Simon Achidi Achu

Simon Achidi Achu was born on November 5, 1934, in the grasslands of what was then the British Southern Cameroons, in the Bamenda region of the country's North West ^[1]. His home area, Santa, sat on the high plateau south of Bamenda town, a district of farming villages governed under British administration as part of a League of Nations mandate and later a United Nations trust territory. He grew up, in other words, in an English-speaking corner of a territory whose political future was still unsettled.

Education in the Southern Cameroons of the 1940s and 1950s ran through mission schools, and Achidi Achu followed that route before pursuing higher studies abroad. He trained in law, completing his professional formation in France, an unusual path for an Anglophone of his generation and one that later served him well in a state dominated by French-speaking institutions ^[2]. When British Southern Cameroons voted in the 1961 plebiscite to join the Republic of Cameroun, forming a federal republic, young educated Anglophones like Achidi Achu found themselves navigating two legal traditions, two administrative cultures, and two official languages at once.

That dual formation shaped his entire career. Colleagues later remarked on his ability to move comfortably between the common law world of Bamenda and the civil law corridors of Yaoundé, a skill that few politicians of either language community could match ^[2].

Achidi Achu entered public service in the years after reunification, rising through the legal and administrative apparatus of the federal and then unitary state. His first major national appointment came in 1972, the year President Ahmadou Ahidjo abolished the federation, when he was named Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals ^[1]. Holding the justice portfolio during the transition to the unitary republic placed him at the center of efforts to harmonize the country's two inherited legal systems, a task that remains contested to this day.

He served as justice minister until 1975, after which he held other senior positions in government and the ruling party, first the Cameroon National Union under Ahidjo and later the Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) after Paul Biya assumed the presidency in 1982 ^[3]. Through the late 1970s and 1980s he built a reputation as a loyal but approachable insider, a Bamenda man who could deliver his region's support to the center while lobbying for its interests in return.

Who was Simon Achidi Achu at this stage? To many in the North West he was a patron and intermediary; to the government he was proof that Anglophones could rise within the system. Both perceptions would matter enormously when Cameroon's politics turned turbulent at the start of the 1990s ^[3].

The early 1990s tested the Cameroonian state as nothing had since independence. The legalization of opposition parties in 1990, the ghost town campaigns of civil disobedience in 1991, and the bitterly disputed presidential election of October 1992 left the country polarized, with the Anglophone regions and the North West in particular strongly behind the opposition Social Democratic Front of John Fru Ndi, himself a Bamenda man ^[4]. Official results gave Biya a narrow victory that the opposition never accepted, and unrest in the North West prompted a state of emergency there.

It was in this charged atmosphere that Biya, on April 9, 1992, appointed Achidi Achu Prime Minister, the first Anglophone to head a Cameroonian government since the post had been recreated ^[1]. The choice was widely read as an attempt to reconcile the English-speaking regions to the regime and to blunt the appeal of Fru Ndi in their shared home area ^[4]. Among the most cited Simon Achidi Achu facts is the phrase he made famous during this period: politics na njangi, a Pidgin expression meaning politics is a rotating savings club, you support those who support you. Critics heard an admission of patronage politics; supporters heard an honest description of how benefits reach neglected regions.

Achidi Achu led the government for more than four years, through the adoption of the January 1996 constitutional revision that formally decentralized the state and created a Senate on paper ^[3]. On September 19, 1996, Biya replaced him with Peter Mafany Musonge, another Anglophone, this time from the South West, ending Achidi Achu's tenure but confirming that the prime ministership had become, by convention, an Anglophone office ^[1].

Leaving the Star Building did not mean leaving politics. Achidi Achu remained a senior figure in the CPDM and continued to campaign for the party in the North West, where its position against the Social Democratic Front was perennially difficult ^[3]. He also held positions in the parastatal sector, including a spell at the head of the National Investment Corporation of Cameroon (SNI), keeping him inside the machinery of the state he had served for decades ^[2].

A new chapter opened in 2013 when Cameroon finally convened the Senate provided for in the 1996 constitution, seventeen years after Achidi Achu's own government had overseen that text. President Biya named him one of the thirty appointed senators, and he took his seat for the North West Region, one of the elder statesmen of the upper chamber ^[1]. He was in his late seventies, still quick with a proverb, still identified with the njangi philosophy of reciprocal politics.

His final years coincided with the gravest crisis his home region had ever known. From 2016, protests by Anglophone lawyers and teachers escalated into an armed separatist conflict across the North West and South West. Achidi Achu, like other Anglophone barons of the ruling party, faced criticism from separatists who saw the old accommodations as failures, even as the government continued to present figures like him as evidence that Anglophones could thrive within a united Cameroon ^[4].

Away from office, Achidi Achu remained rooted in Santa and the wider Bamenda grasslands, where he was regarded as a community patriarch as much as a national politician. He was a family man with children and grandchildren, several of whom settled abroad, and he kept close ties to the traditional institutions of his home area, whose chiefs and njangi associations had shaped his political vocabulary ^[2].

Those who worked with him described a politician of the old school: courteous, fond of Pidgin proverbs, and more comfortable persuading over a shared meal than issuing directives. His legal training showed in his caution with words, yet he had a gift for the memorable phrase that most trained lawyers lack ^[3]. In his last years he traveled to the United States, where members of his family lived, and it was there that his health declined.

Simon Achidi Achu died on May 4, 2021, in the United States, at the age of 86 ^[5]. Tributes came from across Cameroon's political divide, and the government arranged for his remains to be returned home for burial with official honors.

Any Simon Achidi Achu biography has to reckon with the office he redefined. His appointment in 1992 established the informal rule that Cameroon's Prime Minister would be an Anglophone, a convention every subsequent head of government has followed ^[1]. Whether that convention represents genuine power sharing or symbolic compensation is one of the enduring arguments of Cameroonian politics, and Achidi Achu sits at the origin of it.

His catchphrase outlived his government. Politics na njangi entered the national lexicon as shorthand for transactional politics, quoted approvingly by practitioners and mockingly by reformers ^[4]. Few Cameroonian politicians have coined a phrase with comparable staying power, and it guarantees that his name surfaces whenever the country debates patronage, regional balance, and the price of loyalty.

Assessments of Simon Achidi Achu achievements tend to divide along the same lines as assessments of the system he served. Admirers point to a capable jurist who steadied the government through the most dangerous years of the 1990s, brought development attention to the North West, and proved that an Anglophone could hold the second office of state ^[3]. Critics answer that he legitimized a contested election and postponed rather than resolved the Anglophone question that erupted a generation later. Both readings agree on his significance: for three decades, no account of how English-speaking Cameroon relates to Yaoundé could be written without him ^[4].