The State of Cameroon has opened a completely new page on the production of well secured identification documents in the country in a bit to get rid of the cacophony that has hitherto existed in the sector. An agreement signed between the Delegate General of National Security, Martin Mbarga Nguele and Frederic Trojani, Executive Director General in Charge of Government Programmes of the French company, Gemalto, empowers the latter to “furnish and put in place a new identification system considering the shortcomings observed in the present system in terms of security”.  The signing of the agreement is the result of negotiations initiated in December 2014 and conducted in strict respect of the public contract regulations. Considering the sensitive nature of the contract, several government departments were involved in the whole process. These include the Presidency of the Republic, the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, the Ministry of Finance, and the General Delegation of National Security.

The seriousness with which the issue is being tackled tells of the importance of the problem. In effect, as pointed out by the Delegate General of National Security, Cameroon is going through a phenomenon whereby “everyone can have access to the National Identity Card and become a Cameroonian citizen.” The new company is coming in just in time to handle problems embedded into this cacophony. It was indeed long overdue as the cancer warm had eaten so deep. This entails that Gemalto needs to go the extra mile to identify some of these problems in order to understand some of the things to avoid so as not to fall into the same trap. Cases abound where many people were caught with multiple ID Cards. In some cases, mistakes made in the establishment of ID Cards were hard to correct. At the identification office in Mvan, in Yaounde, it had become a daily hob with people travelling from all the nooks of the country to come and spend several weeks and months to finally retire back without an iota of solution to their problem.

The most disturbing issue is that many foreigners who have not naturalised as Cameroonians had succeeded in penetrating the whole system. They would falsify birth certificates and proceed to establish national identity cards. The network of fraud and corruption had become so dense involving even men in uniform; reason why many are presently languishing in prison. As nature would have it, all these had serious negative effects on some Cameroonians, especially those who happened to unjustly fall into the dragnet of incompetence and administrative bottlenecks. Many students are said to have missed a whole academic year as a result of their inability to correct the mistakes in their ID cards; mistakes made by the establishing office.  In the same vein, some could not write their entrance examinations into professional schools for the same reason. What about citizens who establish ID Cards and are issued receipts which they renew several times because the ID Card has not been printed?

As the French company, Gemalto takes the relay baton, it will be important to know all these problems. What is expected of them is nothing less than providing a solution adapted to the Cameroonian security, social, economic and technical environment. What is awaited from them is the production of  well secured and unfalsified documents which are capable of securing the country’s national identity. The project goes beyond producing ID Cards to printing residence permits, refugees status cards, professional cards of the staff of the General Delegation of National Security, cards for retired personnel of the General Delegation of National Security with the possibility of extending to other administrations. In order to ensure a well decentralised operational network, several production centres will be created. These include; the major production centre in Yaounde, secondary production centre in Garoua for the three northern regions, 350 identification centres throughout the whole country, 50 mobile posts partitioned in the different headquarters of the other seven regions. A technical committee has been created to ensure the effective putting in place of the new system. The committee is expected to draw up an efficient procedure, prepare clear and precise texts and propose an efficient system of securing the resources that the new system will generate.