The Plunder Of Cameroon - Four Decades Of Plunder And Decline Under Paul Biya

When Cameroon’s founding president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, stepped down in November 1982, he left behind one of Central Africa’s most promising economies. The country boasted a diversified base of state-owned enterprises — from airlines to shipping, sugar, palm oil, rail, banking, and transport.

Forty-three years later, that legacy lies in ruins. What Ahidjo built, Paul Biya has systematically plundered.

A Prosperous Inheritance

At the dawn of Biya’s rule, Cameroon Airlines flew across continents; CAMSHIP ferried goods through the Gulf of Guinea; CAMSUCO sweetened the national table with domestic sugar; SOTUC ran public buses; and a network of state banks supported local industry.

Cameroon was, by African standards, economically self-reliant — a model of cautious central planning blended with moderate market openness.

Today, those names are ghostly relics. Cameroon Airlines collapsed in 2008 after years of corruption and mismanagement. CAMSHIP was sold off to private hands. CAMRAIL was concessioned to foreign interests. The sugar and palm industries were privatized, and the proceeds — billions in public assets — vanished into opaque accounts and private estates.

The Anatomy of a Plunder

The Biya regime perfected a model of quiet, bureaucratic theft: privatization without transparency, reform without accountability, and justice without results.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, under the guise of “structural adjustment,” dozens of public companies were sold or concessioned — often to regime allies or politically connected foreign firms. The World Bank and IMF endorsed reform, but in Cameroon’s hands, it became a feeding frenzy.

Files from Cameroon’s anti-corruption commission, CONAC, show that embezzlement cases have consumed nearly every sector — from aviation to oil refining. In 2008, the Cameroon Airlines scandal exposed executives accused of siphoning millions from ticket revenues. The same year, a $31 million deal for a new presidential jet turned into an international embarrassment, with funds misused and contracts unfulfilled.

Meanwhile, public companies were converted into personal cash machines for ministers, relatives, and protégés of the ruling party. Procurement became a highway of rent-seeking. Opaque subsidies fattened a handful of insiders while starving public services of investment.

The Mirage of Anti-Corruption

When the scandals grew too loud, Biya launched Operation Épervier (“Sparrowhawk”), a selective anti-corruption campaign. Dozens of officials were arrested, including cabinet ministers and parastatal directors. But Cameroonians quickly realized Sparrowhawk was less about justice and more about palace politics — a convenient broom for sweeping away ambitious rivals.

Transparency International’s 2024 index ranked Cameroon among the world’s most corrupt countries. Billions in oil and infrastructure revenue remain unaccounted for, while state auditors lament “chronic opacity” in public accounts.

The system survives because everyone benefits — except the taxpayer.

A Nation in Reverse

Economically, the numbers tell a story of decline. According to World Bank data, Cameroon’s GDP per capita in 2024 hovered around $1,600 — barely higher than it was in the early 1980s when adjusted for inflation.

The country’s debt has tripled in the past decade, while public enterprises — once the engine of growth — now drain the treasury. In 2023, the IMF warned of “governance weaknesses” in SOE management and called for urgent reform. Little has changed.

The Biya model has become one of depletion without renewal: infrastructure crumbles, youth unemployment soars, and capital flees to Europe, Dubai, and Geneva — where some of Biya’s close allies maintain discreet bank accounts and real estate portfolios.

What Will Be Left Behind

When Biya finally leaves power — whether by mortality or revolt — Cameroon will inherit a hollow state.

The national airline is gone. The shipping line is gone. The sugar and palm estates are foreign-owned. The railways belong to concessionaires. Even the fuel refinery, SONARA, teeters under debt.

What remains is an economy stripped of sovereignty, a bureaucracy addicted to bribes, and a citizenry surviving on the margins.

As one economist in Yaoundé dryly observed, “Under Ahidjo, the state built wealth. Under Biya, the state became an ATM for its rulers.”

The Unwritten Epilogue

Every kleptocracy ends badly. From Mobutu’s Zaire to Bongo’s Gabon, regimes built on extraction collapse under their own weight.

For Cameroon, the reckoning will come — perhaps suddenly, perhaps slowly. The recovery will demand forensic audits of every privatization since 1982, international asset tracing, and the courage to prosecute the untouchable.

Whether Cameroonians can rebuild the republic from the wreckage of Biya’s plunder will define the next generation.

For now, the verdict of history is already written:

Paul Biya inherited a nation that worked — and leaves one that bleeds.

Christopher Achobang writes from Kampala