Business

21, April 2018

Sogea-Satom awarded two major road infrastructure projects in Cameroon ⁰

Upgrading the RN15 over 135 km between Lena and Tibati
Construction of Provincial Road 18 over 106 km between Olama and Bigambo
Total value: €214 million

VINCI subsidiary Sogea-Satom has been awarded two major road building projects in Cameroon for the Public Works Ministry.

The first contract, valued at €112 million, covers upgrading a 135 km section on the RN15 between Lena and Tibati in the centre of the country and 6.7 km of roads in the town of Tibati. The works consist, notably, of flood-proofing earthworks and construction of a 7m wide carriageway and shoulders, drainage structures and five bridges, together with safety, signage and environmental protection structures. The new corridor is 150 km shorter than the existing road arteries. It will boost trade and connections with Chad and Nigeria.

The second contract, valued at €102.4 million, concerns construction of a 106 km road section between Olama and Bigambo which will be part of the future Provincial Road 18 (total length 271 km south-west of Yaoundé). The works include construction of five 10 to 20 m-span bridges, 13 km of urban roads and upgrading of 20 km of rural tracks and concrete drainage channels. This artery is primarily intended to take heavy vehicle freight traffic from the new deep-water port of Kribi to Yaoundé. The project also has a social component representing 10% of the value of the contract. It provides for construction of classrooms, rural centres for young people and women, boreholes, wells and playing areas, together with construction of community and health centres along the road.

Delivery of the two projects is scheduled for May 2020 (Lena – Tibati road) and June 2022 ( Olama-Bigambo road).

These projects will mobilise substantial human resources on the local level. Sogea-Satom Cameroon organised its first job forum in Douala and Yaoundé in January 2018 to recruit more than 100 new employees. Some 90% of Sogea-Satom employees in Africa are local hires.

Thanks to its numerous activities, the Cameroon economy is the most diversified in Central Africa. VINCI has completed many projects in the country, notably a water treatment plant in Yaoundé (2014), a runway upgrade for the international airport in Douala (2017) and, more recently, the dual road-rail bridge over the Wouri river in Douala, the first major engineering structure built by VINCI on the African continent.

Source: globalnewswire.com

19, April 2018

UK investor to develop mall in Cameroon ⁰

British private equity firm Actis is investing in a £200m mall and business park in the central African country of Cameroon.

Planned for the city of Douala, the 18,000-sq-m Douala Grand Mall and Business Park will have a Carrefour supermarket, a multiplex cinema, restaurants and shops. A second phase will include a five star hotel and office spaces.

Douala is the commercial capital of Cameroon, with a population of just under 2.5 million. British High Commissioner to Cameroon, Rowan Laxton, laid the foundation stone for the mall on 11 April with Cameroon’s Minister of Commerce, Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana.

According to the High Commission, the project is funded by the British Investment Fund-Actis, and is being carried out with a local real estate developer, Craft Development.

The scheme is expected to create 4,500 local jobs, with construction scheduled for completion by the end of 2019. “This diversification of portfolio in Cameroon (investing beyond power sector) is a remarkable signal that Cameroon is a good business destination for multinationals like Actis,” said Rowan Laxton.

“As the British High Commissioner, I feel encouraged to persuade more UK investors to come.” Spun out of a UK government investment vehicle in 2004, Actis invests in growth markets across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Source: Globalconstructionreview

19, April 2018

Biya regime launches hunt for ghost workers ⁰

Cameroon has launched a mandatory headcount of all government employees in another effort to unmask ghost workers, official said.

Finance minister Louis Paul Motaze, in a statement, said the nationwide census would start from the salary pay-out period of April and end in June.

“The aim of the physical headcount of all civil servants is to identify and expunge irregular workers from the state payroll,” the statement said.

It said further that teams would be deployed to banks, micro-finance institutions and treasury offices, where salaries were paid out.

Fake pensioners

The salaries of workers who would not have been identified within the three months deadline would be suspended, it went on.

Mid last year, President Paul Biya instructed the government to unmask ghost workers and fake pensioners who were defrauding the state of millions of dollars.

However, experts were pessimistic that the latest headcount would succeed as it targets; banks, micro-finance institutions and treasury offices, were the wrong places to monitor real civil servants.

New York based public policy and strategic management consultant Ekinneh Agbaw-Ebai, thinks the government will fail “because it is a supply-side approach that does not address the demand-side; to know how the ghost workers entered the payroll in the first place”.

Collect salaries

Mr Ebai, who works with the consulting firm, Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), advised the Yaoundé administration to instead go for software programs that would purge payrolls of ghost workers.

“You cannot undertake a headcount by focusing on how many people actually collect salaries. How do you, for example, control fraudulent or double identities?

“And who will monitor the monitors, given that in Cameroon, everybody has a price?” Mr Ebai posed.

Cameroon lost about $283,000 (FCFA 150 million) in salaries and other benefits to the ghost workers between 2007 and 2010, according to local newspaper the Kalara.

Source: Today.ng

18, April 2018

Regulator to Inspect Cameroon’s Douala Airport Repairs ⁰

The International Civil Aviation Organization will inspect the airport of Cameroon’s port city, Douala, to monitor improvements to the facility.

The inspection will follow after the French Development Agency gave the country a loan of 46 million euro ($57 million) in 2015 to rehabilitate runways and modernize the facility to comply with ICAO directives, the airport authority Aeroports du Cameroun said in a statement Wednesday.

The runway repairs were finalized in 2016, while the airport authority is waiting for the approval of the FDA to proceed with works to the terminal building, it said. The ICAO’s inspection of the facility will take place from April 22 to 27, said the airport authority.

Source: Bloomberg.com

10, April 2018

Bundes: Hundreds of flights cancelled due to public sector strike ⁰

Thousands of passengers at four German airports, including the biggest hub Frankfurt, were stranded on Tuesday as ground staff and other public sector workers staged walkouts across the country to increase the pressure in a pay dispute.

Lufthansa said on Monday it was cancelling more than 800 of its planned 1,600 flights on Tuesday and Frankfurt airport operator Fraport has warned of disruption.

As well as Frankfurt, airports in Munich, Cologne and Bremen were hit. The industrial action also affected nurseries, rubbish collection services and swimming pools in several German states.

He said the union would escalate the dispute if employers did not present an offer next week. The third round of talks start on April 15.

(Source: Reuters)

31, March 2018

Chinese miners invade Cameroon, exploiting gold without authorization and causing deaths ⁰

Some Chinese miners taking advantage of the vagueness in the allocation of mining licences and the laxity of the administration in Cameroon are illegally engaging in semi-mechanized artisanal mining leading to destruction of the environment and many deaths.

Sidonie Maboue pulls her hands out of the muddy water to nurse her eight-month-old baby. Sitting on a piece of multicolored fabric, she has filled three bags of gravel with five of her twelve children under a blazing sun.

“These pebbles will be crushed, sifted and if you have the chance, you can find gold but it is difficult,” says the 45-year-old widow who sometimes earns 1500 F CFA, approximately $2.8, after several weeks of digging.

Around her, a hundred people noisily search the yellow metal in a chain work at the Kaye craft quarry in Ngoe Ngoe, a village in the region of East Cameroon. Men dig the earth, crush the gravel and dry the holes with a motor pump. Women collect gravel from muddy waters or prepare food in a makeshift kitchen. The children have fun on the back of their mothers or sleep on pieces of cloth spread on the ground.

In November 2017, Sidonie Maboue nearly lost her life when she went with other villagers to search for gold at a Chinese-owned site near Kaye. “As I ran to carry the earth, I heard the cries of the survivors returning from the site and the young people removed the corpses with shovels,” she says in a low voice. She says she takes these risks to feed her offspring. “If I do not do that, how are we going to live. Since the death of my husband, I am the father and mother of the house.”

Gold and death

That night, nine people who extracted the gravel in this quarry operated by a Chinese company called “Lu and Lang” were submerged by a heap 0f sand about ten meters high. “The Chinese have arrived with law enforcement to drive the villagers out of the mine sites to better exploit our resources,” Yaya Moussa, the village chief of Ngoe Ngoe, says, widening her small black eyes. “So the villagers were forced to come in the night, in the absence of the Chinese, to extract gold and find food for their families. It was during one of these nocturnal outings that the earth fell on them.”

As in Ngoe Ngoe, artisanal mining of gold through the use of manual methods and processes draws crowds in several localities in the Eastern Region. But, the vagueness in the allocation of mining authorizations often creates conflicts between local gold miners and expatriates. According to the Mining Code of 2001, only craftsmen of Cameroonian nationality are entitled to an artisanal exploitation permit. In recent months, this exclusivity is threatened by the presence in the artisanal sites of Chinese operators who practice semi-mechanized artisanal mining through the use of mechanical shovels and loaders, gravel washing machines and chemicals.

Semi-mechanized artisanal mining was conducted for the first time in Cameroon in 2007. In that year, the government had asked the South Korean company C&K Mining to conduct an operation to salvage some 13 tonnes of gold that was likely to be washed away by overflowing water from the Lom Pangar dam. The authorities knew that this decision violated the 2001 mining code, which does not recognize semi-mechanized artisanal mining. At the time, they used the emergency situation as justification. Later, this act by the government was capitalized upon by some unscrupulous operators who started semi-mechanized artisanal mining of gold.

In December 2016 President Paul Biya promulgated a new mining code that recognizes semi-mechanized artisanal mining. However, this exploitation should be carried under Cameroonian law which states that the shareholding in the companies should have nationals controlling at least 51 per cent. This mining code could have helped to reduce the impact of the confusion around mining permits and the rehabilitation of mine holes. But, the decree implementing the new mining law is not yet signed by the Prime Minister.

When contacted, the regional delegate in charge of mines did not wish to comment. “The minister has launched a mapping campaign with drones to identify mining sites and operators pending the decree implementing the mining code,” said anonymously a director at the Ministry of Mines who said he was not allowed to speak to the press. “All the time we hear of reports of deaths in mining sites and, we do not know who is who.”

Meanwhile, semi-mechanized artisanal mining, although illegal, is already doing damage to Cameroon. In 2017, open and abandoned mining holes by operators of the semi-mechanized artisanal mine including Chinese left 50 people dead in the Ngoura, Betare Oya or Ngoe Ngoe communities in the East, according to NGO Forêts et Developpement Rural (Foder) calculations. This civil society organization reported that 250 mining sites opened between 2012 and 2014 have not been rehabilitated by operators of the semi-mechanized artisanal mine. It therefore, launched an online petition to get the Ministries of Mines and Environmental Protection to intervene.

In a video published by Foder on the dangers of illegal mining, a farmer tells how Chinese gold miners grabbed her land and destroyed her plantation with excavators. “The Chinese entered my field and started mining gold without my permission,” says Philiphine Boh. “The Chinese told me that it is the authorities that sent them and they will give me 70,000 F CFA ($ 131.2) for compensation. I said that this money is insignificant for a field of one hectare that they spoiled. Currently, I have nothing left,” said this mother of five.

Secret deals

The losses are not just human lives. In Ngoe Ngoe, a village of 2,600 inhabitants, Chief Moussa says that during the exploitation of gold the Chinese have destroyed rivers and that many domestic animals have been stuck in abandoned mining holes. Mahamadou Abdoulaye, a 42-year-old registered miner, noted that, “when the Chinese saw a local mining artisan, a Nagbata, discovering gold, they chased everyone out of the site including the artisans who have their card while we also paid, it’s not good,” he complains. “The government must intervene because these Chinese are threatening us.”

The local populations are often surprised by the Chinese presence in the mining sites. They wonder how these expatriate operators were allowed to exploit the gold on their land. The Center for Education, Training and Support to Development Initiatives in Cameroon (Cefaid), an NGO based in Yokadouma in the Eastern Region, reports that some local elites are signing secret deals with Chinese miners.

“An elite is collecting photocopies of ID cards from villagers under the pretext of wanting to bring in companies that will provide water, electricity and jobs to the village,” said Victor Amougou, Cefaid’s coordinator, who knows by heart the tricks these people use. “With ten photocopies, this elite can obtain 40 artisanal logging authorizations equivalent to 40 hectares of land. Later, the elite bring in the Chinese operator with whom he has a contract. The villagers who ate and drank are not aware of the deal and only notice the presence of the Chinese who have in the meantime offered envelopes to the mining authorities and military officials to be able to calmly carry out their activities.”

In addition to corruption, some Chinese in their greed for gold do not care about taxes. After the death of nine people in Ngoe Ngoe, some local NGOs and media reported that the site in which the tragedy occurred was operated by the Chinese company called “Lu and Lang”. Yet neither the reports of the local branch of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (ITEI) nor the tax services know the name of the company responsible. The local official in charge of mines in the East refused to comment on this accident, indicating that this file is being handled by his bosses. “This company is not registered in our books,” says a source at the Ministry of Mines. “No Chinese company has obtained a semi-mechanized artisanal gold mining license in Cameroon,” the source said.

In fact, this fictional company is the initiative of lady Lu, an economic operator of Chinese nationality, who did not wish to comment. After Ngoe Ngoe, she and her employees moved to Colomine, another mining town in eastern Cameroon, where they continued to mine gold at a site guarded by soldiers.

“The mining sector is a mafia,” concludes Victor Amougou. “This crime unfolding before our eyes does not benefit either Cameroon or Cameroonians, perhaps an elite who would have received 5 or 10 million CFA ($ 9,376 to $ 18,755)”.

Source: Ghana Business News

28, March 2018

Corruption, backlogs strangling Cameroun’s Douala port ⁰

In Cameroon’s port of Douala, corruption, bureaucratic red tape, overpriced services and a growing backlog have combined to put a major drag on cargo trade through central Africa’s largest harbour.

More than 95% of Cameroon’s maritime traffic transits through Douala, a sprawling hub that serves as the main gateway for landlocked Chad and Central African Republic.

But the procedures for clearing goods are a permanent headache, and very little gets done without greasing palms with extra cash, traders say.

“There is high-level corruption at Douala port,” says one businessman as he slips a 1.50 euros note to the ticket seller at the entrance – a quarter of the official entry price.

Bribes are just one of the obstacles to moving cargo at Douala port. The procedures are interminably long and costly and due to a lack of investment its infrastructure has degraded.

“To take a car out of customs, for example, you have to get between 20 and 22 different stamps,” says a port employee who asked to remain anonymous – for each stamp, a bribe has to change hands. On top of that, there are rapidly rising formal costs.

“A car that we cleared a year ago for 850 000 CFA in charges would now cost 1.3 million,” explains the businessman who bribed the man at the gate.

“In the offices, staff (handling the paperwork) are incredibly slow, so if you want your dossier to be dealt with, you have to pay up.”

The World Bank has noted the remarkably long time taken to move goods through the Douala – an average of 16 days according to an expert mission in March last year.

The team said this period was “an eternity compared, for instance, with the port of Lome in Togo, where the delay is two days”.

Catastrophic delays

For Chad and Central African Republic, Douala is the nearest gateway for a stream of hauliers supplying the capitals of N’Djamena and Bangui.

Due to the red tape endured by the freight transporters, some are now considering the idea of “going through other ports in the West African subregion”, Chad’s ministry of infrastructure warned in a recent statement.

In Douala, “our lorries are often blocked for many weeks at the port before being able to get on the road”, Ali Abdallah Youssouf, head of Chad’s national council of importers, exporters and freight forwarders, told AFP by phone from Libreville.

A survey conducted for the World Bank in 2011 noted that customs “sometimes rightly” took much of the blame for delays in clearing containers and other cargo, but pointed out that many other agents were involved, from shippers to sanitary services.

Such delays are “catastrophic” for most businesses, stated a businessman from Central African Republic who has to work through the Cameroonian port.

“By holding the goods” the terminal managers “earn more money than they do in handling them,” particularly when it comes to wood, a valuable commodity in central Africa, he said.

‘A marked degradation’

Since 2004, the container terminal has been managed by Douala International Terminal (DIT), a subsidiary of France’s Bollore Group. Another of its subsidiaries, SEPDC, manages the wood terminal.

And it is through these two terminals that around half of the port’s merchandise has to pass.

But it has not gone unnoticed by the authorities themselves, with the port’s Director General Cyrus Ngo’o warning last month that a singular lack of investment had caused a “marked degradation” in its infrastructure.

His remarks were made in a pointed letter addressed to the transport ministry, a copy of which was seen by AFP.

The port, he wrote, was initially built to cope with an average “seven million tonnes of merchandise” per year, while today it handles 12 million tonnes – which was putting major stress on its limited infrastructure.

“Since 1980, there has not been any major investment to expand its ability to accommodate vessels and process their merchandise,” he wrote.

‘Congestion is real’

In February, France’s Rougier Group, which trades in tropical timber, said its business was suffering from the “chronic backlog” at Douala port, which was affecting its Cameroonian, Congolese and Central African subsidiaries.

But Ngo’o hit back, saying Douala could not be held responsible for Rougier’s failings since the port’s “logistical operations for international trade were proceeding as normal”.

Despite his fighting talk, Ngo’o’s letter admitted the port was facing “an unforeseen situation in which its operations were experiencing a decline in fluidity”.

“This situation is having a negative impact, notably on the speed of handling the exports of Cameroon’s main cash crops such as coffee, cocoa and wood,” he wrote.

“More than 2 000 containers” of these three goods had been stuck at the terminal for many weeks, he warned, saying the risk “of congestion at Douala port is very real.”

Source: AFP

22, March 2018

44 African states sign free trade area pact ⁰

Forty-four African countries have signed an agreement establishing a free trade area seen as vital to the continent’s economic development, the head of the African Union said Wednesday.

The creation of a free trade area — billed as the world’s largest in terms of participating countries — comes after two years of negotiations, and is one of the AU’s flagship projects for greater African integration.

“The agreement establishing the CFTA (African Continental Free Trade Area) was signed by 44 countries,” said Moussa Faki Mahamat, chairman of the AU commission.

However, the agreement will still have to be ratified at a national level, and is only due to come into force in 180 days.

Nigeria is notably absent from the signatories after President Muhammadu Buhari pulled out of this week’s launch in Rwanda saying he needed more time for consultations at home.

One of Africa’s largest markets, Nigeria hesitated after objections from business leaders and unions — a sign that getting the deal through scores of national parliaments may face several hurdles.

“Some countries have reservations and have not finalized their national consultations. But we shall have another summit in Mauritania in July where we expect countries with reservations to also sign,” said Albert Muchanga, the AU Commissioner for Trade and Industry.

However other economic powerhouses South Africa, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria — known for strict protectionist policies restricting imports and exports — did sign the deal.

A general view taken during the opening session of the African Union (AU) on January 30, 2014 at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa. (Photo by AFP)

If all 55 African Union members eventually sign up, it will create a bloc with a cumulative GDP of $2.5 trillion (2 trillion euros) and cover a market of 1.2 billion people.

Currently, African countries only do about 16 percent of their business with each other, the smallest amount of intra-regional trade compared to Latin America, Asia, North America and Europe.

And with average tariffs of 6.1 per cent, businesses currently pay higher tariffs when they export within Africa than when they export outside it, according to the AU.

“If we remove customs and duties by 2022, the level of intra-African trade will increase by 60 percent, which is very, very significant,” Muchanga told AFP in an interview before the summit.

The CFTA is a key part of the AU’s long-term development plan Agenda 2063, which calls for easing trade and travel across the continent.

At its most recent summit in Ethiopia in January, AU member states agreed to a common air transport market that could drive down airfares, as well as plans for visa-free travel for Africans across the continent.

Also on Wednesday, 27 countries signed the protocol agreeing to the free movement of persons across the continent.

(Source: AFP)

19, March 2018

United Bank for Africa and Nexttel partner to launch mobile money service in Cameroon ⁰

The United Bank for Africa (UBA) has partnered with Viettel’s subsidiary in Cameroon, Nexttel, to launch mobile money services, Journaldeucameroun reported. The decision signed by the Governor of the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), Abbas Mahamat Tolli, reveals that UBA had requested authorisation from the bank as far back as March 2017, to carry out mobile money services in Cameroon.

BEAC approved the UBA request based on the potential benefits to Cameroon’s unbanked population. The central bank said it reserves the right to withdraw the authorisation if the request is not used effectively within twelve months. Mobile money services in the country are currently controlled by Orange and MTN, in partnership with BICEC and Afriland First Bank respectively.

Official statistics indicate that there are 34,114 electronic money service points across the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), with Cameroon accounting for 70 percent.

Source: Telecompaper.com

17, March 2018

Banana disease behind Mozambique job losses ⁰

Mozambican authorities say a fungal infection which eats at banana plants is to blame for at least 2,400 people losing their jobs.

They say Panama disease has hit planations in the northern provinces of Nampula and Cabo Delgado, across an estimated area of 1,300 hectares.

The country says it is looking for alternative banana varieties which are resistant to the disease.

A spokesman for plant health at Mozambique’s ministry of agriculture and food security says:

“So far, the varieties tested aren’t resistant enough. They’ve been imported from Taiwan and show some resistance but aren’t completely resistant. They can endure the disease, depending on the stress. But the more fungus the soil has, the more stressed they become. Under these conditions the plants can not bear the brunt. They also end up becoming infested.”

Source: BBC