Contested
On 20 May 1972, a constitutional referendum replaced the Federal Republic with a unitary state, the United Republic of Cameroon, and strengthened the powers of the president. The official result declared 99.99 percent of votes in favour on a 98 percent turnout. West Cameroon became the North-West and South-West provinces.
No person recorded for this event.
This topic has more than one reading. Camerpedia presents them all, on equal footing, without favouring any one of them.
The referendum remains contested: for the executive of the time, it expressed the popular will to strengthen national unity; some leaders and part of West Cameroonian opinion considered that it ended, without the consent of the former West Cameroon's own deputies, the federal guarantees agreed at Foumban in 1961 — a reading that would later feed the "Anglophone crisis".
For part of the Anglophone press and political leadership, the 1972 referendum was organised without the consent of deputies from the former West Cameroon to the removal of the federal guarantees set at Foumban in 1961, a process seen as contrary to the spirit of the union and presented as one of the origins of the "Anglophone crisis".
In the Cameroonian authorities' own account, the 20 May 1972 referendum allowed the Cameroonian people to express, through an overwhelming vote, their wish to move beyond the divisions inherited from colonisation and build a stronger, more effective unitary state, without calling into question the place of the country's two former components within the nation.
| Date | Event | Era | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foumban conference and the reunification of Cameroon | Independence and reunification | Official sourceUNESCO – General History of Africa |