Hundreds of Cameroon government employees have found themselves locked out of their offices after rolling in to work late, following a crackdown by their new Minister of Public Service, Ephraim Inoni.
The education and finance ministries were the latest to be targeted on Thursday on the orders of Inoni, who last week sacked two top officials after he made a surprise early-morning visit to his own ministry and found them not at their desks.
The crackdown on longstanding practices has caused consternation among the country’s civil servants.
”We don’t understand why, because we arrive at the office at 8am instead of 7.30am, we find the doors shut in our faces and lose a day’s work,” one employee of the secondary education ministry said on Thursday.
President Paul Biya blamed the ”general inertia” of the public services for Cameroon’s exclusion from debt relief by the International Monetary Fund last year. — Sapa-AFP