Taxes.

Say the word in a room full of Cameroonian entrepreneurs and watch what happens: the exhale, the eyes rolling toward the ceiling like they've just been personally insulted, and the nodding that starts before anyone has even finished the sentence. It doesn't matter which kind you mean, either—government tax or the other one, the one nobody files paperwork for but everyone pays anyway, the one we've all learned to call "black tax." Somehow, in this country of ours, they both apply. You are never done paying. You simply rotate who you're paying.

But taxes are the cost everyone already knows to complain about. They're on a form. They have a rate, a deadline, a name. This isn't an article about that. This is about everything else: the costs nobody warns you about before you start, the ones that never show up on a balance sheet until they've already taken something from you.

Every entrepreneur starts somewhere, and for most people in Cameroon, that somewhere is total innocence about what the real cost of doing business actually looks like. You have paid your shop's rent. You have bought your stock. What you haven't costed is the moment word gets out that you now "have something," because the day your business opens, you inherit a second set of stakeholders nobody put in your business plan: family. A sibling's school fees become your emergency. A cousin's medical bill arrives with no warning and no room to say no. A village project, a funeral contribution, a wedding envelope—all of it lands on you now, simply because you're the one who's visibly doing something.

You also haven't costed the small envelope you might need to present to an official quietly expected before a thing of yours gets processed at the speed it's supposed to move at anyway.

Nobody hands you this list on day one. You learn it in arrears, the way most of us did.

Then there's the operator who has survived that first education and adjusted. They've learned that black tax isn't a one-off—it's a recurring, unbudgeted line item that rises in direct proportion to how well the business appears to be doing. They've learned which relationships to invest in and which requests to quietly decline, and that both choices carry a cost. Experience doesn't remove this cost. It just teaches you to expect it and to build a small, permanent buffer around it.

Now take the same set of unexpected costs and apply them to someone with no cushion at all. For a well-funded company, a surprise family emergency or a bribe quietly requested at the electricity board is an annoyance. For someone bootstrapping alone, either one can wipe out a month's margin in a single afternoon. This is worth sitting with, because it's a big part of why so many Cameroonian businesses never grow past a certain size: it isn't only about access to loans or investors. It's that a founder without reserves is one unbudgeted family obligation or one blackout-spoiled batch of stock away from starting over. There is no insurance policy for either of those things, and no line of credit designed to absorb them. You either have a buffer or you don't, and most people don't.

Capital changes the shape of the problem without making it disappear. A funded business can run a generator through the outages that regularly leave entire neighborhoods in Douala and Yaoundé without power for six to eight hours a day. But visible success also means visible obligation. A founder with capital hasn't escaped these costs. They've simply graduated to a version of them with more zeros attached.

Someone running a seasonal trade—festive-season goods, agricultural produce tied to a harvest window, or back-to-school supplies—lives inside a compressed version of all of this. A family emergency or a bad week of outages during a twelve-month business is absorbable; the same event during a four-month earning window can consume the entire season's margin. Nothing about the black tax, or blackouts, or a demanded envelope at the local council pauses to check whether your business happens to be in season. The cost doesn't scale down just because your revenue does.

And then there's the founder chasing real scale—the kind of company this magazine has already asked why we produce so few of. For this person, the hidden costs don't shrink with growth; they multiply and change shape. More staff means more households now indirectly relying on the business, which means every employee's family emergency eventually becomes, in some form, the company's problem too. More visibility means more requests—for jobs for relatives who aren't the right fit, for "support" from people the founder has never met but who now know their name. More scale means more exposure to the same officials researchers have flagged as the most frequent sources of informal pressure—the ones who sit at customs, at the electricity board, at the licensing office… because a bigger business simply has more touchpoints with all three. Growth, in Cameroon, doesn't dilute these costs. It concentrates them.

There's a cost almost nobody names directly, and it's the cost of trust—or the lack of it. It shows up as the security guard and the padlock budget most small businesses never planned for, because theft, whether from outside or from within, is simply priced in as an operating reality rather than an exception. It shows up as the employee you trained who leaves and opens a near-identical business two streets away, taking your supplier contacts and your customer list with them, because there was no real mechanism—legal, cultural, or otherwise—to prevent it. It shows up in the extra layer of paperwork, verification, and follow-up every transaction requires, because a handshake alone doesn't carry the weight it once did, and everyone has a story that taught them why. None of this appears on an expense sheet as "trust." It appears as security costs, as inventory shrinkage, and as the hours spent double-checking things a founder in a lower-friction environment would simply take on faith.

There's one more cost worth naming, and it's the quietest one, because it isn't imposed by family, or officials, or Eneo—it's imposed by the gap between an idea and the ground it's planted in. A lot of businesses that struggle here weren't defeated by any of the costs above individually. They were built on assumptions that simply don't hold locally—a business model copied from Lagos, China, Dubai, or a cousin's success story abroad, one that quietly assumes twenty-four-hour power, fast and predictable logistics, or a level of institutional trust this environment doesn't yet offer.

People fall in love with the idea and force themselves into it anyway because it's trending, because someone else made it look easy, and because turning back after committing feels like admitting defeat before they've even started. But a business whose cost structure doesn't account for the ground its standing on doesn't fail because the founder lacked discipline. It fails because nobody priced in what this specific ground actually charges.

Taxes will always be the easiest thing to blame, because they're the only cost on this list with a receipt. Everything above it is unbilled, unscheduled, and unavoidable—and it is, in the end, the real curriculum of building something here. Anyone still standing after black tax, blackouts, broken trust, and a business model that finally fits the ground has already built something sturdier than most funding rounds are designed to measure.