(Business in Cameroon) – The swearing-in of 40 public accountants before the Audit Bench of the Supreme Court on April 25 in Yaoundé was an opportunity for the court to reaffirm its authority and exclusive right to oversee the management of public finances. This exclusivity is being challenged by the Budgetary and Financial Discipline Council (CDBF) under the Ministry in charge of Supreme State Control (Consupe), whose powers were scaled back by recent public finance reforms and a supranational law. Despite that, the CDBF is still fighting to maintain a role.
“The CDBF still exists. The CDBF is not dead,” said Mbah Acha Rose Fomundam, the Minister in charge of Supreme State Control, during the public launch of the CDBF’s 2025 activities on April 16 in Yaoundé.
In response, Félix Onana Etoundi, Advocate General of the Audit Bench, said the CDBF’s powers “are no longer relevant.” Onana Etoundi, who is also the Attorney General at the Supreme Court, pointed out that the July 11, 2018, law on the state’s financial regime marked a major legal shift in budgetary and financial discipline. That law, he explained, transferred the CDBF’s authority to judge authorizing officers to the Audit Bench.
Audit Bench’s Exclusive Authority
The judges of the Audit Bench are standing their ground, emphasizing that they are the only recognized Supreme Audit Institution (SAI), as laid out in Article 42 of the law. This article states that “public finances and the policies they support are subject to external oversight by the court of accounts,” and that it is the court’s role to “judge authorizing officers, financial controllers, and public accountants,” as detailed in Articles 87 and 88.
The Audit Bench also refers to the hierarchy of legal norms, pointing to a 2011 directive from the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (CEMAC), which requires its six member states to set up Courts of Auditors as the only bodies authorized to audit and judge public accounts.
The directive clearly states that “the judicial oversight of budgetary and accounting operations in public administrations is handled by a Court of Auditors, which must be set up in each member state. This Court of Auditors is a judicial body, and its members have the status of magistrates. […] It serves as the Supreme Audit Institution of each state.”
For Advocate General Félix Onana Etoundi, “based on this text, which aims to integrate community standards into Cameroonian law, all public accountants, financial controllers, and especially all public authorizing officers […] now fall under the jurisdiction of the court of accounts,” a responsibility that used to be handled by the CDBF.
The Audit Bench goes even further. Referring to Articles 87 and 88 of the July 11, 2018, law, it argues that the law clearly rules out any non-judicial body from dealing with budgetary and financial discipline.
“The CDBF is not a court. It’s an administrative body. It has therefore been removed from this field by a law passed by Parliament and signed by the President of the Republic,” the Audit Bench says.
CDBF’s Right to Exist
For the CDBF, even if the clash with the Audit Bench is often played down, it refuses to step aside when it comes to overseeing public finances. Consupe acknowledges that its role is “administrative” — different from judicial or parliamentary oversight — but rejects the idea that the Audit Bench should have full control.
That’s the position defended by Théophile Youbissi Tchuente, head of the CDBF’s Sanctions Enforcement Unit, who said: “The CDBF operates within the framework of administrative oversight of financing. We cannot be seen as competing with bodies involved in judicial or parliamentary oversight.”
Inspectors at Consupe also cite Article 40 of the July 2018 law, which stresses that all operations related to the revenues, expenditures, and financing of public budgets “must be subject to political, judicial, and administrative oversight.”
Drawing on this article, Benoît Ndong Soumhet, minister in charge of mission at the Presidency of the Republic and a founding member of the CDBF, believes that the conflict of jurisdiction between the two entities is a “false debate.” According to him, “the head of state, by virtue of the constitutional powers vested in him as the supreme head of the administration, must have a tool that allows him, at any moment, to oversee the management of public assets and sanction individuals accused of embezzlement.” In other words, the political power aims to retain its authority over public officials, thereby bypassing the independence of the court of accounts, which is otherwise guaranteed by the 2011 Cemac directive. For Benoît Ndong Soumhet, the two entities can coexist because “one does not exclude the other.”
Although Consupe rarely refers to the 2018 law, its inspectors argue that the existence of the CDBF “rests on a solid legal foundation.” Dr. Alfred Wambang Nyamalum, the CDBF’s permanent secretary, specifically mentions the July 1976 law on oversight of public officers, managers, and administrators of public funds, as well as the decree of January 17, 2008, establishing the CDBF’s organization and operations, both of which remain in effect. “Contrary to what some may claim, the July 11, 2018 law on the state’s financial framework does not eliminate the CDBF. On the contrary, it reinforces the principle of plural oversight,” he says.
Advantage to the Audit Bench
In this battle for jurisdiction between Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI), the Audit Bench seems to have gained the upper hand. After being seized by the mayor of Ngomedzap, who was found guilty of mismanagement by the CDBF, the Audit Bench overturned this decision, reaffirming its exclusive competence in matters of budgetary and financial discipline.
In another case—the indictment of the Director General of the National Social Insurance Fund (CNPS)—the administrative court recognized in August 2024 that “public finances and the policies they support are subject to external oversight by the court of accounts.”
Finally, last November, after being asked by the Ministry of Finance to recover several billion CFA francs from the audit firm Lazare Atou, the court of accounts annulled the CDBF’s decision, once again reaffirming its exclusive jurisdiction. With these powers, since January, the Audit Bench has been judging several officials from the Ministry of Public Health for mismanagement in the response to COVID-19 in 2020. The verdict in this case is expected on April 30.
An Underlying Budgetary Issue
The Audit Bench points out that “Cameroon’s new legislation on budgetary and financial discipline has excluded the CDBF as the body responsible for sanctioning mismanagement. This responsibility, now judicial in nature, has been transferred to the Audit Bench of the Supreme Court. Due to the public order character of the jurisdictional rule, it is immediately and exclusively applicable.”
According to its judges, the sanctions imposed by the CDBF cannot stand, as a simple appeal to the administrative court is enough to overturn them. They also note that many lawyers are challenging the CDBF’s jurisdiction alone, further weakening its authority.
Some observers within the Audit Bench see the CDBF’s resistance as an attempt to preserve its role in order to justify its budgetary allocation. As Minister Mbah Acha pointed out, “The activities of the Council are reaffirmed by the law of December 23, 2024, concerning the 2025 finance law for the Republic of Cameroon, in Article 72, Chapter 11, Program 076.” This program, entitled “Audit, Sanction, and Control,” has a budget of CFA 2.6 billion for 2025.
