Cameroon: For a durable peace, from crisis management to restorative justice

Between crises and national fractures, a reflection on transitional justice as Cameroon’s path to de-escalation, repair, and lasting peace, without institutional rupture

On November 6, 2025, during his oath-taking, President Paul Biya spoke words seldom uttered with such gravity: “the depth of frustrations,” “the acuity of the challenges,” “the gravity of the situation,” while calling to “reach out to everyone” and to uphold “sacred unity.” Above all, he warned: “Cameroon does not need a post-electoral crisis whose consequences could be dramatic.”

This statement, more than a warning, is a diagnosis: current tensions go beyond the electoral episode. They condition the very future of the Cameroonian social contract.

A country divided by several simultaneous fractures

The crises Cameroon faces are no longer reducible to a single fault line. The Anglophone crisis, with its still-open wounds, security threats in the Far North, polarized politics, and post-electoral tensions, shape a landscape where the aspiration for peace sits alongside social fatigue, identity concerns, and civic distrust.

These tensions are also reflected in the growing role of the judicial framework in regulating public disagreements, and in the involvement of political and intellectual figures in legal proceedings, in an atmosphere where every public word seems weighed against national stability.

Among the figures involved are law professor Jean Calvin Aba’aOyono, and political leaders such as Ekane Anicet and NjeukamTchameni, not to forget many anonymous individuals whose voices, though less audible, are part of the same social fabric. Beyond individual trajectories, their situation highlights a central issue: a nation consolidates peace less by reducing divergent voices than by trusting the fairness of the framework that welcomes them.

When official discourse resonates with transitional justice

Without naming it, the presidential discourse adopts several codes of transitional justice: the outstretched hand, the call for community dialogue, disarmament paired with reintegration prospects, and above all, the rejection of irreversible polarization.

To claim that Cameroon “does not need a post-electoral crisis” is to acknowledge a fundamental fact: lasting peace cannot be decreed by authority alone; it is built by addressing, upstream, the fractures that threaten it. Unaddressed crises mutate, move, root, and reappear in forms harder to quell.

Too often seen as a sign of weakness, transitional justice does not weaken state authority: it sharpens its reach and strengthens its legitimacy. It does not replace the law. It complements the state, by transforming conflict into a process rather than a dead end.

Relieve without surrendering, soothe without erasing memory

In this perspective, a public, transparent, and fair examination of the situation of all persons today in the judicial system (whether intellectuals, political actors, or ordinary citizens) could become a signal of institutional de-escalation, not a disavowal, but an act of democratic trust.

This is not about shielding anyone from justice, but about affirming that peace also flows from the collective perception of a predictable, impartial, and non-selective justice. Re-reading certain cases in light of a national reconciliation or mediation process would not weaken the state. It would strengthen it.

A Cameroon-specific transitional justice, not transplantation

Cameroon is not destined to clone South African, Rwandan, or Colombian models. But it can take from them the principles: Name all fractures without establishing a pain scale that would invalidate some; Recognize identities without locking them into exclusive narratives; Repair without humiliating, unite without stifling; Protect unity without denying plurality; Restore trust rather than impose silence.

In this perspective, transitional justice tailored to Cameroon would benefit from organized, inclusive dialogue, a national truth commission with a limited and independent mandate, and a public agenda of recognition and democratic guarantees; not to reopen conflicts, but to close them permanently.

The time is past for proclaimed peace; it is time for peace that is built, structured, and guaranteed by durable mechanisms.

When President Biya declares that “the time is for gathering people together,” he sets a horizon. But an horizon is not enough: there must be a method, a path, and shared assurances.

Cameroon does not need a country that thinks the same thing, but a country that knows how to durably manage what it does not think in the same way.

Stability will not arise from silencing dissent, nor from artificial consensus that dissipates debate without resolving it, nor from the symbolic victory of one camp over another. It will emerge from a civic pact in which no citizen feels defined as a threat, an enemy, or a risk.

Peace is not a symbolic endpoint. It is a work, a process, and a commitment. And if the national objective is the durable consolidation of living together, then transitional justice conceived for Cameroon, shaped by Cameroonians, could be one of the strongest political and moral foundations.

By Charles Guy Makongo, lawyer, expert in transitional justice

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Charles Guy Makongo, lawyer, expert in transitional justice