(Business in Cameroon) – Cameroon’s Ministry of Finance is urging significant recruitment limitations and continued efforts to clean up the payroll database. Its recommendation, contained in the Medium Term Economic and Budgetary Programming Document 2026-2028, aims to address persistent budgetary constraints. The call comes as military personnel, gendarmes, and primary and secondary school teachers alone accounted for 67.4% of the country’s total wage bill in 2024.
Secondary school teachers received the largest share, taking 33.93% of the government’s overall payroll last year. They represented 26.34% of the 390,170 civil servants and public employees on the state’s payroll.
Military personnel and gendarmes received 18.6% of the wage bill during the same period, with their workforce representing 19.32% of public sector employees. Defense forces surpassed primary school teachers, who made up 15.81% of the total workforce and received 14.9% of the salaries paid by the Cameroonian public administration in 2024.
Mainly due to these three budget-heavy categories, Cameroon’s wage bill remains above the sustainable threshold. It stood at 38.6% in 2024, a 1.6 percentage point increase from 2023.
For over 15 years, this performance indicator, which measures the ratio between state personnel expenditures and total fiscal and customs revenues, has consistently exceeded the 35% tolerance threshold set by CEMAC’s multilateral surveillance criteria. CEMAC includes Cameroon, Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Chad, and the Central African Republic.
BRM
