I published an op-ed in EcoMatin — a Cameroonian business daily — on electricity in Douala, in the Opinions section on 21 August 2026.

The piece opens with a tribute to Alain Malong, who died on the night of 7–8 August. He joined Alucam in 1981, ran the aluminium producer for more than fifteen years and chaired Syndustricam from 2013 to 2021, and he spent forty years repeating the same point: an electro-intensive plant does not live on electricity that is available, it lives on electricity that arrives, without interruption.

The argument

On paper, supply covers demand: the Southern Interconnected Grid holds 1,536 MW against national demand estimated at 1,206 MW. The outages continue all the same, and factories are the first to be cut off.

• The problem is no longer in generation, it is in the wires. The regulator attributes 28% of undelivered energy over the past five years to the transmission grid, and a further 40% to distribution: nearly seven outages in ten do not originate in the power stations. The bottleneck has an address — the Édéa–Douala corridor, where throughput is capped at 540 MW against local demand of 671. Downstream, substations saturate: the Logbaba transformer climbs to 140% of its rated load, Bekoko to 120%. At that point the distributor cuts large consumers to protect households. The city’s economic engine absorbs the shock for a grid it has outgrown.
• What it costs. Douala generates 31.2% of national GDP, holds a third of the country’s firms, and its port handles three quarters of the external trade of Cameroon, Chad and the Central African Republic. Connecting the roughly 150 MW of industry waiting in the queue would bring in close to 50 billion CFA francs — provided the lines get built. Meanwhile 28.5% of distributed electricity is lost: recovering a fraction of that would add megawatts without building a single power station.
• Direct connection cannot be settled case by case. Taking the largest consumers off the distribution network mechanically frees capacity for households and small firms; but stripping the distributor of its best customers weakens the revenue that funds everyone’s grid. Both arguments hold, which is the sign that something else is missing: a general rule of access to the transmission grid, with a use-of-system tariff that makes directly connected industrial users contribute to the system’s fixed costs. As long as the question is handled one file at a time, every legitimate request looks like a favour and every cautious refusal like obstruction.
• Who actually decides? Few people in Douala. The order to shed industrial load is signed in Yaoundé; local services carry it out. What the decentralisation code grants municipalities on energy suits a village, not a metropolis. This is the gap that runs through the governance of electricity everywhere — between the authority a text confers and the actual capacity to exercise it. In Douala it is simply more visible, because the consequence switches on or off.
• Generate where the power is consumed. Lacking a reliable grid, industry runs partly on diesel sets: it absorbs 26% of the fuel oil consumed in the country. The point is not to invent self-generation but to shift it towards cleaner and cheaper sources — rooftop solar on factories, cogeneration for industrial users already connected to the Logbaba gas field. That power never crosses the saturated corridor: it frees capacity for everyone.

Turning ENEO into SOCADEL answers a real problem, the sector’s financial balance. It does not push a single extra megawatt down the Édéa–Douala corridor: ownership changes, the bottleneck remains investment in the lines, and transmission was already public.

None of this is out of reach — the diagnoses are settled, the financing exists. What is missing comes down to two things: general rules rather than case-by-case arbitration, and a share of the decision returned to the territory that bears the consequence.

→ Read the op-ed on EcoMatin