Digitalisation of public service: Tall in words, short in action.

The e-government has a wide range of objectives, including better delivery of public services to people, enhancing business and industry collaborations and citizen empowerment through access to information, or more effective governance. 
The resulting advantages of e-government can be less corruption, higher transparency, and higher comfort, development in income and also reduction in costs.

It is on that solid assessment that The Guardian Post is appreciative of an agreement signed last Monday, for South Korea to digitalise the Cameroon public service in the next five years for 4.8 billion FCFA.

It was signed for Cameroon by the Minister of Public Service and Administrative Reforms, Joseph Le and the Secretary General of the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, representing Minister Alamine Ousmane Mey. Signing for South Korea was Gyuhong Lee, Country Director of the South Korean International Cooperation Agency, KOÏCA.

The accord, under the title: “Project for Enhancing Awareness and Capacity Building for Public Service Transformation in Cameroon”, focuses on the development of state human resources for the modernisation of public administration. 
The main goal of which is to transform the manual skills of public officials into digital formats for a better online public service that is beneficial to businesses and citizens.
Specifically, the intention is to harmonise the policy of digitising public services, setting up a digital public service for ameliorated quality and round the clock availability of services to users while guaranteeing digital sovereignty for a sustainable economic growth.
Ultimately, the expected results relate to the training of 350,000 public service personnel over a period of five years. 

It also includes the reorganisation of the procedures for implementing computerisation projects in order to ensure interoperability between the information systems of the administration as well as those of stakeholders.

The project in which the Cameroon government is chipping in 15 percent will be supervised by the Ministry of Public Service and Administrative Reforms, with a team composing steering and the management units.
In view of the advantages linked to the digital infrastructure, the government will have a complete electronic administration (e-administration). 

Thus, stakeholders like government officials, economic operators and telecommunications companies like MTN, ORANGE, CAMTEL and NEXTELL will each be able to play their role in providing internet facilities.
While government is being praised for the initiative, it should be noted that electricity supply in Cameroon remains problematic. 
Interment services are also not the best in the country, are expensive and not accessible to the vast majority of Cameroonians, especially in rural communities.

Maintaining and optimising e-government requires a lot of money and prone to hacking, scamming and misinformation.

But weighed against the advantages, e-government is an innovation worth implementing. Nonetheless, the questions remain: Will the project be delivered in five years as agreed, given delays in many government projects?
Why should the country have to hire people from South Korea to teach its civil servants e-government with the numerous universities in Cameroon offering courses in e-commerce and other related ICT disciplines?
What has happened with the Paul Biya computer scheme, which in February 2016, Higher Education Minister, Prof Jacques Fame Ndongo, signed an agreement to establish an e-national higher education network with the Chinese company, Sichuan Telecom Construction Engineering? 

That accord, as the minister claimed, was to generalise the use of ICTs by Cameroonian students. If the 75 billion FCFA project, which the minister claimed included the building of nine digital development centres in each of the country’s eight universities at the time and in the Cameroon-Congo Interstate University in Sangmélima was implemented, would Cameroon today still be contracting another country to set up an e-government programme?
The Guardian Post, however, hopes this new scheme will not be in the footprints of the PB laptops that remain a mystery.