The paper begins from the premise that the efforts of the two regimes of Cameroon to manage ethnic diversity on the basis of a multicultural public policy, known as “balanced regional development”, constitutes an acute problem, exacerbating rather than attenuating the struggles that are often associated with ethnic diversity in postcolonial states in Africa. The purpose of the paper is to examine this public policy in the broader context of the inter‐linkages between ethnicity and politics in Cameroon.
The study rests on a two‐step methodology. First, the authors conducted a review of the conceptual literature around the state‐ethnicity diversity conundrum in postcolonial Africa, especially in terms of struggles for access to state resources and opportunities. Second, the authors used these conceptual insights to ground the historical and critical analysis of primary (newspaper articles, computed statistics from public records, national laws, long‐term unobtrusive observations of everyday inter‐ethnic struggles as a result of the authors' permanent stay in Cameroon) and secondary (local and international publications on the subject) sources.
While these measures of managing ethnic diversity in Cameroon's public sector‐related benefits, such as employment into the country's public service may, in themselves, not be the best approaches to the problem, the main finding of this study is that the greatest obstacle to their potential to yield any serious measure of national integration lies in the tendency for their politicization and capture by those ethnic groups that are more powerful.
The management of ethnic diversities in postcolonial states in Africa is a major development and social policy concern. While most scholars propose succinct analyses of the challenges these may pose for postcolonial nation‐building and conflict‐avoidance, through the notion of a constitutionally grounded “Human Resource Bank” an original policy solution is proposed in this paper that may suit the Cameroonian context and possibly beyond.
