"Development Is First Endogenous": Eugène Nyambal's Blueprint for How Cameroon Could Take Off

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

No country has ever developed thanks to international organisations. That is the conviction Eugène Nyambal has carried through three decades inside them. The Cameroonian economist was a mission chief at the World Bank, sat on the Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund for African countries, and worked at the IFC on Latin America, including Argentina's debt restructuring. In a long interview with Fauteuil Rouge TV, the last of our series on his diagnosis of Cameroon's economy, he set out not only what is going wrong but how a country like Cameroon could actually take off.

This article focuses on that blueprint. It completes our reports on Cameroon's debt, its public revenue and its concessions.

From "Malaysia 2020" to "Senegal 2020"

Nyambal traces his thinking to his time at the World Bank in the late 1990s, when, as he recalls, the institution's private-sector agenda was largely about privatisation and microfinance. Drawing on Asia's experience, he asked whether the policies the Bretton Woods institutions recommended to Africa were the ones Western and Asian countries had used to escape mass poverty. His answer was no. Inspired by Malaysia 2020, he says he launched the "2020" vision concept for Senegal, Rwanda and Benin, built on one idea:

« On doit gérer un pays comme une multinationale, avec une vraie stratégie. Il ne suffit pas de vendre les bijoux de famille. »

"A country must be run like a multinational, with a real strategy. Selling the family silver is not enough." (our translation)

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

An economy, in this view, develops only when it chooses a handful of strategic sectors and builds poles of excellence around them.

Why Cameroon's Vision 2030 stayed on paper

Cameroon has its own long-term plan, Vision 2030. Nyambal's verdict is blunt: it was written, filed away and never owned by the ministries meant to deliver it. What he saw in Rwanda and Ethiopia, he explains, is a chain that Cameroon never built:

1. Sector strategies: where will growth come from? Textiles? Tourism? Agro-processing?
2. Aligned reforms in education, health and infrastructure, with coordination mechanisms between ministries.
3. A five-year plan, like those Cameroon ran from 1960 to the early 1980s, cut into annual budgets that fund its targets.
4. The right people in charge, with management autonomy and accountability for results.
5. Monitoring of what is actually built.

Without that chain, he argues, big projects are pulled "out of a drawer" rather than out of a strategy. He cites the Nachtigal hydropower dam, an idea he says had been discussed decades earlier. The budget instead goes mostly to running costs and debt service, leaving roughly a quarter for investment, and even that is only partly executed.

« Le développement est d'abord endogène. »

"Development is first and foremost endogenous." (our translation)

— Eugène Nyambal. Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026

Only once a country has set its course, he says, should it turn to the IMF or the World Bank and ask how far they can support it. "That effort is what is somewhat missing in Africa."

Human capital before raw materials

Nyambal recalls being uneasy, in the adjustment years, at programmes that discouraged spending on education. "It is not raw materials that drive development," he says, "it is know-how, human resources." With the artificial-intelligence revolution under way, he argues that African states must invest again in the education of elites and in technical training if they are to catch up.

Equatorial Guinea: the neighbour that built first

One of the more surprising passages concerns Equatorial Guinea. Nyambal says that before working there, as an adviser to the African Development Bank, he had heard only criticism of the country. What he found, he says, was a two-phase plan: first infrastructure, identified from oil revenue, built and closely monitored ("un vrai monitoring"); then human capital and diversification. The second phase, he notes, was hit by the fall in oil prices. With what has been built, he believes Malabo and Bata could make the country "the Dubai of Central Africa", serving the CEMAC market and Nigeria, provided it now diversifies.

A multipolar world, and Africa's choice

Nyambal rejects both blind loyalty to the Bretton Woods institutions and calls to walk out of them. His argument is about direction, not camps. By 2050, he reminds viewers, Africa will have about 2.5 billion people while the West will have fewer than one billion. Old civilisations, from China to India, are reasserting themselves. "Africa does not need friends in the West or the East," he says; it needs to decide where it is going, and then choose, according to its interests, whether the IMF, the BRICS or others can help.

« Il n'y a aucun pays dans le monde qui a été développé grâce aux organisations internationales. »

"No country in the world has been developed thanks to international organisations." (our translation)

— Eugène Nyambal. Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026

What he would do

Asked what he would do with responsibility in Cameroon, Nyambal lists a programme that mirrors his diagnosis:

• one last IMF programme, designed to prepare the exit from dependence on such programmes;
• discipline "at the level of the elites", not more belt-tightening for households: a government of about 20 members and cuts in operating waste;
• public enterprises benchmarked against the best-performing peers elsewhere, with managerial autonomy;
• policies for agricultural, industrial and service sovereignty, financed by redirecting public spending towards education, health, roads and water;
• a national capitalism: backing Cameroonian entrepreneurs first, as Nigeria did under Olusegun Obasanjo, with foreign investors as a complement.

What it means for investors

For investors, the blueprint doubles as a checklist. The sectors a Cameroonian government chooses as priorities, the credibility of its medium-term plan and budget execution, and the rules it sets for public procurement and state enterprises will decide where private capital can earn a return. Nyambal's proposed "small business act", reserving part of public procurement for SMEs, would also open a market that today, he says, is dominated by contracts awarded without competition.

Conclusion

Nyambal's diagnosis of Cameroon is severe, but his message is not fatalistic. Countries that took off, from Malaysia to Ethiopia, did so by choosing a direction, cascading it into budgets and holding people accountable for results. Cameroon, he insists, has the human resources to do the same. The question he leaves open is whether its leaders will build the chain from vision to budget that turned other plans into roads, factories and jobs.

Source: interview with Eugène Nyambal, Fauteuil Rouge TV, 28 September 2026. Statements of opinion are those of the interviewee.

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