Why Cameroon must shield its young generation from pseudo-intellectual manipulation and rebuild institutions that reconnect the State to its people
By Dr Peter N. Mbile
In every society, there comes a moment when plain truth becomes a civic duty. For Cameroon, and especially for the former Southern Cameroons, that moment has arrived. After nearly a decade of violence, stagnation and dangerous ideological drift, we must confront an uncomfortable reality: our youth, gifted, intelligent, and desperate for opportunity, have become the softest targets of sophisticated manipulation by a class of self-appointed Ambazonian pseudo-intellectuals. These individuals, perched abroad or operating discreetly at home, have mastered the art of psychological seduction, exploiting the reverence that young Anglophones, indeed young Africans everywhere, have for anyone who has lived “outside.”
It is time to call this phenomenon by its proper name: the theft of our youth.
Young people are naturally drawn to those who appear successful or enlightened. In our context, those who return from abroad, or broadcast themselves from foreign shores, automatically command a certain awe. Many of our youths hang on every word they utter, assuming that exposure to the West automatically confers wisdom, discipline, or moral authority. Yet the tragic irony is that many of these Ambazonian elites are the direct opposite of what they project.
Behind the polished accents and the confident pronouncements lie stories of professional rejection, intellectual indiscipline, and personal failures to align ambition with the rigor and discipline required by institutions, employers, and society. Some harbor profound character defects that were exposed, not corrected, by their time abroad. Instead of introspection, they returned, or remained online, to reinvent themselves as revolutionaries, injecting their personal frustrations into the bloodstream of a traumatized community.
And it worked, because our children, our Youth were unprotected.
*The perfect conditions for manipulation*
To understand why this manipulation has been so effective, we must appreciate the context. Cameroon’s Anglophone youth face the double burden of unemployment and witnessing a governance system that often fails to reward merit or protect opportunity. Their frustration is legitimate. Their hunger for meaning, validation, and belonging is real.
Into this psychological vacuum enter these pseudo-intellectual merchants of grievance, individuals who neither understand the real historical trajectory of Southern Cameroons nor care to interpret it accurately. Worse, they deliberately distort it, selectively editing or fabricating narratives to weaponize the past and recruit the present.
They speak with an authority they have never earned.
They preach a history they have never studied.
And they mobilize young people for battles they will never fight.
This combination, false authority, distorted history, and frustrated youth, is one of the most dangerous mixtures in political sociology. It is how societies lose their golden generation.
*The true motivations behind the Ambazonian Elite*
One of the most significant long-term tasks ahead is the intellectual unpacking of the Ambazonian elite’s motivations. Sociologists, political psychologists, and historians will eventually examine this phenomenon with scholarly detachment, and when they do, they will likely reveal what many of us already suspect: the drivers of this movement are far from noble.
Behind the rhetoric of liberation lies a darker, less honourable impulse, the urge for personal relevance, revenge against institutions that rejected them, or the quest for political influence through the back door. These drivers, shame, resentment, ego, unmet ambition, are not the foundations of any sustainable social movement. They are the seeds of destruction, and the youth have paid the highest price.
This is why the Ambazonian message resonated most powerfully with angry, frustrated young men and women who already felt abandoned. For them, it was not simply a political project, it was an emotional refuge. A place to project hope, anger, and fantasy. In that confusion, the truth was lost, and manipulation thrived.
*The institutional incoherence that enables it*
But we must also confront our own internal weaknesses. The hyper-centralized political system in Cameroon has inadvertently contributed to this crisis. When people feel disconnected from national institutions, they seek identity elsewhere, even in destructive movements. Our governance structure, which elevates Parliamentarians as “Députés de la Nation,” accountable upward rather than downward, has created a permanent vacuum between communities and the State.
This vacuum is where pseudo-intellectuals thrive. Where disinformation thrives. Where extremists recruit.
If Parliamentarians were truly accountable to the people, not to central authority; if they were the modern institutional equivalent of traditional chiefs, custodians of community well-being, interpreters of national policy, protectors of local interest, the youth would not be so easily captured by external manipulators.
Chiefs preserve cultural and communal cohesion
Parliamentarians should preserve political and developmental cohesion
But when both fail or are structurally constrained, youth drift, and predators move in.
*A response to the President’s November 6 speech*
In his policy speech of November 6, 2025, the Head of State emphasized the importance of mobilizing youth, women, and all development-oriented actors towards the single objective of national development. It was an important message, but it demands institutional coherence.
You cannot mobilize youth effectively if you simultaneously maintain structures that disconnect their elected representatives from their lived realities. Mobilization requires connection. Connection requires trust. Trust requires accountability. And accountability requires decentralization of political responsibility.
Therefore, if the President’s vision is to succeed, we must take a decisive constitutional step: abolish the notion of “ _Députés de la Nation_ ” and create a system in which Parliamentarians are downwardly accountable to their constituencies.
Only then can:
- misinformation be neutralized
- the youth be anchored in reality, not fantasy
- communities regain trust in the State
- local problems receive local solutions
- pseudo-intellectual parasites lose their influence
*Rescuing the golden generation*
Youth is the golden age of life.
It is the age of discovery, adventure, idealism, and courage.
But it is also the age most vulnerable to intellectual manipulation. And we have seen, painfully, how easily that golden age can be stolen, not through guns alone, but through ideas, false promises, and romanticized illusions whispered by people who have never built anything and are incapable of building anything.
We must separate our youths from these toxic influences.
We must re-anchor them in truth, opportunity, mentorship, and community.
We must rebuild institutions that allow them to see a future inside Cameroon, not in fantasies crafted from abroad.
*The path forward*
The solution is both political and psychological:
- Restore downward accountability of Parliamentarians.
- Create community-rooted representation.
- Reinforce civic education based on accurate history.
- Make youth the primary partners of local development.
- Expose, intellectually and publicly, the manipulations of pseudo-intellectual extremism.
The battle for Cameroon’s future is not a battle against guns. It is a battle for the minds of our youth, our greatest national treasure.
Let us win that battle. Let us protect the golden age of our young people from the shadows of a failed ideology. Let us rebuild the bridge between the State and its citizens. And let us do so before another generation is stolen by voices that have nothing to offer except borrowed anger and manufactured illusions.
The youth must not be lost. The age of their promise must not be stolen.