I think there's an element of all the above mentioned here.
From what I remember there were a lot of good people there, some of who enjoyed a good and full social life. As Max Payload says it's a good idea not to pass judgement on what other colleagues do in their spare time (in Africa as everywhere else in the world - it's just that as expatriates people spend more of there time off together than they would if working in their own countries)- after all, it's none of anybody else's business unless it interferes with work. Crusty was a good bloke socially but became a bit more of a Rottweiler after his promotion (as opposed to the Doberman who was there before). He never seemed particularly unfair - just very moody. It seems the manager who spent a lot of the day in the corner of the office known as 'the aquarium' was a bit too busy playing with his computers all day to make sure that his subordinates were good man managers. He certainly never had much to do with anyone on the operation and never managed to establish much of anything with the regulatory authorities there either. (Sorry if that's you I'm talking about Dolfin). At least he was always full of confidence that there were even greater things just down the road. But, it's just like Max Payload says, the contract was always going to be that the number of aircraft and people would go down as the pipeline got built, and there's not a lot of helicopter work in Cameroun. That may just be because nobody's ever really got out and done any marketing there - you can't just sit in an office and wait for the work to come to you.
There have certainly been some rather strange departures and some pilots were definitely driven out of the place by the way they were treated, but I never heard of anybody suing the company, so maybe there was more to their departures than we knew about. There were also, as Max Payload says, quite a few oddballs like you get on any operation in Africa, who were not caompatible with either the operation or the country. There was also a lot of crewroom talk for a while about promotion being gained in the bedroom, but it was just talk I guess, because there was an aviation adviser on site most of the time keeping an eye on things.
Africa has never been a place for the weak in spirit Phone Wind, and your advice about taking care before you think of going there applies to most of the countries on the continent. It's not for everyone, but there are always plenty who enjoy it. I don't think Cameroun is much different to any of the other countries in the region, except for this, it's brief moment of glory because a few guys felt they have something to get off their chests about it.