Cameroon has officially been a decentralized state since the Constitution of 1996. The idea was simple: decisions affecting people in Buea, Bamenda, Maroua or Bafoussam should not always have to wait for Yaoundé. Councils and regions should have enough authority to respond to the people they govern.
Nearly thirty years later, Cameroon has councils, city councils, regional councils, and a full legal framework for decentralization. The question is no longer whether the structures exist but whether real power has moved with them.
On paper, the reform is real:
Cameroon has 360 councils, 14 city councils, and ten regional councils. The law gives them responsibilities in areas such as local roads, markets, sanitation, water, health, education, agriculture, tourism, and local economic development.
The 2019 General Code of Regional and Local Authorities also recognizes councils and regions as bodies with administrative and financial autonomy. Regional councils became operational after the 2020 elections, and the Northwest and Southwest received a special status with regional assemblies and houses of chiefs. Money has also moved. In 2025, more than FCFA 300 billion was allocated to regional and local authorities through transfers and investment support.
So decentralization is not entirely fictional considering that councils now execute projects, manage budgets, and perform functions that once belonged almost completely to central ministries. But having responsibilities is not the same as having power.
Duties have moved faster than authority:
A council may be responsible for a road, a market or a health center, but it may still depend on central transfers, ministerial approval and administrative procedures before it can act. Many councils have weak local tax bases and depend heavily on money from the State, FEICOM and other public programmes. The law speaks of financial autonomy, but a council that cannot predict when its money will arrive or raise enough of its own revenue remains dependent.
This creates a convenient arrangement. The central government transfers responsibility, but not always the full resources or authority required to carry it out. When the project fails, the citizen blames the mayor. When the mayor explains that the funds or approval did not arrive, nobody knows where responsibility truly ends.
That is not full decentralization. It is the transfer of duties without the complete transfer of control.
The elected mayor still shares power with appointed authorities:
Cameroon’s local system has elected mayors and regional councilors, but it also has governors, senior divisional officers and divisional officers appointed by Yaoundé.
The mayor represents an elected council. The governor and administrative officers represent the central state. Both operate within the same territory, but the appointed side of the system often remains more powerful.
This weakens the meaning of local elections. Citizens may elect municipal leaders, but those leaders still operate under strong administrative supervision. A mayor who must constantly look upward before acting is not fully accountable downward to the people who elected the council.
Some supervision is necessary. Local leaders can also be corrupt or incompetent. But when supervision becomes control, decentralization begins to look like centralization with local offices.
Citizens are closer to the buildings, not always the decisions:
A council office may be located inside the town, but that does not mean citizens have access to what happens inside it. Most people do not know the size of their council budget, the projects approved for their neighborhood, the companies receiving contracts, or how local revenue is spent. Council meetings and budget documents remain difficult for ordinary citizens to follow.
A decision can therefore be local in location but distant in practice. The money may be spent in the community, but the people living there may never have participated in deciding how it should be used.
Decentralization is not simply bringing the office closer. It is bringing information, participation, and accountability closer as well.
Regional councils exist, but citizens remain distant from them:
Regional councils were an important reform because the regions promised since 1996 finally became operational. But ordinary citizens do not directly elect regional council presidents or councilors. The process is indirect, passing through municipal councilors and traditional rulers.
This makes the institution less visible to the people it represents. Many citizens can identify their governor more easily than the president of their regional council. Even fewer can explain what the council controls or how they can influence it.
A political institution people do not understand is difficult to hold accountable. Elections alone do not bring power closer if citizens cannot see clearly who holds it.
The Special Status exposes the same limitation:
The Special Status for the Northwest and Southwest recognizes their distinct educational, legal, linguistic, and traditional heritage. It created regional assemblies, houses of chiefs, and public independent conciliators.
These are meaningful recognitions, but participation is not the same as control. A region may contribute to discussions about education, development, or traditional institutions without having final authority over them.
The reform gives the regions a stronger voice, but it does not return the level of autonomy they once had under federalism. This is why the Special Status can be presented by the State as major reform while still feeling insufficient to many of the people it was designed to satisfy.
There are places where decentralization works:
Councils have built classrooms, repaired roads, developed markets, supported water projects, and improved local services. Research has also shown that transferring some responsibilities to municipalities can produce positive results, especially in areas such as primary education.
This is because local authorities usually understand local problems better. A council knows which bridge becomes unusable during the rainy season, which market lacks toilets and which school has no benches. When authority, money and local knowledge meet, decentralization can work.
The problem is that the success of the system still depends too much on the personal competence, connections and persistence of individual mayors. A proper system should not require an exceptional mayor for a town to receive ordinary services.
Local power can also become local elite control:
Moving authority away from Yaoundé does not automatically place it in the hands of ordinary people. It can simply move into the hands of mayors, traditional rulers, party officials and politically connected families.
A council can be as secretive as a ministry. Contracts can be given to allies. Relatives can occupy positions. Party loyalty can become more important than competence. This is why local power must come with local accountability. Councils need greater authority, but citizens also need access to budgets, contracts, meetings, audit reports, and project information.
Without autonomy, the council becomes an extension of the central government. Without transparency, it becomes the territory of local elites.
Reform or illusion?
Cameroon’s decentralization is not entirely an illusion considering that the institutions exist, budgets have increased and councils execute projects. Also, regional councils now operate and some responsibilities have genuinely moved. On the side of reforms, that remains incomplete. In as much as power has moved, permission to execute has not moved far enough.
There is cash flowing across regions, but much of it remains controlled through central systems and institutions moving closer, yet citizens are still too far from their decisions.
The real test of decentralization is not the number of councils created or the laws passed. It is whether a local authority can identify a problem, raise or receive predictable resources, make a decision, and act without waiting endlessly for Yaoundé. It is whether citizens know what is being done in their name and can remove the people who fail them.
Until that becomes normal, decentralization will remain both a reform and an illusion: real enough to exist on paper, but too controlled to fully change how power is experienced.
