My work as a teacher and consultant sometimes pushes me to look at our administration and I ask myself the question of why it is not performing. I will use three principles to illustrate some of his failings:
1- The law of Pareto or law of 80/20
In the Cameroonian administration, senior officials (20%) consume 80% of the state’s financial resources through favors and embezzlement.
These salaries consist of a non-salary and discretionary remuneration system. They are informal and expensive. These include, for example, company cars, fuel vouchers, attendance fees in committees and committees.
You can receive between 150,000 to 300,000 F CFA per session and some officials have up to 5 or 6 sessions per month, boards are 500,000 F per session and I know PCA who scheduled a normal session morning and extraordinary session in the afternoon.
We must also add coffee breaks and perdiems in seminars (evaluation design, restitution). All of these benefits increase the expenditure on state personnel.
2- The Peters Principle
The appointment being discretionary, it does not always respect the standards of competence. So in our administration, the promotion of incompetent seems to have become the norm.
They occupy the major positions but are unable to take responsibility for them. As a result, they hold meetings that last 6 hours and spend time receiving visitors when they are not permanently on assignment abroad. In the area of project management it is serious.
His village brother is named not because he is PMP certified, but because he has to go and control the money from the project, regardless of whether he is 15 years later than expected and does not meet any standards in terms of quality.
I saw it in all the structuring projects and for the CAN do not speak about it any more. A deputy director in one department has already organized the same meeting 8 times for the same file.
One of these employees told me that it became witchcraft because the provider concerned is out of Yaoundé and must come every week for the same thing.
The incompetence of our engineers is such that they preferred to start the construction of the highway that will link Yaounde and Douala by the economic capital and the first phase will stop in the bush.
Common sense would have ordered to start in Douala to have a highway Douala-Edéa and an interchange to go to Kribi and Yaoundé. The problem of the east exit of the city of Douala will not arise anymore.
3- Parkinson’s law
Our public administration is only growing like a mammoth. It’s normal, it’s Parkison’s law that work increases infinitely and we need more resources.
Good with our administration is that the increase in number of resources, does not lead to increased user satisfaction. The budget for basic education is increasing every year, yet we still see schools under the trees!