DOI: 10.36347/sjahss.2022.v10i03.004

Pages: 99-109

Corporate enterprises in British Southern Cameroons as in most African territories under colonial rule were dominated for the most part by non-nationals. After the independence and reunification of British Southern Cameroons with the Republic of Cameroon on 1st October 1961, there was a visible paradigm shift in the actors and scope of intervention of corporate business life in Anglophone Cameroon, the territory roughly representing the erstwhile British Southern Cameroons. The Social and economic needs of the new state in office structures, hotels, transportation and the increased exigency for public utilities, gave room for fresh business opportunities. This resulted in the birth of indigenous business companies prominent among which was the famed Nangah Company limited. Though this company became the symbol of indigenous entrepreneurship in Anglophone Cameroon in the 1960s and 1970s, it became a victim of “problematic” liquidation in the 1980s largely as a result of political manipulation. It is centrally in this context that this paper mostly drawing from primary historical sources and employing a descriptive and analytical approach, examines the political influences involved in the rise and eventual collapse of the Nangah Company. The findings revealed that the backbone of the speedy ascendancy of the Nangah Company was the Kamerun National Democratic Party (KNDP) support given that the main shareholders of the company were financial benefactors of the KNDP Party. The paper equally disclosed that, following the putting in place of a one party state in 1966 and later the Unitary State in 1972, political suspicion and social clashes between D. A. Nangah and President Amadou Ahidjo, led to the political victimization of the Nangah Company. This personality differences partly contributed to ushering the company to a calamitous demise. It also emerged from the investigation that, the Nangah Company was entangled by the double matrix of the inability by the .........