The Director General of the National Social Insurance Fund  Alain Noël Olivier Mekulu Mvondo indicates in a press release that  “a special campaign of forced recovery from employers who owe social security contributions”, will be effectuated on the national territory.

To move from words to deeds, “this May 10, 2022, agents of the National Social Security Fund NSSF the public pension fund of Cameroon, have sealed the main gate of the Industrial Cotton Company of Cameroon Cicam in Douala, the economic capital of the country,” says our reporters of stopblablacam.

Once the leader of the textile industry in Central Africa, this state-owned company has been experiencing enormous financial difficulties for many years, due to competition from Chinese and West African textiles, and has thus become one of the first victims of the new operation to recover social security contributions that the NSIF has just launched.

Through this operation, which targets many companies, the NSIF is thus taking a step forward in tracking down insolvent employers, some of whom actually deduct social security contributions from employees’ salaries, without paying them to the NSSF.

We remember that in a press release, the General Manager of the NSSF , already invited “all employers and persons concerned to pay their debts as soon as possible or to request an adjustment of the related payment terms“.

This appeal by the head of the social security management body does not seem to have aroused much interest among employers. Hence the forced recovery, given the scale of the phenomenon. Indeed, according to NSSF data, only 7,000 out of 30,000 active companies are up to date with the payment of their employees’ social security contributions.

As a result, says the public pension fund, “we have almost 16,000 socially insured people that we cannot take care of because their employers are heavily indebted to the NSSF. Today, the situation has deteriorated to the point where only a quarter of the companies are in good standing.”

As a reminder, while they barely exceeded 60 billion CFA francs in 2016, the arrears of social contributions claimed by the CNPS from local companies amounted to 201 billion CFA francs at the end of August 2020. They peaked at CFAF 217 billion in the first half of 2021, including more than CFAF 60 billion claimed from decentralised territorial authorities , projects and public administrative establishments.