The Director General of the National Social Security Fund (CNPS), Noël Alain Olivier Mekulu Mvondo Akame, has challenged the sanctions imposed on him by the Supreme State Audit Office (CONSUPE).
In an order signed on May 7, 2024, the Minister Delegate at the Presidency, in charge of State Audit, Rose Mbah Acha Fomundam, meted out sanctions against the CNPS Director General. The management shortfalls ran from the period 2008 to 2016. The investigations by the audit lasted three years.
The report said the DG of CNPS received a cumulative fine of 611,578,192 French CFA francs .
The faults concerned among others benefit that were not deposited in the bank for retired workers covered by the Labor Code as well as those in the private sector. In all, some nineteen management errors were attributed to the head of the CNPS.
Following this order, Mekulu Mvondo has appealed to President Paul Biya. In his letter dated June 7, 2024, the CNPS Director General described the decision as “iniquitous and unjustified, as I have extensively demonstrated and documented.” He argued that the procedure leading to his sanction was “grossly aggressive, biased, and not objective.”
This order concludes a process initiated by an audit of CNPS accounts for the period 2008-2016, conducted by a special Consupé control and verification mission. Following the audit report produced on December 17, 2019, Mekulu Mvondo was brought before the Budgetary and Financial Discipline Council (CDBF) in August 2020. After about ten sessions examining the case, the CDBF issued the decision that inspired the May 7 order.
According to the document, 19 management failures were attributed to the CNPS Director General, including 16 failures with “unquantifiable financial damage” and three with “quantifiable financial damage.” The latter category involved: authorizing and receiving a year-end bonus of 3.5 million CFA francs “without legal basis”; approving and authorizing expenses of 514.5 million CFA francs for CNPS board members as supervision allowances “without equivalent service”; and discrepancies and shortfalls in interest repayments from CNPS treasury operations, resulting in financial damage estimated at 91.5 million CFA francs.
For the first category of management failures, Mekulu Mvondo argued they were mainly related to the functional organization of CNPS in place since 2009, an organization “entirely in compliance with the principles and rules of the Inter-African Conference on Social Security (CIPRES).” However, he claimed the issue arose because the CDBF challenged these principles and rules. “It is worth noting that the interpretative conflict regarding the rules applicable to CNPS, brought to your high arbitration at the time, led to your signing of decree No. 354/2018 organizing CNPS, which settled the matter in our favor,” he reminded the President in his letter.
Regarding the supervision allowances for board members, Mekulu Mvondo stated they were annually approved by the board, endorsed by the ministries of Finance, Labor, and Social Security, then distributed by the board chairman and executed jointly by his then-deputy and the accountant. He noted that neither the directly benefiting board members nor the board chairman, nor the officials who executed the resolutions, had been sanctioned or asked to reimburse, which had been the consistent jurisprudence of the Consupé until now.
Mekulu Mvondo also pointed out that the performance bonus “granted to me (as well as to my deputy and the accountant)” by the board in 2009 for exceptional results (29 billion CFA francs surplus) obtained in his first year was confirmed by current regulations, including decree No. 354/2018. He expressed surprise that neither his deputy nor the accountant faced the same sanction.
He further defended that the alleged unreturned interests by banks on term deposits were due to a “manifestly erroneous calculation, which Consupé services have refused to communicate for verification against our calculation method, validated by the banks, the dedicated software we use, and expert firms we consulted for cross-verification.”
For all these reasons, “I have naturally and promptly filed appropriate appeals with the Yaoundé Administrative Court for the total annulment of this decision,” Mekulu Mvondo wrote in his letter to the President.
