It is rather paradoxical that the fight against evil, rather than celebrating all the good things about Nigeria and Cameroon, are bringing the two neighbours together! Cameroon and Nigeria share a boundary of close to 2000 kilometers spanning the savanna or sahelian northern parts down to the dense equatorial forest and right down to the creeks. They both share the fortunes as well as misfortunes of belonging to the Gulf of Guinea realm. That is about physical geography. The human geography part of the story is even more edifying. The same ethnic groups are found across the borders with each of them selecting their nationality, often solely on the interest of the moment to the extent that many people spanning the boundary areas are virtually stateless peoples and choose their nationality depending on the stakes of the moment. In the southernmost parts of the boundary the situation is even different because colonization so wished that a part of Cameroon under UN trusteeship be run as if it was part of Nigeria, thus giving that part of the country – the North-West and South-west Regions of Cameroon today – a very Nigerian outlook in terms of cultural practices, at least those inherited from the British colonial authorities. A border of some 2000 kilometers is obviously difficult to oversee, let alone preventing the movement of people from one side to the other; especially when the peoples often belong to the same ethnic group or can communicate easily with a local language or a lingua franca. Then one also imagines how such a situation can facilitate the easy movement of goods and services either through the formal or informal channels of communication. Even with the very bad state of roads between the two countries, people easily move between the two countries. Available statistics indicate that more Nigeriand head for Cameroon than Cameroonians heading for Nigeria to the extent that some Four million Nigerians have made Cameroon an abode for permanent domicile. Officialdom has often had difficulties as can be attested by the problems of bakassi and the expulsion of some Cameroonians from Nigeria in the Shehu Shagari administration of the early 80s; but people-to-people contacts are a different ball game to talk about. As much as freshly harvested eru is ferried to Nigeria in the same way as what they call “savon”, a hard detergent produced in Cameroon and very highly priced in Nigeria and other products, Cameroonians extensively use Nigerian products and their automobile spare parts segment continues to reign unchallenged in Cameroon.

The Bakassi crisis might have come to darken parts of the natural relations expected to characterize such close neighbours linked by history, geography and sheer nearness to each other; Even language may be playing a diminishing role because of what Nigerians often refer to as the overly use of French even in a country supposedly officially also English-speaking. This perception of Cameroon as a French-speaking country has certainly kept a few well-thinking Nigerians off the track a the use of French, especially in Cameroonian officialdom kind of estranges them and make them believe that Cameroon is a Francophone country and, in fact further from them than what geography and history had initially seemed to help bring together. One must give some trust to the highest authorities of this land. In a message to the nation on August 14, 2008 after the permanent transfer of authority to Cameroon by Nigeria as per the Greentree agreement in a ceremony in Calabar, the President of the Republic Paul Biya stated that “the future of relations between our two countries is bright… bound by history and geography to live together, and by numerous links rooted in a common culture, the Nigerian and Cameroonian peoples have every possible reason to promote mutually beneficial ties of friendship and cooperation… As far as I am concerned, I intend to lend my full support to such relations.”