NAVIGATING THE ANGLOPHONE CRISIS IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CAMEROON: ARMED GANG KIDNAPPINGS AND THEIR SOCIOECONOMIC RAMIFICATIONS 2016-2025

African countries continue to witness conflicts which often lead to insecurity and cause catastrophic impacts on their populations. In Cameroon, the quest for secession by the Englishspeaking part of the country (Northwest and Southwest Regions) plunged the country into a deep conflict resulting to a high rate of insecurity in the English-speaking regions. A major characteristic of the insecurity problem witnessed in English-speaking Cameroon over the past couple of years has been the rising cases of kidnapping for ransom. A plethora of causes have attributed the spate of insecurity in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon to multi-layered factors including leadership gap and absence of good governance This has eaten so deep into the fabrics of the two English-speaking regions of Cameroon leaving undesirable consequences in the socio-economic life of the people. This study exploited primary sources consisting of oral interviews, and newspapers; and secondary sources, as well as using a qualitative and descriptive approach in the realization of its findings. This blended well with the Queer Ladder Theory (QLT) and the findings revealed that, while armed gangs have adopted kidnapping as a revenue generating model for themselves and their organization, kidnapping has caused undue socio-economic implications as it constitutes a huge threat to human and national security and further deepens poverty. This paper thus concludes by recommending a multidimensional approach to solving the perennial kidnapping in the English-speaking regions of Cameroon.