Southwest Region
On the evening of 31 May 2019, an explosion at the SONARA refinery in Limbe destroyed four of thirteen production units and took Cameroon's only oil refinery offline. The country still imports the fuel it once processed domestically. SONARA's collapse illustrates the structural fragility of Cameroon's Southwest Region — a territory that concentrates national-scale assets with zero redundancy: the country's sole refinery, 70% of its oil production from the offshore Rio del Rey basin, its second-largest employer in the Cameroon Development Corporation, and historically its dominant cocoa-producing region.
The Cameroon Development Corporation operates nine rubber estates, six oil palm estates, and banana plantations supplying roughly 100,000 tons annually — the region's economic spine. Before the anglophone crisis, CDC employed over 20,000 workers. By 2021, the workforce had fallen below 15,000 as separatist groups targeted plantations through arson, worker abductions, and conversion of estates into operational bases. The sabotage is strategic, not random: destroying CDC's capacity damages the state's revenue while demonstrating separatist territorial control.
The cocoa economy followed the same trajectory. The Southwest historically produced over 40% of Cameroon's cocoa; during the 2022–23 season, sales collapsed 40% year-on-year, driven by security disruption and smuggling losses to Nigeria estimated at 40,000 tons. More than 300,000 people have been internally displaced from the Southwest, with tens of thousands more crossing into Nigeria. The farms are not empty because the soil failed — volcanic earth from Mount Cameroon, West Africa's highest peak and most active volcano, makes this some of the most fertile land on the continent. The farms are empty because the people who work them have fled.
What distinguishes the Southwest from the Northwest is not the severity of the crisis but the concentration of national infrastructure within it. The Northwest lost schools and markets. The Southwest is losing the physical capital that underwrites Cameroon's export economy — refinery capacity, plantation output, oil production, and port throughput at Limbe and Tiko. Any organisation that concentrates irreplaceable assets in a single jurisdiction without redundancy faces the same structural risk: a keystone region whose failure cascades beyond its borders.