The scene replays at regular intervals. In August 2026, mountains of rubbish blocked the approaches to the Tam-tam bridge, one of Yaoundé's main crossing points. The figures vary by source: the city mayor, Luc Messi Atangana, cites 2,000 tonnes of waste produced per day, of which around 1,300 are treated; the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (MINHDU) estimated production at close to 3,000 tonnes a day at the end of 2024. Collection coverage is put at around 45%, a theoretical shortfall of some 1,650 tonnes every day.
In legal terms, the question of who is responsible has an answer. Law No. 2019/024 of 24 December 2019, the General Code of Decentralised Territorial Authorities, assigns the collection and storage of household waste to urban communities and communes. They must adopt a plan — communal or inter-communal — covering sorting, pre-collection, collection, transport, landfilling, treatment, recovery and final disposal. In Yaoundé, that means the Urban Community, led by the city mayor, and the seven district communes of Mfoundi.
In practice, responsibility is shared far more widely. MINHDU carries national policy and infrastructure, and organised the National Consultation on waste management on 6 and 7 May 2025 in Yaoundé. The Ministry of Territorial Administration (MINAT) steps in with every flare-up: on 28 August 2026 it convened administrations, district communes and operators behind closed doors, brandishing the threat of arrests. The result: at least four tiers claim a role, and none is solely accountable for the outcome.
On the ground, one actor remains central: Hysacam, Hygiène et Salubrité du Cameroun, which has held a near-monopoly on urban collection since the 1980s, backed in Yaoundé by a second operator, Thychlof. The capital's contract was renewed at the end of 2025 for more than 45 billion FCFA; the total value of Yaoundé's cleaning contracts has been put at 61.8 billion.
The breaking point is financial, and it repeats. The state pays its bills late and partially. The timeline is documented: in 2017, only 45% of the invoice had been paid; the 2018 financial year closed with a debt of 14 billion FCFA; at the end of 2019, the state and local authorities owed around 10 billion; by early 2021 the claim reached 20.6 billion, a doubling in a year. Since June 2024 it has stood at 7.7 billion, unchanged.
That debt turns mechanically into unpaid wages. By mid-2026, Hysacam staff were owed three months of arrears and stopped work for more than a week; collection halted, and the capital 'became a rubbish bin again'. In parallel, several banks are separately claiming around 6 billion FCFA from the company.
Infrastructure is the blind spot. The Nkolfoulou treatment centre, opened in 1988 about twelve kilometres from Yaoundé, covering roughly five hectares and semi-controlled in design, is described as having reached the end of its life. No replacement site of comparable capacity has been brought into service.
Dedicated funding does exist on paper, and has for years. A special excise duty on waste collection was created in 2019, but it only began to be genuinely operationalised from July 2025, and its yield is still deemed insufficient. The May 2025 consultation recommended an 'overall reform of the financing mechanism', the gradual removal of roadside bins and a programme to build transfer and treatment centres.
The immediate 2026 responses remain short-term: a collection campaign covering 24 neighbourhoods in July, a special allocation of 150 million FCFA per district town hall to set up regrouping centres, and a debate on revising articles 157 and 241 of the 2019 Code to explicitly assign collection and sorting to the district communes.
What the file brings out, without any need to single out one culprit, comes down to three findings. First, a competence was decentralised by law without the matching revenue following: responsibility changed hands, the means to exercise it did not. Second, an essential service whose payment depends on the state's budgetary goodwill is structurally exposed to cyclical crisis — the debt is cleared, then rebuilds identically. Third, when several administrations steer the same issue, each can pass the burden to the other, and every crisis meeting produces one more roadmap, never a lasting mechanism.
The way out, therefore, is not another collection drive. It requires three simple things, long deferred: an earmarked revenue that actually reaches local authorities' accounts on schedule, a single lead body clearly identified in law, and investment in the physical chain — transfer centres, a next-generation landfill — that eight years of successive roadmaps have yet to commit.
