How Issa Tchiroma turned Biya's power against him.

How Issa Tchiroma turned Biya’s power against him.

This is MC Crichton broadcasting from the voice of Ambazonia Radio, truth in resistance and clarity in crisis. Today is Sunday, October 26th, 2025, and we bring you another deep editorial from the corridors of political reflection, a story of power, patience and poetic justice. The title for today’s editorial is The Survivor and the Throne, how Issa Chiroma turned Biya’s power against him.
In a country where loyalty could be a death sentence and silence a weapon, one man has played the longest game of survival, not with armies, but with time. Today, we journey through the ironies of history, from the prison cells of 1984 to the trembling palace of 2025, to understand how Issa Tchiroma, once branded a traitor, became the mirror that reflects Paul Biya’s own undoing. It is a story of patience over pride, and of a man who learned to live inside the storm until the storm itself grew tired.
Stay tuned, my fellow Ambazonians. This is not just a story about the north of Cameroon. It is a mirror for every person rising from betrayal toward redemption.
Let’s begin. As Cameroon stumbles into the twilight of Paul Biya’s 40-plus-year rule, a quiet reckoning unfolds. The palace whispers of succession grow louder, the war in southern Cameroons refuses to end, and the once-feared machinery of control creaks under the weight of fatigue.
In the middle of this storm stands a man whose life tells the contradictions of the Republic itself,Issa Tchiroma Bakary, the survivor who turned victimhood into leverage. History has a strange sense of irony. In 1984, Biya’s regime accused an overwhelming number of northern officers and civilians, known then as the Nordistes, of plotting a coup.
Many were rounded up and executed after kangaroo trials in Yaoundé. Others, like the young railway engineerIssa Tchiroma working at REGIFERCAM in Douala, were thrown into prison for seven years on suspicion alone. He lived through one of the darkest purges in the country’s post-independence story, a purge that decapitated the northern elite, shattered Ahidjo’s legacy, and redrew the map of power.
Yet decades later, that same man would smile before the cameras inside Biya’s cabinet. His return was not luck. It was designed, part Machiavelli, part Sun Tzu.
For Issa Tchiroma, survival was never luck. It was a calculation. Prison taught him two lessons: that open opposition invited death, and that proximity to power was the only shield.
So he chose patience over exile, proximity over protest. Instead of retreating in bitterness, he re-emerged as a technocrat who spoke both the language of the regime and that of the opposition. His survival instinct became a disciplined craft, infiltrate to understand, endure to outlast.
It was not loyalty that kept him near Biya; it was reconnaissance. When multi-party politics returned in the 1990s, many northern politicians rushed to open opposition. Chiroma took a subtler path.
He built or joined smaller parties, forming alliances when they suited his ends, and walking away when the winds changed. To many, he looked inconsistent, but to the strategist, he was reading the board. He aimed to become the bridge between the regime’s palace and the disenchanted north.
Biya’s greatest fear was northern unity. Tchiroma’s advantage was to appear the acceptable northerner, loyal in public, calculating in private. In that contradiction lay his safety.
Every appearance and appointment carried hidden meaning. When Biya made him minister of communication, it was both theatre and irony. The once accused now held the government’s microphone.
To Biya, it seemed an act of generosity. To Tchiroma, it was poetic justice, the accused commanding the voice of the accuser. During the early days of the southern Cameroons’ crisis, he appeared to defend the regime too strongly, declaring that there was no anglophone problem.
Yet to the deeper observer, that was a balancing act, protecting the north from new suspicion, while quietly reading the cracks in the regime. His mastery of optics calmed Biya’s paranoia while keeping his base alive. He never forgot 1984.
He only learned to be loyal. His revenge was not forged in anger, but in endurance. Over the years, he built networks of civil servants, chiefs, and young northern politicians shaped by Biya’s neglect.
He gave the neglected region a patient voice inside the system that had silenced it. As cracks widened, succession battles, legitimacy crises, and the war in the west, Tchiroma remained the one man Biya could neither trust nor dismiss. He understood Biya’s psychology, the obsession with loyalty, the terror of betrayal, the blindness to generational change.
By staying close, he became indispensable. Stay close to your enemy while standing far apart in ideology. That is the oldest Sun Tzu rule.
Now, as Biya’s reign limps toward its end under age, war, and inertia, Issa Tchiroma’s long game is nearing completion. His latest statements show a man repositioning not as a courtier, but as a custodian of reckoning. Yet his triumph is double-edged.
The patience that kept him alive also kept him silent through years of state brutality. His resilience stands as both tactical genius and tragedy, the proof that in Biya’s Republic, cunning became a civic virtue. Still, in the arithmetic of power, Tchiroma achieved what few dared.
He outlasted, outlearned, and outmanoeuvred the very system that once sought his death. Biya believed he had neutralized the north by crushing its elite and co-opting its survivors, but he ignored the oldest rule of politics: he who endures rules. Issa Tchiroma played the longest game, three decades of adaptation and study, until the hunter found himself surrounded by his prey.
When the moment came, the strike was not a shout but a whisper, a quiet claim to relevance that made the regime itself his stage. Biya may still sit in the palace, but the north no longer bows in silence. And Tchiroma, through both action and symbol, has shown that revenge served cold is not shouted from rooftops; it is achieved at the very table where one was once condemned.
In the end, Issa Tchiroma Bakary’s story is less about victory than about survival in a nation where institutions collapsed and only instinct endured. He mastered patience because the system left him no other weapon. His rise is both an indictment of Biya’s legacy and a warning to those who will follow.
When a state turns cunning into a virtue, the clever survive, but the nation decays. History may remember Biya for longevity, but it will remember Tchiroma for endurance, the man who learned to live inside the storm until the storm itself grew tired.