A Board meeting of Cameroon Postal Services (Campost) held on 7^th July 2016 in Yaoundé, led to the appointment of Pierre Kaldadak, a Cameroonian Posts and Telecoms Inspector, as Managing Director of this state company. His appointed took effect immediately as directed by the Minister of Posts and Telecoms, Minette Libom Li Likeng.

This appointment puts an end to six years of technical support from Sofrepost, subsidiary of the French Post Office which had been managing Campost since 2010, and whose contract expired in May 2016, we officially learned. However, the management of Campost has been taken away from Cameroonian experts since 2007, after the crisis the public post office company went through starting from 2004.

Indeed, in order to restore the image of the Cameroonian Post Office, whose financial services are now incapable of refunding clients’ savings, the Cameroonian government entrusted, from 2007, the restructuration of this public company to the Canadian firm Tecsult International Ltd. Within 2 years of managing Campost, this firm rather generated a loss of FCfa 2 billion, following misappropriations of funds carried out by some employees, with the complicity of Tecsult’s senior management team.

In 2010, the Cameroonian State opted for Sofrepost, to get the Cameroonian post office back on track. Though the Sofrepost team helped the company in recovering a certain financial equilibrium (approximately 850,000 savings accounts and 56,700 current accounts managed in its portfolio as at end 2013) and to offer new services (money transfers, express courier services), the financial management of Campost did not go without challenges.

Indeed, between 2011 and November 2013, we learned from reliable sources, a networks of fraudsters within the company, led by Jean Jacques Zé, embezzled approximately FCfa 4 billion through fraudulent wire transfers. Pierre Kaldadak thus takes over a company in which there are several misappropriations of funds, and a company which has not really renewed with its clients, who are still angry about the crisis started in 2004.

Brice R. Mbodiam