What the Pope’s visit cannot do in our place

By Franck Essi, April 19, 2026

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When Pope Leo XIV set foot in Cameroon from April 15 to 18, 2026, he became the fourth pontiff to visit this country under the presidency of Paul Biya. Before him, John Paul II had come in 1985, then again in 1995. Benedict XVI did the same in 2009. Three popes. Three solemn messages about peace, reconciliation, justice, and the moral responsibility of leaders. And the question that now imposes itself, with a clarity no one can honestly sidestep, is the very one Leo XIV himself put to the Cameroonian authorities: what fruits have these visits actually borne? Will this country that popes love to visit finally, this time, hear what it already knows?

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A papal visit to a country is never an ordinary event. It generates hope, emotion, sometimes even a collective fervour that few institutions can still produce. For centuries, great spiritual voices have awakened consciences, recalled forgotten moral truths and urged peoples to rise.

But one must have the courage to say something simple: a papal visit replaces neither political lucidity, nor the responsibility of leaders, nor the commitment of citizens.

Because the NOSO crisis will not be resolved by sermons. It will only end when those who govern this country finally agree to look this crisis squarely in the face for what it truly is.

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Three popes before him: a visit does not change a system

The Cameroonian government likes to recall that Paul Biya has welcomed four sovereign pontiffs onto national soil. A proclaimed pride, a symbol of international standing. But this argument deserves serious examination, because it reveals precisely the problem.

John Paul II made his first visit to Cameroon in 1985. Biya had just come to power in 1982. In 1984, the regime had survived a coup attempt. He was still purging the government and the army when the Pope came to visit. John Paul II’s second visit, in 1995, came in a context of social discontent following the theoretical return of political pluralism. Benedict XVI came in turn in 2009, to Yaoundé.

During his own address, Leo XIV evoked the legacy of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who had come to Cameroon with precise messages: reconciliation, justice, peace, and the moral responsibility of leaders. He then asked, before a room full of ministers and ambassadors: what fruits have these visits actually borne?

It is important to consider the timing of papal visits to Cameroon: they have generally taken place during a crisis, during periods of upheaval threatening the survival of the regime. This pattern — crisis, papal visit, speech about peace, return to the status quo — has repeated itself with a regularity that should trouble every conscience. These numerous papal visits have changed nothing about Biya’s policy in Cameroon, which has maintained its system of governance throughout all these years.

This observation is not an indictment of the Church. It is a warning against a very Cameroonian temptation: believing that spiritual legitimation can substitute for political reform.

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The Pope went to Bamenda. Paul Biya never has.

There is in Leo XIV’s visit a fact that must be named with all the clarity it deserves.

On April 16, 2026, a 70-year-old pope, who had come from Rome as part of an eleven-day apostolic journey across Africa, made the trip to Bamenda. After reaching the city by air, he travelled in the popemobile along a road lined with mud-brick houses with corrugated metal roofs to reach Saint Joseph’s Cathedral. He listened to the testimonies of an internally displaced family, a widow, a young man torn from his studies. He released a white dove before a crowd in tears.

Paul Biya has never been to Bamenda since this crisis reactivated in 2016.

Not once in ten years. Not one visit. Not one speech on the very soil of the wound. Not one gesture that would have said, even symbolically: I am your president, I see you, I acknowledge what you are going through.

For the head of a state to leave it to a foreign pope to do what he should have done himself is more than a political failure. It is a confession.

In African societies, and in Cameroonian society in particular, the symbolic weight of a leader’s physical presence is immense. His presence would have signified: this crisis is real, it concerns me, it concerns all of us. His prolonged absence over ten years says something else: this part of the country is not quite my country, or at least not enough for me to deign to go there. One cannot fully measure the power that the presidential office, properly exercised, could have produced on a people in mourning, hungry for some sign that their suffering is acknowledged by the head of state. Leo XIV, by going where the Cameroonian president does not go, revealed by contrast the full extent of that symbolic abdication.

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What Leo XIV said — and what his words imply

Upon his arrival in Yaoundé, Leo XIV had already issued a solemn call to political leaders to break the chains of corruption that shackle them to the pursuit of profit. Words spoken before the very officials of the Cameroonian state, in the capital of the regime itself.

The Pope’s peace mission quickly produced concrete results: Anglophone separatists announced a three-day pause in fighting to coincide with his visit. This is a significant gesture, even if temporary. It demonstrates that the pontifical word still carries real resonance on the ground — which makes the contrast with the persistent political inaction of the central government all the more striking.

In Bamenda, before direct victims of the conflict, Leo XIV delivered words that cannot be read lightly. He declared: « Blessed are the peacemakers! But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging what is sacred into darkness and filth. » He urged the community to be the oil that spreads over human wounds. Presenting himself as a pilgrim of peace and unity, he explicitly acknowledged the profound suffering of the region and called on Cameroonians to begin rebuilding their society today, not tomorrow. He also condemned the masters of war, stating that they pretend not to know that it takes only a moment to destroy.

These words name responsibilities. They set moral demands before which the Cameroonian power cannot hide behind a simple diplomatic smile.

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The Catholic Church facing the crisis: real commitment, structural limits

The Catholic Church is present in each of Cameroon’s ten regions. It is one of the most solid institutions in the country, and Cameroonians take it very seriously. This presence grants it a moral authority that neither the state nor armed groups can ignore.

The late Cardinal Christian Tumi had brought together imams and the head of the Presbyterian Church of Cameroon to discuss solutions to the crisis, calling on Anglophone populations to attend a general conference. Several Catholic leaders have regularly affirmed that the Church was determined and available to contribute to the restoration of peace. But these announcements had no direct effect on the ground. Internal divisions between Anglophone and Francophone clergy — and between clergy critical of the government and clergy close to it — have prevented the Church from playing a fully constructive role. And when a papal envoy was sent to Yaoundé in the early years of the crisis, he was perceived in diplomatic circles as having sided with the government.

The Church can accompany, encourage, and challenge. It cannot substitute for the political will that alone makes it possible to resolve structural crises. The resolution of the Anglophone conflict depends above all on the Cameroonian government, on separatist leaders, and on a genuine political dialogue.

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A systemic state injustice

The NOSO crisis is not, at its origin, a security crisis. At its root, it is a systemic state injustice: the progressive and methodical liquidation, over several decades, of a freely agreed political compact, to the detriment of a part of the nation whose specific rights have been denied, eroded, and then repressed.

One must go back to 1961 and the constitutional conference of Foumban, held from July 17 to 21. John Ngu Foncha and the representatives of Southern Cameroons conceived the federation as a framework protecting genuine political, legal and administrative autonomies. Ahmadou Ahidjo, for his part, adhered to federalism only as a temporary stage, for want of being able to immediately impose the unitary and centralised state he desired. The founding compact did not rest on a shared vision. It rested on an ambiguity. And every founding ambiguity eventually exacts its political price.

The referendum of May 20, 1972 — announced fourteen days before the vote, in a context of a single party — liquidated this initial compromise with 99.99% voting « Yes ». A significant part of Cameroonian legal scholarship regards this process as a civilian coup d’état, since the 1961 federal Constitution did not provide for the possibility of ending the federation by referendum alone. It was not a national deliberation. It was an organised ratification. From that point on, the state progressively neutralised the guarantees meant to protect the historical specificities of the Anglophone regions: the common law judicial system weakened, the educational system subjected to growing intrusions, and the administration functioning as if uniformity were the condition of unity.

No, the crisis did not begin with armed violence. It was lawyers, and then teachers, who relaunched the contemporary sequence in 2016, with precise and legitimate demands. On January 17, 2017, the government banned the activities of the Anglophone civil society consortium, had several leaders arrested, and cut off Internet access in the Anglophone regions. That is the moment when a crisis that was still reversible was treated as a threat to be crushed rather than a conflict to be negotiated. When a state closes the political door to a structured demand, it mechanically opens the window to radicalisation. And when that state is structurally responsible for the injustice fuelling the demand, its repression is not a solution: it is an aggravation.

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The human cost of political refusal

Since 2016, the Anglophone crisis has killed more than 6,000 people according to Amnesty International. In 2024, the Norwegian Refugee Council counted 583,113 displaced persons in the Northwest and Southwest regions. For 2026, the United Nations estimates that 2.9 million people will need humanitarian assistance in the country.

These figures have a name. They measure the concrete effect, on the most vulnerable social majority, of decisions made by leaders whom those consequences do not reach directly. Violence does not strike indiscriminately: it strikes first those who have neither the resources nor the networks to protect themselves. We are talking about broken school trajectories, shattered families, local economies reduced to nothing, and normalised death.

One must add to this picture a reality that is rarely named: the NOSO crisis is one of the most invisible crises internationally. This is not an accident. It is a strategy. The Cameroonian regime has managed to control the external narrative with an effectiveness that its own internal reforms have never achieved.

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What political lucidity demands: refoundation, not patching

What this crisis requires, we know. It is not a secret. It is not a new formula. It is simply what political reason has demanded for years, and what the government in power has systematically refused to accomplish. Because an exclusively security-based response has not worked. It will not work. Eight years of military deployment have produced the structuring of a war economy, the normalisation of lethal violence and the entrenchment of the conflict — not its resolution.

More than anything, Cameroon needs a refoundation of the state.

Not an institutional patch-up. Not a façade dialogue organised by those who are themselves responsible for the impasse. But a new political contract between Cameroonian women and men and their institutions — a contract built on binding, not merely decorative, values: justice, dignity, and unity in diversity.

Because the current national motto — Peace, Work, Fatherland — has shown its limits. There can be no peace without justice. There can be no dignified work in an environment of arbitrariness. And there can be no true fatherland when injustice fractures the national community. The Anglophone crisis is first and foremost the story of a political, cultural and symbolic marginalisation that was long denied and never repaired. Systemic corruption is a daily violence inflicted on those who have neither the connections nor the influence to escape arbitrariness. Distrust of institutions is the direct consequence of a judicial apparatus used as a political instrument rather than as an impartial guardian of the law. As long as we continue treating these problems as governance or security crises without naming the injustice that fuels them, we will keep producing temporary fixes without ever healing the root causes.

This refoundation necessarily passes through a rewriting of the Constitution — not as a literary exercise, but as a founding political act. A Constitution that refounds the rules of power: who decides, how, under what oversight, and with what sanctions. A Constitution that refounds the rules of trust: how citizens protect their rights without having to beg. A Constitution that refounds the rules of proximity: where public money goes, who manages it, as close as possible to the people. And a Constitution that refounds the common narrative: what we are, what we want to become, and how we embrace our differences without turning them into pretexts for domination.

Article 55 of the 1996 Constitution perfectly illustrates the betrayal that awaits us if we do not go to the root: it provided for decentralisation, but referred the essentials to « the law ». The result: twenty-three years of waiting for an implementation that betrayed the spirit of the text. The forms of democracy, but the methodical neutralisation of counter-powers. The text as a shop window, and practice as a padlock. This cycle must be broken.

For the NOSO crisis specifically, this refoundation requires: a genuinely inclusive dialogue on the form of the state and the real sharing of power; the recognition of historical wrongs committed since 1961; a credible framework for de-escalation, demobilisation and the protection of civilians; and justice for the victims — justice understood not as procedure, but as effective reparation for the harm suffered.

Unity is not celebrated. It is built, every day, through the reduction of inequalities, the equitable sharing of resources, the valorisation of our history in its full truth, and the real practice of democratic values in our institutions as much as in our conduct. Unity cannot be built on empty words. It is built on justice, an assumed history, and a credible collective project.

Let us dare to say it clearly: we have the capacity to invent a different Cameroon. A country where every public penny is allocated to the right priorities. A country where appointments rest on transparent criteria of excellence. A country where difference is no longer perceived as a threat but as a richness. A country reconciled with its memory and capable of moving forward together. Great ruptures always begin with an act of collective imagination. Powerlessness is not a fatality. It is the result of a lack of organised will.

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A people’s maturity cannot be decreed

Four popes have come to Cameroon. Four times this country has heard just and solemn words. And four times, the day after, the system resumed its habitual course, as if nothing had been said.

It took a pope travelling from Rome all the way to Bamenda for Bamenda to exist, for one day, in the national political conscience. That alone says everything about the abandonment in which the power has kept these populations.

The primary responsibility for this state of affairs lies with the central power — with those who held institutional initiative, who had the means to reform and who chose, at every crossroads, to temporise and to repress. They are the ones who must be named. They are the ones who must be held accountable.

But lucidity demands going further. Because political systems endure not only through the ill will of those who govern. They also endure through the passivity of those who know and do not act. The elites who chose co-optation over courage. The voices that fell silent when they should have spoken. A civil society that remained insufficiently organised. A fragmented opposition that too often played on a terrain the system had itself designed.

For an individual as for a people, maturity can be stated simply. It means doing well, in time, what we know we must do, without waiting for the pressure of events or the prompting of others. What has been missing in Cameroon until now is not information. It is not even diagnosis. It is the political maturity to do in time what we know to be just, necessary and vital.

Nations are not transformed by miracle. They are transformed when the people rise and become themselves the force of change. When leaders stop confusing longevity with legitimacy. When elites stop calling stagnation what they prefer to call stability. And when citizens understand that history does not spare peoples who refuse too long to do what they know they must do.

It is not more knowledge that we need.

It is the will, at last, to act.

Franck Essi

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