Where Cameroon's Public Money Leaks: Customs, the EU Trade Deal and a Shrinking Tax Base

Eugène Nyambal interviewed on Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026 (in French). The quotations below are taken from this interview.

Cameroon's customs service collected 1,155 billion FCFA in 2025. Côte d'Ivoire's collected 3,452 billion. The two countries have comparable populations, yet one raises three times more at its borders. For Eugène Nyambal, a former World Bank mission chief and former member of the IMF Executive Board for African countries, that gap is the clearest symptom of a wider problem: Cameroon does not collect the money its economy could yield, and it spends much of what it does collect badly. In a long interview with Fauteuil Rouge TV, he walked through where, in his view, public money leaks.

This article, the second in our series on his diagnosis, focuses on the revenue side: the tax base, customs, the trade agreement with the European Union, the inspection of imports and the extractive sector.

A tax base that keeps shrinking

Nyambal starts not with the tax authorities but with the economy they tax. The primary sector, he argues, has stopped feeding the country: Cameroon imports much of what it eats, and its cash-crop output trails that of Côte d'Ivoire. Industry, in his words, has largely collapsed. The service sector is dominated by the informal economy, which pays little or nothing.

The result is a narrow base carrying the whole load. The same formal companies are taxed again and again, and, he says, many of them end up going under, stop investing or stop hiring. Each failure shrinks the base further, which pushes the tax authorities to squeeze harder on those who remain.

Customs: a third of Côte d'Ivoire's yield

This is where Nyambal is most severe.

« La gestion douanière du Cameroun, elle est catastrophique. »

"Cameroon's customs management is catastrophic." (our translation)

— Eugène Nyambal, former member of the IMF Executive Board. Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026

In the interview he put Cameroon's customs revenue at about 1,100 billion FCFA and Côte d'Ivoire's at about 3,000 billion. The published figures confirm the order of magnitude and, if anything, make his point stronger. Cameroonian customs reported 1,155 billion FCFA in 2025, up from 1,055.9 billion in 2024 and slightly above target. Ivorian customs reported a record 3,451.8 billion FCFA for the same year. Nyambal also compared Cameroon with Togo, which he puts at around 780 billion; we were not able to verify that figure, so it is not included in the chart below.

Customs revenue in 2025

billion FCFA

Cameroon

1,155

Côte d'Ivoire

3,452

The comparison is not perfect. Côte d'Ivoire has a larger, more diversified economy and a bigger port hinterland. But the gap is too wide to be explained by those differences alone, and it points to the question Nyambal keeps returning to: how much is lost between the ship and the Treasury.

The EU trade deal: tariffs cut, but only here

Part of the answer, for Nyambal, lies in Brussels. Cameroon signed an interim Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union in January 2009. It has applied it provisionally since August 2014 and began dismantling tariffs on European goods in August 2016. It remains the only Central African country implementing the agreement; its CEMAC neighbours did not follow.

Nyambal says he wrote an open letter to President Paul Biya asking him not to sign, and argues that the agreement has cost the State revenue it badly needs. His objection is as much about fairness as about arithmetic:

« Quelqu'un qui produit à Barcelone, à Paris… ne paie pas les droits de douane au Cameroun, et le petit commerçant… à Maroua, à Douala, on le pourchasse partout pour payer les impôts. »

"Someone producing in Barcelona or Paris doesn't pay customs duties in Cameroon, while the small trader in Maroua or Douala is chased everywhere to pay taxes." (our translation)

— Eugène Nyambal. Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026

Supporters of the agreement argue that cheaper European inputs help local producers and that it secures Cameroon's duty-free access to the EU market. The fiscal trade-off, however, is real: every tariff line that is phased out is revenue that must be found elsewhere, usually from the same narrow domestic base.

The SGS inspection contract

Nyambal also targets the outsourcing of cargo inspection. The Swiss group SGS operates the scanning of goods at the port of Douala under a contract dating from March 2015. Nyambal says he saw the logic of such contracts from the inside: SGS-type inspection returned to Africa in the 1990s, during structural adjustment, on the argument that African customs administrations were corrupt. He notes that Côte d'Ivoire and other countries have since ended similar arrangements.

In the interview he described the contract as costing the country "20 billion a month". The published figures do not support that number. Reports on the contract earlier this year put SGS's receipts at 19.35 billion FCFA for the whole of 2025, against 2.1 billion for the State, with gross scanning revenue estimated at around 148 billion. His monthly figure therefore appears to be an annual one. He also cited an initial investment of about 8 billion FCFA, which we could not confirm. The contract has been the subject of public debate over its split of revenue; the Prime Minister ordered in January 2026 that it be maintained. We present these figures as reported, and his characterisation of the contract is disputed by them.

He made a similar point about the new customs levy on mobile phones, which he estimated at 5 to 6 billion FCFA. The official target of the reform launched in March 2026 is much higher, at least 25 billion FCFA a year, up from 1.3 billion; its enforcement through phone blocking was frozen in May.

Gold, iron and oil: the extractive leak

Beyond customs, Nyambal points to the subsoil. Gold, he says, leaves the country for Dubai; iron ore at Mbalam and cobalt deposits remain undeveloped; and the oil and gas sector is, in his words, "in very bad shape".

On gold, the data are stark. Cameroon's 2023 report under the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) compared official export declarations with the imports recorded by trading partners. Cameroon declared 22.3 kilograms of gold exports. Its partners recorded 15.2 tonnes arriving from Cameroon, more than 90% of it in the United Arab Emirates. In 2022 the gap was 47.9 kg declared against 4.8 tonnes recorded. Whatever the exact mechanism, almost none of that trade passes through the official channels where it could be taxed, and the authorities have since announced measures against gold smuggling.

The spending side: a large State that costs a lot

Revenue is only half of Nyambal's diagnosis. On spending, he starts at the top. Cameroon's government has 63 members, including ministers of state, ministers, delegate ministers and secretaries of state. Benin's, formed in May 2026, has 24 to 25. Nyambal would cut Cameroon's to about 20.

He then turns to state enterprises. Elsewhere, he argues, public companies pay dividends to the State; in Cameroon, he says, they generate debts "of nearly 800 billion a year". That figure is his own and we could not verify it. The only recent study we found, published in June 2026, estimated net losses of about 40 billion FCFA in 2022 across 89 public entities, although liabilities at companies such as the refiner SONARA are far larger than their annual losses.

His third target is public procurement. Most contracts, he says, are awarded "de gré à gré", by direct agreement without competitive tender, and infrastructure costs far more than elsewhere. World Bank work reported in the press has found some Cameroonian road projects to be two to six times costlier than comparable projects in Africa. His proposed remedy is a Cameroonian "small business act" that would reserve a share of public contracts for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Finally, he says civil servants earn roughly half what their peers in comparable countries earn, after pay cuts he describes as having happened three times without being restored. The record shows two cuts in 1993 followed by the 1994 CFA franc devaluation, with only partial raises since. An administration that is poorly paid and not computerised, he warns, becomes "une passoire", a sieve.

« Le Cameroun est devenu une espèce de comptoir qui profite à tout le monde, sauf aux Camerounais. »

"Cameroon has become a kind of trading post that benefits everyone except Cameroonians." (our translation)

— Eugène Nyambal. Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026

What it means for investors and businesses

Tax pressure on the formal sector is likely to stay high. With a debt stock above 15,000 billion FCFA and a new IMF programme under discussion, the State needs revenue. As long as the informal economy and extractive exports remain largely outside the net, the burden falls on registered companies. Businesses should budget for more audits, new levies and real-time collection schemes of the kind already being rolled out in telecoms, gaming, beer and cement.

Importers should watch customs and the EPA closely. Tariff dismantling under the EPA lowers duties on many European inputs, which benefits importers who can document EU origin. At the same time, a customs administration under pressure to close the gap with its peers is likely to tighten valuation checks, scanning and phone and electronics controls. Compliance and good documentation will matter more, not less.

Reform signals to watch:

• the fate of the SGS scanning contract and any move to bring inspection back in-house;
• gold traceability measures and whether declared exports start to match partners' imports;
• the conditions attached to a new IMF programme, especially on revenue, arrears and state enterprises;
• any reduction in the size of government or restructuring of loss-making public companies;
• procurement reform, including more competitive tendering and any quota for SMEs, which would open a market that today is hard to enter.

Conclusion

Not every number Nyambal cited survives scrutiny: his figure for the SGS contract confuses a year with a month, his phone-tax estimate is well below the official target, and his estimate of public-enterprise losses is far above the only study available. But the core of his argument holds up against the data. Cameroon's customs yield is a third of Côte d'Ivoire's; it is alone in its region in applying the EU trade deal; and tonnes of its gold are recorded abroad while mere kilograms are declared at home. Before asking households and formal businesses for more, he argues, the State should close these leaks. Whether it does so will shape Cameroon's public finances, and its business climate, for years to come.

Sources: interview with Eugène Nyambal, Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026; Cameroon customs revenue 2025 (EcoMatin); Côte d'Ivoire customs revenue 2025 (Koaci); European Commission, EU–Central Africa EPA; SGS contract (Investir au Cameroun); phone levy (Investir au Cameroun); EITI, Cameroon's gold gap; government size (Camer.be, Burkina24); public enterprises (News du Camer); road costs (Agence Ecofin). Statements of opinion are those of the interviewee.

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