
By 2024, PM Dion Ngute had recalibrated the plan by restructuring the organic framework to accelerate recovery, expanding the scope of implementation and deepening the pace of intervention.
The results are visible on the ground: water supply systems now serving over 170,000 people across multiple divisions; equipment provided to more than 2,400 farmers and fishermen; reconstruction of courthouses in Bali, Tombel, Batibo and Limbe; rehabilitation of penitentiary infrastructure in Kumba, Kumbo and Bamenda; and support extended to cooperatives, start-ups and community credit funds.
These are the building blocks of sustainable peace, laid brick by brick under the directives of the Head of State and implemented with determination by his Prime Minister.
Why Bamenda, What It Means
It is telling that the Vatican, in designing Pope Leo XIV’s itinerary, did not simply route the Pontiff through Yaounde and Douala Cameroon’s political and economic capitals.
The Holy Father will travel to Bamenda. This decision, laden with symbolism, speaks volumes about the international community’s reading of the situation: that Cameroon’s peace process has matured to a point where the seat of the Anglophone crisis can receive the world’s foremost spiritual leader in a gesture of dignity, not distress.
Archbishop Andrew Nkea of Bamenda who doubles as President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon has been candid that the visit theme, “May They All Be One,” was chosen deliberately in the backdrop of “political disturbances, ethnic divisions, spread of hate speech, and the violence in some regions of our country”.
The Church does not arrive to declare victory over suffering; it arrives to amplify the call for unity and in so doing, it lends spiritual authority to what Biya’s government has been building politically.
The government of Cameroon extended a formal State invitation to the Holy Father as confirmed by the Minister, Director of Civil Cabinet, Samuel Mvondo Ayolo.
Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Cameroon and specifically his journey to Bamenda, does not arrive in a vacuum. It arrives because a government chose dialogue over pure force, because a Prime Minister walked into restive regions bearing not a gun but a message, because a President dared to convene a national dialogue and put his word behind its implementation. The Pontiff is, in a meaningful sense, coming to a Cameroon that has done the hard preliminary work of choosing peace.
As the faithful gather at Bamenda Airport and St. Joseph’s Cathedral to receive their Holy Father, they will be bearing witness to the fruit of a peace process that began in the corridors of government and descended, imperfectly but persistently, into the communities that needed it most.
In that convergence of papal mission and presidential peace effort, Cameroon has a rare and historic moment: to show the world not only that it has suffered, but that it has chosen to heal and that its leaders have been willing to lead that healing process from the very front.
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