Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the opposition leader who has proclaimed himself victor of the October 12 poll, has publicly exposed what he calls Yaoundé’s centuries-old playbook of electoral theft, sparking fresh outrage and hardening resolve among Patriots across the Northwest and Southwest.
Tchiroma’s disclosure lays out a familiar choreography of exclusion: the deliberate shrinking of the youth roll, the withholding of voter cards, the last-minute release of lists, and the deliberate hiding of polling points in unsafe or inaccessible sites, tactics designed to keep ballots away from the people who would use them to punish the occupier. For Ambazonians who have long watched the coloniser manipulate every frame of the vote, the revelation only confirms what many already knew: the system is engineered to steal.
Beyond the streets and into the offices, the playbook, Tchiroma says, is surgical: procès-verbaux drawn with holes to allow page swaps, a legal window of days where “adjustments” are made by loyal agents, and a Constitutional Council ready to rubber-stamp the fiction. In Amba Land, this bureaucratic theatre is not just a technicality — it is the grammar of occupation, used to turn popular will into state propaganda.
The militarisation of the terrain completes the picture. Soldiers on the roads, the spectre of mass arrests, and the neutralisation of dissent through bribery, intimidation or detention create a climate meant to empty the squares and quiet the ballot boxes. But in Ambazonia, these tactics often backfire: repression hardens resolve, and the people who survive the raids and checkpoints bring their anger to the streets. Recent days have seen arrests and clashes in several towns as supporters of Tchiroma and other opposition voices resist what they call a stolen vote.
The October 26 march has therefore become a test of popular legitimacy. For Patriots, it is not merely a demonstration; it is a counter-proclamation that the occupier’s paper kings and puppet courts cannot cloak stolen mandates when tens of thousands of citizens pour into the streets. The call is to march peacefully, march in force, and show that the “new normal” they try to impose will not stand while people still breathe free.
To honest elements within the security services, Tchiroma’s plea is direct: choose the people over the machine of theft. To the international community, Ambazonians say: watch closely; the playbook has been exposed, and the evidence is being gathered. If Yaoundé persists in trying to convert fraud into legality, the struggle will shift from ballots and proclamations to mass civic refusal, and in Amba Land, Luta Continua.
By Lucas Muma
