Easing Cameroon’s Ethno-Political Tensions.
Channel: International Crisis Group
Date: 2020-12-03

Cameroon’s opposition leader Maurice Kamto continues to dispute the 2018 presidential election results, while his supporters and President Paul Biya’s exchange invective that often descends into ethnic slurs. Fuelled by online trolling, such hate speech is leading to violence.

Tensions between the Biya and Kamto camps, increasingly framed along ethnic lines, threaten national stability, already rocked by the separatist insurgency in the country’s Anglophone regions. These strains risk tearing at Cameroon’s national fabric, with more bloodshed likely if the government takes no corrective action.

The government should correct deficiencies in the electoral system that undermined the 2018 elections and outlaw ethnic discrimination. Facebook, the country’s most used social media platform, should work with the government, opposition and civil society to limit inflammatory content or misinformation lest intercommunal relations break down further.