Fako councils suffocating under debts

All eight Councils in Fako Division are suffocating under huge debts, their 2015 balance sheets have revealed.

Their current balance sheets as presented on November 19, to the Fako SDO, Zang III, shows that most of them are barely crawling, due to huge debts which, some of the Mayors say, they inherited from their predecessors.

Idenau Council, West Coast Subdivision, has not been able to realise its 2015 budget which stood at FCFA 400 million. As at October 2015, debts owed to FEICOM, Taxation, ENOE, National Social Insurance Fund (CNPS), suppliers and others, stood at a whooping FCFA 235.5 million. The Mayor, Gabriel Tonde, says a good chunk of the debt was inherited from his Predecessor, James Esange Elonge, who ran the Council for over 15 years. Mayor Tonde told the press that, since the creation of the Council in 1997, none of the staff has had any social insurance benefit from CNPS.

“For the past 20 years, I think no worker has been able to receive any social insurance benefit. But as at now, all the workers are registered and immediately I clear the debts with CNPS, the workers will start receiving their benefits,” Mayor Tonde said. He said his administration has already paid FCFA 30 million to CNPS and FCFA 50 million as taxes to the taxation department.
The Tiko Council, with 2015 budget of FCFA 1.33 billion has debts of FCFA 302.9 million.

Cameroon’s third richest Council, Limbe City Council, for the past three years, has not had a franc from several billions of FCFA, of its tax revenue which the National Oil Refining Company, SONARA, has been paying at the Central Treasury in Yaounde.

The Government Delegate, Andrew Motanga, said SONARA was its highest tax payer and contributes about 65 percent of the City Council’s budget which stands at FCFA 6.5 billion.

“This is one of the reasons why we have not been able to carry out a lot of our earmarked development projects such as the tarring of streets in Limbe which we started off with some few years back,” Motanga said.
The Limbe gathering was the second session of the Fako Divisional Committee for Local Finances set up by the Fako SDO, Zang III, as Chairman. The Divisional Committee was set up as a forum where the Mayors can come together and share their experiences and worries and find solutions to them.
After listening to the Mayors and Divisional Treasurers, Zang reiterated the fact that the Mayors needed to intensify efforts to improve on revenue collection within their different municipalities.

He also said that, in order to improve transparency and accountability in the management of the money within their Councils, all Councils in Fako, henceforth, must be computerised. That is all the computers in the financial service in each of the Councils plus all the auxiliary administrative services, must be linked to a central server, have a unique accounting system and with each computer user having his or her won password.

It was also resolved that all the Councils must forward an inventory of all their tax payers to the SDO’s office. The SDO said that it was incumbent on every council to have a mastery of all the tax payers within its municipality and also ensure that the data base is up dated at every given period. The need for Councils to establish a building permit tax and ensure that the taxes are collected and paid into the Council coffers, was also emphasised.

The Divisional Chief of Taxation for Fako, Atangwa Anagho, said the Councils were losing a lot of money just because most do not collect the land taxes which she said is 0.1 percent of the total cost of each building.
“There are a lot of new buildings sprouting everyday and the Councils are crying of not having money,” she said.

Zang said the Limbe City Council, for instance, could make much from the building permit taxes if it embarked on effective collection.
The DO of the West Coast Sub Division, Basile Ombah, said that one of the problems killing Councils in Fako was the fact that they were over-staffed. The SDO added that, besides being over-staffed, there were some staffers earning as much as FCFA 700,000 a month without commensurate output. There are many who spend time idling on the computer screens in their offices while others kill the time ‘whatsapping’ on their phones and go for their salaries by the end of each month.

But the Councils complained of not having adequate support or collaboration from the taxation department to assist them collect some of their taxes. Some of them said some of their tax collectors simply pocket the money they collect.
The gathering ended with a series of resolutions taken, of which the SDO called on all the Councils to endeavour to implement to improve on their revenue collection and be able to serve their populations better and also clear their debts.