Salaries, Remuneration for Cameroon’s Mayors: Victim of Government Inertia or Call for Open Embezzlement?

By Martin-Luther Fon Yembe ( SG UCCC Donga Mantung Bureau)

It was President Paul Biya, who, on December 31, 2013 reproached and rebuked the Philemon Yang Government for being sick from a disease he baptized inertia.\! Maybe Mr. President did not know the magnitude of the illness. It is not just at the level of HIV but has transgressed to AIDS!! This is so when we examine what is happening/or not happening with the situation of remunerations for Mayors and their Deputies.

It was on September 16, 2016 that a Presidential Decree was signed by President Paul Biya granting a salary and some allowances to Government Delegates, Mayors and their Deputies as well as adjusting favorably the allowances for councilors. The Budget for 2016 was voted in November 2015, promulgated into law and many ministries are already executing it. The Minister of Territorial Administration was quick to tell Mayors that the Budget had already taken care of the salaries and that all is being done for this to be paid in the shortest time possible.

We are at the beginning of March 2016 and these Mayors and their deputies have not yet had even the allowances for electricity, water or telephone. The salary situation is now an inviolable issue left to the winds. Nobody cares; nobody says anything, not even the UCCC!

Going by the facts that these Mayors and Deputies have families, friends and political commitments to fulfill, as has been the tradition, and more so, given that they cannot access any single franc since they have to do so only when the Ministers in Yaoundé sign the deliberations of the Budget sessions of the various councils, long done in November 2015, it beats any one’s imagination why this has become another “progressive” promise!

In the present circumstance, a Mayor or Deputy has to keep the office going, his family going, his stomach going and his social connections going! Do you imagine what will NOT happen? What will NOT happen is that the Mayor will Not stop fulfilling these “indispensable” natural demands! How? By dipping his hands into some forbidden coffers!! Whose fault? The indolence and lethargy of the Yang Government!

It should be recalled that immediately the Presidential Decree was signed on September 16, the majority RDPC-controlled UCCC organized a Thank You trip to Yaoundé to say “THANK YOU PAPA PAUL BIYA!!”, and now that Papa Paul Biya knows he is dealing with weaklings who are all the same like these susceptible and gullible Camerounais, he had to wag his tail and on December 31, 2015, his message was “THANKS FOR RESILIENCE”!!

The conclusion one makes of all these is that the regime is bedeviled somehow! What does it cause a Minister to sign a deliberation of a council where all the council did was to fulfill the demands stated in the September 16, Presidential Decree, allocating the amounts as directed! Ever since this new dispensation was voted, the Municipal Treasurers cannot pay anything, not even the old scale of allowances to the mayors and Deputies until the Ministerial golden signature! Is this deliberate to push the Mayors misbehave so that Yaoundé finds an excuse to reverse the ongoing decentralization moves? Who benefits, and who loses!!! The state of Cameroon is at stake!!!

When News Breaks Out, We Break In. (The 2014 Bloggies Finalist)