Ayaba Cho Lucas


Ayaba Cho Lucas is an Anglophone Cameroonian activist. He is the former Secretary General of the Southern Cameroons Youth League and is the current leader of Ambazonia Governing Council, a separatist organization in Southern Cameroons.
Ayaba was expelled from the University of Buea in 1993 because he had led a one-man demonstration against tuition increases; he has been in exile from Cameroon since then. He eventually ended up in Norway, where he studied human rights and development at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, and from where he has based his activism ever since. In January 2017, Ayaba was allegedly targeted for assassination in Brussels, Belgium.

Anglophone Crisis

As leader of the Ambazonia Governing Council, Ayaba and Chairman Benedict Kuah oversaw the creation of the Ambazonia Defence Forces, which carried out its first guerilla action on September 9, 2017. This was the first armed action by Ambazonian separatists in what would become known as the Anglophone Crisis. This happened seven weeks before the Interim Government of Ambazonia was established, and months before it endorsed an armed struggle.
The AGC's relationship with the Interim Government was oftentimes strained. In March 2019, Ayaba refused to attend the All Southern Cameroons People’s General Conference in Washington, D.C., calling some of the attendants "enablers". The AGC did thus not become part of the Southern Cameroons Liberation Council. During the 2019 Ambazonian leadership crisis, Ayaba supported Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe against Samuel Ikome Sako "out of principle". Ayaba argued that it was wrong to attack Ayuk Tabe, who had been under detention since January 2018.
In July 2019, Ayaba claimed that Cameroon had practically lost the war, and that separatist forces controlled 80 percent of the Anglophone regions.

Publication

Ayaba Cho Lucas, published the book "Not Guilty" An African Refugee Experience, which is the journey of a black refugee through the complex and restrictive economic centre of fortress Europe as seen through the eyes of one person.