Ben Modo’s Return to Biya Raises a Darker Question: Was His “Revolution” Ever Really Opposition?

The businessman who accused Issa Tchiroma Bakary of betrayal for refusing to force Paul Biya from power now says he supports Biya and is ready to work with his government. In Cameroon, where an armed conflict has already shown how quickly mass political resistance can be converted into a war that strengthens the very state it was meant to weaken, that reversal deserves more than surprise. It deserves scrutiny.

Ben Modo has completed an extraordinary political journey. Before Cameroon’s October 2025 presidential election, he publicly rallied behind Tchiroma, calling for opposition candidates to unite around him. After the vote, he went further, maintaining that Tchiroma had won and accusing the Biya government of holding onto power illegitimately.

Then came something far more consequential than ordinary political support. Modo began promoting what he presented as a revolutionary route to removing the government. A document circulated in his name went so far as to describe an “Armed Revolution” led by Modo himself, with Tchiroma envisaged as transition president; it even contained provisions for those who took part to later be folded into a new army and granted amnesty.

When Tchiroma did not take that road, Modo turned on him. He accused Tchiroma of abandoning the struggle, of letting post-election pressure collapse, of sabotaging what Modo called a revolutionary movement. Reporting at the time noted that part of the dispute concerned proposals for an armed pressure group. This is a strategy critics questioned because it was not even clear who such a force was meant to fight. In April, Modo again addressed Tchiroma as “President-elect” . He then went on and proposed a reported $125-billion agreement, claiming that signing it could help bring about political change within roughly 90 days. Tchiroma did not sign.

Biya Supporter—Really?

Now Modo says he supports Paul Biya and his government, and is ready to work with them for Cameroon’s development.

That is not an ordinary political disagreement. It turns the entire story backwards.

The man Tchiroma was supposedly betraying is now supporting the government Tchiroma refused to fight

Modo’s central accusation against Tchiroma was, in essence, that he had failed to go far enough. Tchiroma had mobilised a broad political constituency around an election, and whatever one thinks of his long history inside the Biya government, his post-election strategy did not become a declaration of war. Modo treated that restraint as betrayal.

Now the man who demanded confrontation has himself crossed over to publicly supporting the very government against which he wanted that confrontation launched. So who betrayed whom? If refusing an armed struggle made Tchiroma a traitor in February, what does supporting Paul Biya make Ben Modo in August?

And more importantly: what would have happened to Cameroon if Tchiroma had actually accepted Modo’s strategy? That question matters because Cameroon has already run this experiment once. It is called the Anglophone crisis.

Cameroon already knows what happens when mass political protest becomes war

The Anglophone crisis did not begin with armies. It began in 2016 with lawyers, teachers, professionals and ordinary citizens protesting grievances over the courts, education, language, governance and political marginalisation. The movement was broad, civilian, capable of drawing in entire communities. Government repression contributed to its radicalisation, according to Human Rights Watch, and what began as protest eventually developed into an armed separatist conflict.

Something fundamental changed when guns replaced demonstrations. A peaceful movement can involve hundreds of thousands, even millions of citizens. An armed struggle cannot. Once politics becomes warfare, participation passes from the population to the small number of people carrying weapons, and the contest is no longer principally between a government and citizens demanding change — it becomes a security confrontation between the state and armed groups.

That distinction has been enormously useful to the Biya government. Peaceful protesters pose a political problem; armed fighters pose a security one — and governments know how to answer security problems, with troops, emergency measures, arrests, anti-terror laws, restricted movement and the language of national security. The political grievance that created the crisis becomes secondary.

Then the revolution became an economy

Almost a decade later, the Anglophone conflict has liberated no one. Human Rights Watch has documented grave abuses by both government forces and armed separatists — killings, kidnappings, destruction of property, torture and extortion. More recent country-of-origin research describes something even more disturbing: as the conflict became more lucrative, some armed groups moved increasingly into kidnapping, extortion and the taxation of civilians, while ideological objectives weakened among fragmented factions.

That is a war economy, and ordinary Anglophones became trapped inside it — caught between forces claiming to protect them and armed groups claiming to liberate them. Pay the separatists, and government forces may accuse you of collaboration; refuse, and armed men may punish you. The civilian becomes the revenue source.

That is the lesson anyone proposing another “armed revolution” in Cameroon should have been required to answer. Who would fight? Who would fund them? And who would command them? Who would they attack? Who would stop them once political violence curdled into kidnapping, racketeering and revenge? And who would guarantee that civilians would not, once again, become the battlefield? Those questions were never academic. Cameroon already has the graves.

And politically, who benefited?

This is where the Ben Modo story becomes considerably darker. The Anglophone war did not merely devastate communities; it redrew the electoral map. Before the conflict, the North West in particular was the historic fortress of the Social Democratic Front, which once dominated parliamentary representation there. As insecurity grew, separatists attacked elections, threatened voters and targeted politicians — including SDF candidates. Human Rights Watch documented the kidnapping of opposition politicians and intimidation severe enough to stop the SDF campaigning normally in its own strongholds.

Before the 2020 elections, the International Crisis Group warned that precisely this environment would favour the CPDM: opposition candidates could not campaign safely, turnout would be depressed, and ruling-party dominance would expand. That is what happened. The SDF collapsed from 18 parliamentary seats to five, while the CPDM eventually took all 13 seats contested in reruns across the conflict-hit North West and South West. A war supposedly aimed at Yaoundé had helped remove one of Yaoundé’s strongest opponents from much of its historic territory.

The irony grew harder to ignore during the 2025 presidential election. According to the official results, Paul Biya took 86.31% in the North West and 68.79% in the South West — regions where armed separatism has spent years declaring the Cameroonian state illegitimate. Official turnout was reported at around 47% and 46% respectively, despite displacement, insecurity and separatist restrictions on voting.

Did the CPDM collaborate with separatists?

The SDF then went further. In February 2026, the party formally alleged that some CPDM elites had collaborated with Ambazonia fighters to facilitate ballot stuffing during the election. That remains an allegation rather than an established judicial finding — but it came from the political party that has arguably paid the highest electoral price for the conflict. The broader fact requires no conspiracy theory: armed conflict objectively shrank the space in which the opposition could organise, while expanding the CPDM’s grip on territory where it had historically struggled. That should trouble anyone who genuinely wants political change.

Guns shrink opposition movements

Consider two scenarios. In the first, a million Cameroonians peacefully refuse to recognise an electoral outcome — they demonstrate, strike, organise, document results, pressure institutions, and force the government to confront a legitimacy crisis before the country and the world. In the second, several hundred or several thousand men pick up guns.

Which is easier for an authoritarian government to manage? The second, by far. The state has an army, intelligence agencies, prisons and administrative control of territory. It can call armed opponents terrorists, restrict demonstrations in the name of security, and persuade foreign partners that the real question is stability rather than democracy. And once opposition violence begins, every government abuse can be repackaged as counter-insurgency. The political battlefield changes completely.

That is why Modo’s insistence on revolution deserves retrospective scrutiny now that Modo himself says he supports Biya. Was the objective resistance or the militarisation of resistance?

The question of intent — and what can fairly be asked

There is presently no evidence that Ben Modo was secretly acting for the Biya government while backing Tchiroma, and it would be irresponsible to present that theory as fact. But his own conduct makes the question legitimate, because outcomes can be examined even where intentions cannot be proven.

Modo entered the post-election debate promoting escalation. Tchiroma declined it. Modo accused him of betrayal, then proposed an arrangement built around removing the government and transferring power — and now supports that government. That sequence forces a brutal question: was Modo genuinely trying to dismantle the Biya system, or was his intervention, intentionally or otherwise, steering a potentially enormous civilian resistance off the terrain where the regime was most vulnerable and onto the terrain where it was strongest? A million angry voters are politically dangerous. A few armed groups are militarily containable. Cameroon’s own recent history proves the point.

Never an outsider

There is another uncomfortable detail: Modo was never really an outsider. He did not emerge from a lifetime of opposition politics. Years before he became one of Biya’s loudest critics, he publicly praised the president’s development agenda, describing the Emergence 2035 initiative as laudable. His company, Prime Potomac, has had substantial dealings with the Cameroonian state, notably through sports-infrastructure contracts in Garoua — negotiations Modo himself has described conducting at the presidency. As recently as June 2026, he was publicly fighting the Sports Ministry over those same projects while insisting Prime Potomac could secure independent financing to complete them.

None of this proves a conspiracy. Businessmen can oppose governments they hold contracts with; former supporters can genuinely change their minds; political actors are entitled to change them again. But when someone travels from supporting the regime, to demanding its overthrow, to proposing armed revolution, to denouncing an opposition leader for refusing to escalate, and finally back to supporting the regime, the public has every right to re-examine the whole journey. This is more than a 180-degree turn. Set against Modo’s longer trajectory, it looks almost like a return home.

Ben Modo now has questions to answer

Modo is free to support Paul Biya. What he cannot reasonably expect is for Cameroonians to forget what he urged others to risk while he opposed him. Did he believe armed confrontation was necessary? If so, why is the government he wanted removed now worthy of his support? If Biya’s rule was dangerous enough to justify an “armed revolution,” what fundamental transformation has occurred since? Was Tchiroma genuinely a traitor for refusing that strategy? Would Modo himself have stood on the battlefield had it produced war? Who were the people expected to fight and who would have buried them?

And after the lesson of the North West and South West with thousands dead, hundreds of thousands displaced, civilians extorted, opposition structures gutted . After the CPDM left stronger in territory it once struggled to hold. Why was another armed confrontation ever sold to Cameroonians as liberation?

Perhaps Ben Modo has perfectly reasonable answers. He should provide them. Because the real issue is no longer that he supports Paul Biya. The more serious question is whether the Cameroonians who resisted calls to turn the post-election crisis into another war understood the Biya system far better than the man who was calling them cowards and traitors.

And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: if the journey ends back with Paul Biya, what exactly was Ben Modo asking Cameroonians to fight and possibly die for along the way?

#MMINews