According to the Minister of Finance, the level of total operating expenses of the State (excluding debt service) will be reduced by nearly 80 billion CFA francs.
The Cameroonian government aspires to reduce its operating expenses during the year 2022. This is what emerges from the 2022 finance bill, under study in parliament, we learn in the columns of the biweekly Current Challenges.Defending this bill, finance minister Louis Paul Motaze explained that "under the constraint of a deficit target of 2% of GDP, the level of total state spending (excluding debt service) will be reduced to 15.3% of GDP in 2022, against 15.6% of GDP in 2021; i.e. a budgetary saving of 0.3% of GDP achieved in 2022 compared to 2021, and corresponding to an amount of about 79.6 CFA francs billion". And to achieve this objective, the State intends to accelerate "the continuation of the application of the 'zero value' strategy, which consists in freezing the growth of operating expenses (excluding salaries) of all administrations from one year to the next, and in making trade-offs on the available budget space according to the priority challenges of the period".
In order to reduce the operating costs of ministries and other institutions during the next financial year, the State intends to continue operations of "physical counting" of State personnel for assets, control and security of beneficiaries for pensioners. For the record, during the Extended Budget Programming Conferences held in Yaoundé in August 2020, the Director General of the Budget, Cyrill Alo'o Edou, explained that the rationalization measures over the period 2021-2023 aim to control public consumption of water, electricity, telephone, fuel expenses, mission expenses and the acquisition of service or function vehicles.
