Faced with the low mobilisation of funding for the Reconstruction Plan of the North-West and South-West Regions , Cameroon is urging France to release the 40 billion F CFA promised in 2019 for this plan.
According to the Minister Delegate to the Minister of Economy, Planning and Regional Development, these funds are still not available to the PPRD-No/So. “We have no reason to doubt that this promise will be fulfilled. We say to ourselves that the wait is to make sure that we can do it. Today, there are no more doubts about the feasibility of implementing the presidential plan. We think it will come,” he said, adopting a diplomatic posture.
“Once the plan was announced, we had a distinguished guest in the country, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs who had publicly announced the contribution of France to the tune of 40 billion CFA francs,” recalled Paul Tasong , national coordinator of the PPRD-NW/SW, at a press conference held on 8 July in Yaounde after the holding of the 4th session of the PPRD-NW/SW steering committee.
It is indeed at the end of a two-day working visit to Cameroon, on 24 and 25 October 2019, that the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs had announced a 40 billion CFA francs aid for the reconstruction of the English-speaking regions hit by a separatist conflict since 2017.
Following this, the French ambassador to Cameroon indicated that his country conditioned the release of this funding to the pacification of these regions. “Before starting the reconstruction, the region must be pacified. You will have to reach a peace agreement between the armed gangs and the government,” said Christophe Guilhou, during an interview broadcast on 19 April 2020 on public television CRTV.
A position that Minister Paul Tasong contests, citing the case of Ukraine. For the government member, Ukraine’s partners met to mobilise funding estimated at 750 billion dollars for the reconstruction of the country, “while the war is still going on”.
The PPRD-NW/SW is struggling to mobilise funds to finance the construction of infrastructure destroyed by the conflict. Initially estimated at 89 billion CFA francs, the plan now requires 154 billion CFA francs. However, after 18 months of implementation, the Plan’s coffers show only 11.5 billion CFA francs, 75% of which have been contributed by the Cameroonian state, 1.5 billion CFA francs by Japan (the release of a second envelope of 900 million CFA francs is under discussion), 1 billion CFA francs by the private sector and 300 million CFA francs by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which is also a technical partner of the PPRD-NW/SW.
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