Towards Operationalising Assets Declaration in Cameroon Through Political Will

Abstract

In recent years, the asset declaration regime has emerged as a useful catalytic tool against corruption. Many nations have now made asset declaration a constitutional or legislative imperative with explicit obligations on appointed and elected government officials to declare their assets and property. However, compliance with these constitutional and legislative prescriptions seems difficult or nearly impossible due to the regime being either problematically weak or there is the problem of non-implementation of the law as in Cameroon. The problem of non-implementation is rooted in the lack of promulgation of the enabling presidential decree to operationalise the law on asset declaration. This situation has made it possible for elected and appointed government officials not to declare their assets and property as required. A need remains to determine what could be done to surmount Cameroon’s public sector corruption conundrum that has brought the country’s image into disrepute. Can political will play this role? In this article, I attempt to make the case for political will as a tool to operationalise asset declaration in Cameroon. I argue that an asset declaration regime requires more than the enactment of legislation to galvanise the necessary political will and support for their deployment in practice to achieve the intended purpose. I demonstrate that there is a lack of political will by Cameroon’s political ruling elites to ensure compliance with the constitutional and legislative mandates on asset declaration and to fully realise the constitutional democratic values of transparency and accountability. Furthermore, the lack of political will can have a dominant negative hold on the (effective) implementation of asset declaration as an anti-corruption measure. I conclude that decisively confronting compliance with asset declaration laws in Cameroon, urgently requires political will. The doctrinal method of research is used to achieve the objective of the article.