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
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.
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