Is Cameroon really about to collapse?

Yesterday's headlines reported two major collapses in Cameroon, a poor West African nation ranked among the most corrupt countries in the world. A portion of the only major highway linking the economic port city of Douala and the political capital of Yaounde caved in, leaving thousands of travelers confused.

Hours later, at least 53 people died and nearly 300 were injured when an overloaded passenger train traveling between Douala and Yaounde derailed and overturned, according to Aljazeera reports. Basically, every direct access point between Yaounde and Douala has collapsed. Only the rich can afford flying with the country's ailing airline company, CAMAIRCO.

Well, the Biya administration's national policy has failed, and every sector sustaining the country's economy is waning. I will explain.

Data from the CIA World Factbook revealed that among other countries in the world, Cameroon ranks 112 for its airports, 87 for its railways, and 76 for its roadways. Its railway connections are generally "efficient but limited," linking only four in 10 regional capitals. No English-speaking regional capital is linked.

Roadways total about 51,000 km, but only slightly over 4,000 km is tarred. A 2011 study finds that there is nearly 29,000 km of national roads. Take a deeper look at the transport system again. Most of Cameroon's roads were paved by former president Amadou Ahidjo who ruled between 1961 and 1982.

No major quality road construction work has taken place ever since President Paul Biya took office. Instead, the 34-year-old regime has been hawking from one foreign bank to the other, begging for loans like a 19th-century gangster. Many of its citizens and supporters are unaware of the dangers of international debt. Perhaps, I could better clarify this once and for all.

In International Political Economy, we often use a term "bad luck." It basically means that money is borrowed in huge sums in response to external factors, particularly the oil price shocks, high-interest rates, recessions and weak commodity prices. Also, political factors play a major role too. Cameroon borrows and spends more than it receives as revenues.

Estimated revenues in 2015 hit nearly $5 billion USD. But expenditures that same year were over $6 billion USD. We owe more than $4 billion dollars of international debt, roughly 28 percent of GDP. So ever since Heavily Indebted Poor Countries' Initiative canceled off Cameroon's loans in 2006, living standards even became worse.

Debts have been accumulating once again from 9 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2014 and 28 percent in 2015. And no one is stopping it? What in the world! Here are the big questions: What have we been doing with the borrowed money? Who has been taking how much for what project?

Spending FCFA75 billion to supply laptops to some favored students instead of building laptop manufacturing factories or tarring roads across major cities. With the absence of the rule of law, weak institutional checks and balances, bad democratic governance, opaque public accountability, the danger is that if Cameroon foreign debt exceeds 50 percent of its total revenues, it would be time to say goodbye.

Here is Tapang's take.

Halt the unwanted borrowing and stop relying on oil revenues. The oil wells are drying up and are unsustainable. In fact, as of 2007, a Correlates of War (COW) study revealed that all of Cameroon's oil would have been depleted in 7.1 years if it continued extracting it at that same rate COW recorded. Cameroon should diversity to agriculture. Investing more in that sector would not only pull back the country from teetering on the brink of an economic collapse but also from a conflict trap.

Oil has caused unresolved wars in most of Africa ever since sovereign states began producing the back gold. Cameroon has been saved from oil-related violence because of its heavily divided ethnicity. Paul Collier, an economist and conflict researcher argues along my lines. It takes decades for oil-related conflicts to be resolved but it takes hours for food-related conflicts to be resolved. And ever since Cameroon started oil production in 1979, there has been no oil-related violence. The first violent was food related in 2008. And that claimed over 100 lives, according to some media reports.