Council Treasurer fakes illness after embezzling 13 million

This story isn’t just about some 13 million CFA. Neither is it a means to belittle the amount. Rather, it’s about how corruption, fraud and embezzlement have eaten so deep into every nook and cranny of Cameroon and how it goes completely unchecked despite President Biya’s so-called war against corruption.

It is also about how far the chain of embezzlers can go to make sure perpetrators go unpunished.

This is the first story we will be doing on corruption in Lebialem this week. Tomorrow, we will be exposing the revelation of how the Mayor of Menji, Divisional capital of Lebialem, purposefully set the Council’s chamber on fire to cover his corrupt acts.

Recently, Eladson Fotabong Christopher, Municipal Treasurer for Alou Council in Labialem faked an illness and got admitted for treatment in Kumba general hospital after an alarming allegations of corruption in his office began to emerge in the council.

Alou councilors are perturbed that South West administrators from top to bottom have maintained total silence in the face of such embezzlement and misappropriation of state funds estimated at thirteen million, one hundred and thirty-one thousand, three hundred and fifty francs (13.131.350) FCFA.

Although the amount pales into insignificance when compared to the billions some top government officials are known to have embezzled, the amount is worth at least four months salaries for the council workers who have gone unpaid since January 2015.

The council staff, the Journal gathered, are finalizing plans to stage an industrial strike action and have vowed that they would join councilors in boycotting this year’s national day celebration on May 20.

Various petitions submitted to the Lebialem and South West administration by Alou Mayor, Paul Ntemgwa, together with the councilors indicate that the treasurer of the council, who has since December abandoned his office, is being protected by some very powerful officials for “obvious reasons.”

Meanwhile, the Treasurer is reported to have left his Kumba hospital bed where he was said to be undergoing medical treatment since December.

It is interesting that he chose Kumba hospital in spite of the fact that there is one of the best hospitals in the region,- Mary Health of Africa hospital, in Menji, a 20 minutes’ drive from Alou.

Worse still – if not ridiculous, instead of instructing the council cashier to pay council revenue collected in his absence into the council’s bank account, Eladson reportedly ordered that the money be sent to him in his ‘sick bed’ in Kumba by express transfer.

Copies of remittance slips indicating the amounts the cashier sent to Elad show unconscionable sums that were wired to him at his ‘hospital bed.’

There are also documented complaints that the National Insurance Fund, deductions from staff salaries, taxes collected from contractors and other council revenue are presently still in his keeping.

The Journal had earlier reported how following the many complaints addressed to the SDO for Lebialem and other regional and national supervisory authorities, Eladson was invited for questioning by SW Pay Master General in Buea, March 24.

See how Eladson cleverly played his game! He hired a nurse, driver and an ambulance which drove him from Kumba to Buea, with a sachet of drips hanging and dangling over his hand and the nurse next by purportedly taking care of a very sick patient.

Before he got to Buea, he also made sure there were reporters and photographers at the scene to report the first act of the melodrama as the ambulance zoomed in front of the Buea finance building.

The plot, quickly assuming a kind of 419 scheme – so successful, made his condition appear so pathetic that Ayuk, the Pay Master General spared him the trouble of alighting from the ambulance and chose to meet him in it rather than in his office.

In fact, The Journal learned that instead of interrogating him, Ayuk, out of sympathy “dashed” him some money and asked that the nurse not only take good care of him, but also begged that he be rushed back to hospital.

The Journal learned, however, that the supposed seriously-ill treasurer was seen the next day presiding over a CPDM meeting in Nguti where he is party’s section president.

He was reportedly pictured shouting orders at the confab. When the Journal contacted him by telephone to find out how come he recovered that soon to be in Nguti the following day after leaving Buea in Ambulance, his only reply; “It was my ghost, I will call you later.” He dropped the phone and never called back.

Owing to his long absence and reports of a “Meeting to Review the Crisis in the Alou Council Municipal Treasury,” written on a CPDM headed paper and copied South West governor and Lebialem SDO, the Paymaster General in Buea went ahead to appoint a temporal treasurer.

Eladson’s office was sealed by investigators pending his discharge from “hospital.”

However, just after the temporal treasurer started work in a designated temporary space, so that workers could be paid and the council gets back to regular operations, Lebialem SDO ordered that the temporal treasurer’s office be sealed also.

When contacted, the SDO told The Journal by phone that he ordered the office sealed because the procedure used to establish the temporal treasury was wrong.

He would not explain what according to him is supposed to have been the right procedure. But we also asked him what action he was taking to hasten investigation of Eladson so as to prevent a strike action by councilors. The SDO ducked the question and directed our reporter to talk to the mayor of Alou instead.

When we reached Ntemgwa, the Mayor, by phone, he said despite the money being demanded from Eladson, “There are enough funds in the bank to pay workers and keep the council running.

But without a treasurer,” he said, “we cannot get the money.” He said the council has become like a leprosy patient, given that no contractor wants to do business with it for fear they won’t be paid.

Alou residents are on the record as saying the current “treasury scandal” is just a tip of the scams that have made the municipality a cave of criminality.

Last year for instance, lamentations of rip-offs in the municipality prompted a visit of investigators from the National Anti-corruption Commission, CONAC.

They came in following reports that a second hand jalopy pick-up truck was supplied to the council as a new one for 25MFCFA. A second-hand caterpillar originally bought for 30MFCFA was sold to the same council without tender for 150MFCFA, while a road maintenance job was reduced by ten kilometres, yet the contractor was paid money for a complete job.

Those said to be implicated in the scandals are reportedly boasting that a planned boycott of this year’s 20th May festivities by councilors, a strike action by council staff and the investigation carried out by CONAC are just like throwing water on a chicken’s back: “because they are well connected.”