On August 28th,The Cameroonian customs officers, deployed as part of the Halcomi operation, seized a shipment of 2000 smuggled mobile phones on the Garoua-Ngaoundéré road in the northern part of the country.

Cameroon only collects about one billion FCFA of the potential 13 billion FCFA from the 4 million mobile phones entering the country each year, reports customs statistics. Custom say the documents presented by the smugglers indicated a shipment of fresh dates and kola nuts.

In order to combat smuggling of these devices, the government, as of 15 October 2020, tried  to introduce a digital collection system for customs duties on mobile phones and tablets. This system required mobile operators to connect to a digital platform designed by the company Arintech, in order to allow the collection of customs duties on the terminals, by deducting it from the owner’s communication credit.

However, faced with the reservations expressed by mobile operators i.e limited technical characteristics of the platform and the popular discontent that arose from this project, which was practically aimed at transferring the payment of customs duties on terminals to users, the government had to postpone its reform.