The clearing and update of the salary register of the Cameroonian State which started last year created victims in March 2016. Following this operation which was meant to identify the employees of the State, over 3,000 civil servants found themselves without salary at the end of March. “These employees do not belong to any administration”, a source at the Ministry of Civil Service whispers.

This interruption in the payment of salaries comes seven months after the publication, in August 2015, of a list of over 10,000 State employees called to clarify their situation vis-à-vis the public administration. One last notice was issued in November 2015, giving them three months to present the documents confirming their status as civil servants and the administrative service in which they work.

It was at the end of this verification process that the interruption in salary for employees supposedly in trouble with their employer being the State was ordered to the Minister of Finance by his colleague at the Ministry of Civil Service and Administrative Reform, Michel Ange Angouing.

Since then, the halls of these two Ministerial departments are full of civil servants looking to sort out their situation. However, among the employees denied of salary last month, some are not even on the list of employees in trouble published in August 2015.

As a reminder, censuses undertaken within the Cameroonian Civil Service are generally meant to find fictitious State employees, or those benefitting from undue advantages. In the past, this kind of operation sometimes helped in saving up to FCfa 5 billion in the monthly payroll of the State, an ex-Minister of Finance revealed.