I published an op-ed in Défis Actuels (Cameroon) — issue no. 1142, Tuesday 18 August 2026, Horizons section, page 11 — on the handover of Cameroon’s electricity distribution to the new public operator Socadel.

What is Défis Actuels?

Défis Actuels is a Cameroonian daily covering economic affairs, billed on its own masthead as the country’s “premier news magazine”.

The argument

Cameroon is attempting something few countries get right the first time: transferring electricity distribution to a new public operator. Attention is fixed on the assets — lines, substations, meters, receivables — when what the incoming operator lacks first is the capacity to act. You can hold a grid in law and still not know how to run it. The gap between the authority a decree confers and the ability to exercise it plays out over an eighteen-month window; after that, whatever has not been organised is simply endured.

The piece examines three underestimated fronts, then a question of market design:

• The data. A distribution grid is first an information system laid over cables: customer records, consumption histories, the real condition of transformers, losses by zone, qualified arrears. Taking over the assets without an adversarial certification of their documentary condition turns every doubtful receivable and every ghost customer into a dispute with the outgoing operator — a dispute the incoming one always loses, because it is the one that has to bill tomorrow. A transfer audit run by a third party before the handover period ends costs a fraction of what its absence will cost.
• The contracts. A distribution utility is a contractual knot — upstream power purchases, downstream supply, maintenance, information systems, agreements with local authorities and large accounts — all negotiated by and for the outgoing operator. The critical contracts have to be ranked (which ones, if they lapse, halt service within 72 hours?), dormant clauses dealt with before the first incident, and upstream tariff schedules examined: a newborn distributor inheriting rigid purchase contracts against uncertain revenue carries a margin-squeeze risk no one has yet quantified on its behalf.
• The skills. The most underestimated front, because it appears on no balance sheet. A distributor rests on a few hundred people holding unwritten knowledge, and that capital has a cruel property: the most employable profiles leave first. Hence the need to identify by name the forty or so holders of critical knowledge, secure them contractually, and fund the handover period as a line item of the transfer rather than hope for it as goodwill.
• The perimeter. Since July, large industrial users have been asking to connect directly to the transmission grid, or to contract directly with generators. Their technical case is sound — fewer transformation stages, fewer points of failure — and mature systems work that way: in France, electro-intensive sites are direct customers of the transmission operator; in South Africa, large mines and smelters have been for a long time. But those systems settled a question Cameroon still faces: who funds the distributor when its best customers leave?

Public debate has settled into for-or-against, when the useful question lies elsewhere: what mechanism makes that departure neutral for the system? It comes down to four pieces — an objective power threshold applicable to all rather than case-by-case exemptions; a transmission use-of-system tariff including a public-service contribution, so that a directly connected industrial user keeps funding the system it is leaving commercially; an exit schedule that gives the distributor time to adjust its model; and a regulator equipped to arbitrate on evidence.

The conclusion is an uncomfortable one: a decree creates authority, not capacity — and capacity is built now.

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→ Read the op-ed on Défis Actuels

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Print edition: Défis Actuels no. 1142, Tuesday 18 August 2026, Horizons section, page 11.