In terms of its size and scope, the Covid-19 pandemic is unprecedented. Still ongoing after sixteen months, it has claimed the lives of 4.5 million people globally – as of today’s date, 14th July 2021. The pandemic has forced governments everywhere to learn how well they do in a crisis, and the Cameroonian government has been no exception. Unfortunately, a recent audit of the government’s use of funds has revealed gross mismanagement and embezzlement, in a scandal which is now being dubbed “Covidgate”.
Cameroonian newspapers were running scathing headlines throughout the end of May which lambasted the ‘culture of corruption’ at work in the government and called on officials to resign, or even to be put behind bars,s as punishment for their involvement in Covidgate.[1] But what actually happened? To answer this question, it’s best to begin with the ‘Special National Solidarity Fund for the fight against coronavirus and its economic and social repercussions,’ endowed with 180 billion CFA francs for the 2020 financial year. As is clear from its name, this fund was meant solely to aid in the fight against coronavirus, which is stipulated yet further in the allocation decree published alongside it by the Prime Minister on the 3rd of June 2020, laying out in clear legislation twenty-six tasks which were to be carried out using this money. These tasks included financing a track and trace system, funding research into the virus, locally producing pharmaceutical products to care for patients with the virus, developing a long-distance learning system, distributing educational tools and supports in rural areas, and supporting socially vulnerable people and homeless children affected by the virus. The tasks were further divided into action plans, then grouped and assigned to different government departments. In other words, the uses for which this money was intended could not have been made any clearer. So how is it that, one year on, many Cameroonians are asking, ‘Where is that 180 billion francs?’[2] How is it that, as the impassioned letter from twenty leading Cameroonian women to the IMF – who loaned Cameroon the money – states: ‘Cameroonians died from Covid-19 because tests were unavailable, because oxygen was unavailable and because personal protective equipment was unavailable’?[3]
The reasons are laid out in excruciating detail in the Chamber of Accounts’ independent audit of the Special National Solidarity Fund, provided for in decrees passed back in June by the President, the Prime Minister, and the Minister of Finance, along with the decree for the fund itself, and commissioned in March this year. The audit tells a story of vast overspending, unwillingness to be transparent or to keep records and accounts, probable corruption in the selection of companies to buy from, carelessness, mistakes, and innumerable irregularities. The audit focusses on the Ministry of Public Health (MINSANTE) and the Ministry of Scientific Research and Innovation (MINRESI) since they were the ones to use up the most of their total budget, and indeed went well over their budget in many tasks. For example, 43% more than the allocated budget was spent on requisitioning hotels for use as quarantine premises, which means the hotel sector, already disproportionally affected by the pandemic, was hit with outstanding payments.
When it comes to overspending, however, the most notorious case, and probably the one being discussed the most in the media, is the overspending on rapid tests. MINSANTE bought 94.93% of their tests from a company called Mediline Medical Cameroon SA, effectively giving them a monopoly over the market. However, Mediline Medical Cameroon SA charged £13.66 (10, 415 FCFA) more than the manufacturer. If MINSANTE had ordered the tests directly from the manufacturer they would have saved Cameroon £19, 122, 803.49 (14, 581, 884, 800 FCFA). MINSANTE also had the option of purchasing tests from the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, who were selling tests at a unit price of £3.86 (2, 932.30 FCFA). Yet they still chose to buy tests for a unit price of £23.04 (17, 500 FCFA) from Mediline Medical Cameroon SA. Why choose such an expensive option? The decision to do so becomes even more fishy in the light of the Chamber’s discovery that Mediline Medical Cameroon SA’s bank balance was nil on the 1st of January 2020, and it was only in June – around the time decisions were being made over which company to award contracts to – that movement began in their account. This behaviour would seem to suggest a vested interest in the choice to spend excessive amounts on rapid screening tests when much more affordable options were available: a suspicion confirmed when it came to light that Mohamadou Dabo, a well-known businessman, holds shares in Mediline Medical Cameroon SA. This was the influential personality benefitting from the decision to overspend on rapid screening tests. Dabo also turned out to own the company called Moda Holdings Hong Kong, which charged disproportionate amounts for the transport of the tests purchased by Mediline Medical Cameroon SA – transport, as it turns out, that Moda Holdings did not even provide. The bill for transport was invoiced to the Ministry of Health, and Mediline Medical transferred a large sum of money to Moda Holdings bank account in Hong Kong, a city which is notorious as a tax haven.
That a task had not been characterised by overspending does not mean that it was performed well. For that matter, it’s worth noting that the audit only records two of the eighteen tasks it investigated as having been completed successfully. Often, where MINSANTE and MINRESI hadn’t overspent, they had instead vastly underspent, seeming to neglect their duties and leave certain districts and sectors stranded without financial aid. For example, despite there being a pressing need for drugs to treat Covid-19 in hospitals and treatment centres, the budget for acquiring and distributing these drugs was consumed at an alarmingly slow rate, and a significant amount of it was spent on normal hospital equipment and pharmaceutical products rather than the Covid-19 drugs for which it was specifically provided. Similarly, the budget for Covid-19 screening and community-based surveillance was split completely evenly between the districts, even though some had a much greater need than others. There is still roughly 3.3 billion FCAF available in this fund, which the Chamber suggests should be given immediately to the districts in direst need. Similar in turn to this is the decision to award 157 billion FCFA to the city of Yaoundé for public hygiene and sanitation costs, and 49.5 Million FCFA to the rest of the country, a significant imbalance without apparent justification. The money was intended to be distributed according to need, with much of it given to the municipalities since they were on the frontline. Yet the municipalities had to fund the sanitisation of their public environments out of their own pocket, because the money wasn’t made available to them in time.
Some more tasks which have become notorious for their failings are the fitting out of isolation units for patients with Covid-19, the delivery of ambulances, and the acquisition of drugs to treat the virus. Only one of the eleven isolation centres that were to be built as a matter of urgency has been able to accommodate patients. The ambulances simply never turned up. One reporter summarised this situation by saying, with a slight note of bemused desperation: ‘from the 880,000,000 francs spent on this operation, not a single ambulance has been delivered!... Seven months we’ve been waiting for these ambulances, and the ambulances never came.’[4] As for the acquisition of drugs, Madeleine Tchuente, the head of MINRESI, proposed that they should be produced in Cameroon, and gained the President’s approval to manufacture five million hydroxychloroquine tablets and five million azithromycin tablets. However, instead of having them manufactured, she ordered 5 million hydroxychloroquine tablets, 500, 000 azithromycin tablets and 300 kgs of azithromycin from India, which she then paid to repackage in labels which said the drugs had been manufactured in Cameroon. The Chamber noted how this latter was particularly wasteful since ‘the medicine had [already] entered Cameroon in packaging which respected good manufacturing and packaging practice.’ The audit in general was a record of financial management that, in the words of one reporter, was ‘drowning in irregularities.’[5] This included, but wasn’t limited to, work being carried out on buildings without record of the owner’s approval; over-ordering medical equipment so there weren’t enough warehouses to store it – meaning it was then exposed to the elements to be damaged, stolen or misplaced; no records made of medical equipment stocks and therefore no way of finding out where it ended up; MINSANTE distributing 2,000 defective PPE suits and in one case delivering masks where suits had been ordered.
Another worrying trend was that of a resistance to demands for transparency. MINSANTE set up a working group in April 2020 under the authority of Manaouda Malachie, the Minister of Public Health, which was to make progress reports on the tasks as they were carried out. Yet when the Chamber of Accounts requested the working group’s minutes and consultation files, they had no response. The Chamber also asked for the Working Group’s patient charts and reports on the thirty contracts they had been given to acquire medical equipment, and were also ignored. This bodes badly, especially in light of what little records there are showing things like five contracts for the procurement of medical equipment being given to companies owned by Abakar Sidiki Diaby, who happens to be related to Ousmane Diaby, President of the Working Group; and like Yaoundé’s contracts for hygiene and sanitation of public environments all given to a company called ETS African Distribution, which was created on the 14th of February 2020 and has no experience in hygiene and sanitation. These both allude to vested interests similar to that which motivated the decision to buy solely from the expensive company Mediline Medical Cameroon SA. The Chamber wanted to understand the selection criteria for awarding contracts to service providers, and the two departments’ reluctance to provide this information does nothing to relieve suspicions that the process had corrupt aims. Actions for Development and Empowerment (ADE) and Follow the Money Cameroon, two organisations that advocate for openness and accountability in public finance, have launched the Covid-19 Transparency and Accountability project (CTAP). Executive director of ADE, Ndi Nancy Saiboh, said, ‘We are proud to be leveraging the Follow the Money platform to activate a Pan-African tracking system for all Covid-19 funds received and donated to these countries.’ Together with BudgIT, Global Integrity, and the Scoll Foundation, they ‘join [their] voice with citizens’ to call for ‘effective accountability mechanisms’ and push the National Anti-Corruption Commission to ‘thoroughly investigate procurement fraud and mishandling of COVID 19 related funding and resources.’[6]
The results of the Chamber of Accounts’ audit were not published at first, and the IMF faced pressure from the Human Rights Watch to make its publication a condition of a second loan, in order to ‘press for deep-seated governance reforms that will improve Cameroon’s transparency and accountability.’[7] The audit was leaked online in May to a shocked and angry reception, after which it was finally publicised through official channels. Its findings have provoked expressions of frustration, outrage, and a deep sense of betrayal, both in the media and among the general public. On the 24th of May, newspaper L’Avenir’s front page was a picture of four ministers below the headline, ‘Il Veut Les Envoyer à Kondengui’ suggesting that they should be put in prison. Quotidien Émergence echoed this sentiment with ‘Everyone Must Answer for Their Actions’, and L’Anecdote’s headline was ‘The Noose is Tightening Around 12 Ministers’ Necks.’ Videos have been circulating online which prove that this rage is not limited to the media but is also shared by the general populace. One was entitled ‘Covidgate Cameroun: High Treason’, and it listed all the names of the ministers thought to be involved, while one man spoke about these ministers’ ‘criminal and unacceptable’ actions. The video ended with instructions to ‘remember their names and faces’ because ‘when public funds are stolen, the people deserve a public trial!’ People were understandably angered by an audit which showed that, while they were suffering through the pandemic, there had been money available which was designated specifically to alleviating that suffering; but MINSANTE and MINRESI, along with many other ministry departments, cannot account for where that money has gone. Many people have concluded that it has been embezzled, and now lines the pockets of people like Mahamadou Dabo.
This crisis of corruption has been linked by some to the Anglophone crisis. There have been adamant calls for the Anglophone Prime Minister, Dion Ngute, to resign – notably from the Secretary General, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh. Writing in Le Soir, Joe Dinga Pefok remarks that this is interesting because ‘the Prime Minister is not incriminated anywhere in the audit report.’ Of course, as he goes on to explain, ‘in a democratic society, the Head of Government would, in the face of a scandal like Covidgate, not even wait to be asked to resign.’ However, ‘the fact is that the current Prime Minister… like all his Anglophone predecessors, is not really the Head of the Cameroon Government.’ He underlines this with several examples of the Prime Minister’s humiliation at the hands of the Francophone Presidency, such as Ngute’s 2019 visit to the Anglophone regions after which his message of hope was undercut by Secretary General Ngoh Ngoh who, Pefok writes, is ‘more of a Vice President… Cameroon is in reality not a semi-presidential system, but rather a full presidential system.’ Pefok believes that such treatment is par for the course for Anglophone Prime Ministers. Ngute is powerless, and ‘the real Head of Government in Cameroon remains the President of the Republic, Paul Biya,’ which means Ngute ‘cannot be held responsible for the failure of the Government in the management of the FCFA 180 billion Covid-19 funds.’ It remains likely, however, that he will become Biya’s scapegoat – or, as Pefok puts it, ‘sacrificial lamb.’ On the other side of this, Jean-Michel Nintcheu, deputy of the SDF and head of the Anglophone opposition, has been calling for the dismissal of all Government members involved in the scandal, especially the Secretary General and the Minister of Public Health, Manaouda Malachie. He also calls for the dismissal of the Minister of Territorial Administration, for not providing the Chamber of Accounts with records of expenses. Nintcheu demands that ‘light be shed’ on everything.[8]
This June, a group of Cameroonian women leaders wrote to the UN Security Council urging them to put Cameroon on their official agenda. ‘Over 10,000 of our people have died in the Boko Haram conflict and the Anglophone crisis. Over 1, 000, 000 of our children have had their schooling disrupted by conflict.’[9] In a second letter, this time to executive director of the IMF Kristena Georgieva, they point out that a loan in 2017 coincided with violent conflict in Cameroon, which ‘leads us to believe that IMF loans which will be reimbursed by Cameroonian citizens are being embezzled and used to buy weapons which murder these very Cameroonians.’[10] Fighting to prevent history repeating itself, they urge Georgieva not to give Cameroon a second loan until it is ensured that it won’t be handled by anyone responsible for embezzling the first: ‘We ask that you do not increase our burden by emboldening government officials who have … steered our resource-rich country to this place of poverty.’[11] They have pitted themselves against these government officials, whose fraudulent use of funds is the common cause between avoidable suffering during the pandemic and the extreme violence of the Anglophone crisis and other conflicts. It’s a culture of political corruption which this latest scandal has only dimly illuminated but which must, as so many have been saying, fully be brought to light. The letter to Kristena Georgieva ends by asking her to help ‘demonstrate to the world that we are demanding women’s place in leadership because it is our right to do so, but also because as women, we have the power and the ability to govern with integrity and in the interest of the humans we are entrusted to care for,’ and to the UN by asking ‘that you consider the peace and security of our entire sub-region, it is hanging by a thread. We are that thread.’
Author: Isobel Macleod
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[1] TV 5 Monde Afrique, news report.
[2] E-TV Hub, news report.
[3] Open Letter to the Executive Director of the IMF. “Open Letter to the Executive Director of the IMF.” 3rd June 2021.
[4] E-TV Hub, news report.
[5] E-TV Hub, news report.
[6] ADE, Follow The Money, BudgIT, Global Integrity, Scoll Foundation. “Media Alert.”
[7] Staff, Reuters. “Cameroon State Audit Questions Ministries’ Use of COVID-19 Funds, Says Report.” U.S., 21 May 2021, www.reuters.com/article/cameroon-corruption-idUSL3N2N83HQ.
[8] E-TV Hub, news report.
[9] Open Letter to Members of the UN Security Council. “Open Letter from Women Leaders to Members of the UN Security Council: An Appeal from the People of Cameroon.” 3rd June 2021.
[10] Open Letter to the Executive Director of the IMF. “Open Letter to the Executive Director of the IMF.” 3rd June 2021.
[11] Ibid.
