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Industrialization occupies a central place in the new engineering of emergence in Cameroon. This article examines the authorities’ return to development planning policy by focusing on projects relating to the construction of material infrastructure, institutional reform and business development financing. The discrepancy between stated objectives (or the image that a regime eager to construct new legitimacy presents of itself) and actual achievements (or the state’s practices) tells us much about the power dynamics at play in the political, economic and social project of “emergence”. Our fieldwork shows that this configuration contributes to rebooting the forces that have historically structured government in Cameroon. Yet, even though the state’s dynamics have converged in a way that tends to preserve the status quo, the project of “emergence” is accompanied by significant transformations that attest to the malleability of a regime capable of permanently reinventing the forms of this status quo in the aim of guaranteeing its stability.