(Business in Cameroon) - Officially, former Mines Minister Jacques-Yves Mbélé Ndoé is, since July 13, 2021, the chairman of the executive board of CIMENCAM, a subsidiary of LafargeHolcim-Maroc Afrique (LHMA) in Cameroon.  He replaces Pierre Moukoko Mbonjo, who is, like the new chairman, a representative of the President of the Republic in CIMENCAM’s executive board.

The new chairman is a veterinarian by training. Trained in Dakar, Senegal, he joined the government in Cameroon on December 7, 1997, and exited on August 24, 2002. He then disappeared from public life. His appointment comes just days after the warning issued on June 29, 2021, by the government to Benoît Galichet, CEO of CIMENCAM.

In the warning note, Minister of Trade Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana threatened to close CIMENCAM’s facilities should the cement producer unilaterally raise its wholesale prices again. “Various sources have informed me that you are planning to proceed to an umpteenth unilateral price increase, in defiance of my former warnings and calls for negotiations(…) I would like to hereby inform you that should that measure I consider an opposition and provocation happen to pass, I will be obliged to order your facilities to be closed,” Luc Magloire Mbarga Atangana wrote. In the note, he also reminded that cement is still one of the products whose prices are subjected to the price approval procedures in Cameroon.

Is the new appointment prompted by this dispute? Internal sources at CIMENCAM believe so but there is hardly any evidence to back their beliefs.

BRM