As the 2025 presidential campaign reaches its crescendo, the ruling Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM) has been criss-crossing the North West Region making the familiar appeal: vote for continuity under Paul Biya because party leaders can point to appointments and named projects allegedly delivered in local areas.
But on the ground in the Anglophone North West, where voters have endured decades of declining public services and worsening roads, many residents say the CPDM’s boasts are hollow.
Independent reporting and sector data show a longer, darker record of institutional decay that undercuts the party’s message.
Appointments And Announcements Versus Lived Reality
At recent CPDM events in Bamenda and other divisional headquarters, party operatives repeatedly brandished lists of individual appointments and the creation of agencies as evidence that the party has “been present” in every Subdivision.
The rhetorical thrust: those appointed, and a handful of development institutions created under successive Biya governments are proof of delivery and reason to extend a 43-year rule.
Yet residents and local analysts point to a gap between the names on stage and the services people actually receive. The party’s public rallies and PR materials may make for dramatic headlines, but they do not address longstanding structural failures in the local economy and public services.
Cooperatives that Collapsed Under Government-led Models
A particularly painful part of that story is the collapse of formerly important agricultural cooperatives especially in the coffee sector.
Studies and historical analyses show that many coffee cooperatives, once the backbone of smallholder incomes and rural social life, have withered since the liberalisation and restructuring eras.
Production has plunged and many cooperative federations that once supported farm inputs, marketing and processing lost their capacity and disappeared, leaving farmers exposed to volatile markets and middlemen.
The loss of cooperative structures has had real consequences for household income and community resilience across the highlands adjacent to the North West.
A related historical example often cited locally is the Wum Area Development Authority (WADA), a mid-20th century project that, despite early promise, failed to deliver sustainable transformation in parts of the North West, leaving a legacy of unfulfilled promises that many older residents still recall.
References to such institutions frequently surface when voters contrast past government announcements with present realities.
New agencies, old problems: MIDENO and LIFIDEP
The Biya era has also created new development bodies, including regional initiatives and projects with names like MIDENO (North-West Development Authority) and LIFIDEP (Livestock and Fisheries Development Project) — that are cited by officials as evidence of investment.
But media coverage and local reviews indicate these projects often fail to scale or to match the specific needs of communities: project timelines are delayed, benefits remain concentrated in particular areas, and promised services (extension, markets, durable processing facilities) rarely reach the majority of smallholders who need them.
Locally, people say that such bodies exist on paper, but their outputs rarely transform livelihoods at scale.
The Roads Problem: Infrastructure as a Political Obstacle
If cooperatives and development agencies have disappointed, the physical access problem has been impossible to ignore.
Cameroon’s national road network remains in poor condition.
Reporting from independent observers and government figures shows that a large percentage of roads are unpaved or in urgent need of rehabilitation.
For campaigning in the North West where many villages lie off seasonal tracks this is not an abstract statistic.
