Suspicions of financial embezzlement within the National Assembly have been making a lot of noise in the corridors of the institution for several weeks. Dysfunctions, both on the administrative level and in the keeping of budgetary accounts which undermine the functioning of the chamber.
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With our correspondent in Yaoundé, Polycarp Essomba
The alert was given during a meeting to prepare for the new budgetary exercise of the National Assembly on October 17. During this work, MP Abba Kabir Kamssouloum shook the audience with a muscular outing made of all-out denunciations. For this deputy, quaestor in the National Assembly, the lower house of the Cameroonian Parliament has become the very symbol of mismanagement.
He will then reel off a string of defects which would have the consequence of jeopardizing the functioning of the institution. Thus, the MP denounced among other things: fictitious work and services, multiplication of undue advantages, onerous and convenience missions abroad, the undertaking of activities not included in the budget, etc.
A hole of 2.7 billion CFA francs
In short, a series of unhealthy practices compiled in a fairly limited space-time and which, according to an internal control report, would have caused in the coffers of the National Assembly, between the 2022 budget year and mid-2023, a financial hole of 2.7 billion CFA francs (more than 4 million euros). The report, conducted by the quaestors of the National Assembly, reveals in this case that two thirds of the institution’s budget – which is 23 billion francs (approximately 35 million euros) – had been consumed in just six month.
All of which forced President Cavaye Yeguie Djibril to request an exceptional extension from the President of the Republic to cover operating needs until the end of the current budget year. These dysfunctions forced Cavaye Yeguie Djibril to set up an ad hoc committee whose mission is to take an exhaustive account of the problems that undermine the institution and to propose solutions in order to prevent such situations from recurring in the future. , according to one of the members of the said committee.
Re-elected president of the National Assembly in March 2023, Cavaye Yeguie Djibril has reigned at the head of this institution since 1992. Now aged 83, many say he is sick and tired. Very often absent and withdrawn in his village Mada in the Far North, the president would no longer have full control over the institution he has led for 31 years, lament several of his fellow deputies, including within the the majority in power.