Cameroon’s Minister of Energy and Water Resources, Michael Tomdio, this week ordered AES-SONEL to reverse its unilateral price hike for electricity consumption. AES-SONEL, a company which enjoys a monopoly in electricity production, transportation and supply in Cameroon went ahead in April to increase the cost of a kilowatt of electricity for the medium and low voltage users.

The high voltage users, the major manufacturing companies like ALUMCAM (Cameroon Aluminum), CIMENCAM (Cameroon Cement) with majority French shares enjoy a special colonial deal.

While the ordinary poor Cameroonians using a few kilowatts a month paid over FCFA 50 a kilowatt, these companies using megawatts a second paid FCFA 10. The April price hike did not affect the major energy consumers who were also making huge profits and plying them back to France.

When the economic crisis was biting hard in the 1990s and the World Bank/IMF imposed SAP (Structural Adjustment Programme) was sapping the heavily indebted poor Cameroonians of their last substance, the former SONEL (with majority French shares) joined in the bleeding process.

Cameroonians were served two bills in a month. The ‘facture forfaitare’ (arbitrary bill) came at the beginning of the month while another bill, ‘facture complémentaire’ (complementary bill) came around the middle of the month. None of these bills reflected the real units of consumption on the electricity counter. Cameroonians suffered like stoics, paying and grumbling without government intervention to rescue them.

Government did not react. Cameroon government looked the other way while these outfits were bleeding its citizen to economic anaemia. The same sort of bleeding continues with petroleum products where the cost of a litre of petrol is highest in Cameroon than in any other oil producing company.

At SONARA (National Oil Refining Company) a litre of refined premium petrol costs less than FCFA 200. By the time it is served at the filling station in Limbe where it is refined, it costs above FCFA 550 a liter.

Ibrahim Talba Malla, General Manager of the Hydrocarbons Stabilisation Fund, CSPH, explained in 2007 that more than 60 percent of this cost went to service a plethora of taxes.

Many wealthy Cameroonians have understood and have gone ahead to open their own petrol stations. Inter-urban transport companies like Guarantee, Mondial all have their own rights to buy fuel directly from SONARA so as to beat the tax zombies.

While it is possible for Cameroonians to have a litre of fuel at less than half the current price, government has simply closed its eyes and allowed business wolves to prey on the ordinary user. After all, no government service buys fuel paying money at the petrol station.

All the higher-ups in the Cameroon administration and their family members, friends and concubines have a generous supply of petrol bons (receipts) to top their tanks at the stations. The special favour also goes for the other commodities; water, electricity and telephone.

Ordinary Cameroonians have watched on in total disbelief as their own government which is supposed to protect them, instead condones their gross exploitation by wolfish imperial businesses.

Michael Tomdio’s actions may just confirm rumours that Prime Minister Yang Philemon may be a no-nonsense head of government, after all. As the political will to protect the consumer becomes manifest, may consumers’ syndicates spring up to defend the emasculated wretched of the earth.

Cameroonians have to stand up and reject the monopolistic stranglehold of French backed companies. France has no natural resources and has to hang to its former colonies like leeches. And like leeches France is ready to bleed Cameroonians of their economic blood to transfuse its resource-barren country.

As we still bathe in the aura of the Cinquantenaire of our ‘independence’, may Cameroonians ask whether the French have any reason to continue exploiting them, in-and-out? Cameroonians should fight and break the monopoly of French companies in the production and provision of basic needs as water, energy, petrol, customs, building materials etc.