(Business in Cameroon) - The Cameroonian Ministry of Public Works has just officially launched the 2016 road maintenance campaign. According to the senior officers of this ministry, this year, a budget of FCfa 90 billion has been allocated to the road maintenance works in the country.

Thanks to this funding, of which about half (FCfa 42 billion) comes from unused resources carried over from 2014 and 2015, the Cameroonian government plans to maintain over 16,000 km of roads throughout the country this year, we officially learned.

As a reminder, less than 10% the Cameroonian road network is maintained, due to insufficient resources allocated to the works, Jean Claude Atanga Bikoé, Administrator of the Road Fund, recently confided. Indeed, we learned, the main source of resources for these works come from part of the special tax on oil products paid by oil products distributors. This licence fee is currently, the Road Fund Administrator said, of FCfa 55 billion per year, while the maintenance cost of a single kilometre of unpaved road, with the network estimated to have 100,000 km (excluding tarred roads), is on average of FCfa 2 billion.

Brice R. Mbodiam