Much ado about nothing:

Alleged rift between AlamineMey& Paul Elung unfounded

Both personalities who had long been friends before the former was appointed Minister of Finance five years ago, work in perfect harmony, in accordance with the description of their duties.

By Douglas A. Achingale in Yaounde

The rapport between AlamineMey&

Paul Elung is cordial and wholesome

Ever since Paul ElungChe was propelled to the enviable position of Director General of the Petroleum Prices Stabilization Fund (CSPH), and later that of Minister Delegate to the ministry of Finance, his detractors have been machinating in the dark to smear his effulgent image. Their ultimate aim is, of course, to cause the illustrious graduate of Harvard University to plummet from amazing grace to grass.

                The Median has been informed, reliably, that the schemes are orchestrated by ill-fated people of various walks of life and at different levels. One of the levels that is known to all and sundry is the press. It is an open secret that some hapless journalists who are not comfortable with Elung’s meteoric rise to fame have repeatedly used their media organs as weapons to fire missiles at him.

                The latest of such attacks came from La Lettre du Continent, a confidential online publication, in its edition of Wednesday, 22 June 2016. In it, it is purported that all is not well between AlamineOusmaneMey and Paul ElungChe. The former is alleged to have issued a severe reprimand to the latter for, as the online publication puts it, spending most of his time in his CSPH office, thereby abandoning work at the ministry of Finance (MINFI). It should be recalled that Paul Elung is cumulating functions as DG of CSPH and Minister Delegate at MINFI.

                However, independent investigations carried out by this newspaper both at CSPH and MINFI have proved that the report of La Lettre du Continent is rather suppositious; that it is outright false, so to speak. 

                Although our attempts to get to the ministers in question were futile, our usually dependable sources told us that Paul Elung stopped using his office at CSPH immediately he was appointed Minister Delegate. “The GM seldom comes to his office here. I personally have hardly seen him around here since he became minister. Files only leave from here and meet him at his office at the MINFI. He has delegated much of his powers to some directors to perform certain functions in his absence, as well as to represent him wherever his attention is needed. Even the company’s cars which he was using are all parked here for many months now. The GM only makes sporadic visits here to give orientations and see how the house is running,” an insider at CSPH, who spoke on conditions of anonymity, revealed to us last week.

                A close collaborator of his at MINFI, who did not also want his identity revealed, equally related to us: “You will seldom go to the Minister Delegate’s office and not find him, except he is attending a meeting elsewhere. Very often he is there up till 8 p.m. and at times up to midnight. Talking about the alleged reprimand by the Minister of Finance, I haven’t heard of it. If there were any such thing, it wouldn’t escape me. But I can vouch to you that the Minister and the Minister Delegate work in very close collaboration, each according to the descriptions of their functions.”

                Other senior officials of the MINFI whom The Median talked to, simply guffawed over allegations of a reprimand given Elung Paul by AlamineMey. They said a claim of this nature could only be made by someone who does not know how the administration functions.

                “Firstly, a Minister cannot call another Minister to order. If Minister Paul Elung were to be reprimanded, it would be by the Prime Minister or perhaps the Secretary-General at the Presidency, and not by Minister AlamineMey. The latter can only draw the attention of his bosses to a misdeed committed by the Minister Delegate, if any,” explained a senior staffer at the MINFI.  

                The MINFI officials faulted journalists for raising smoke where there is no fire. “Elung and Alamine are both workaholic ministers; one does not need to tell the other what to do,” the senior official assured The Median. “They each have their job description and they like doing what they do. By the way, do you think they are meeting each other for the first time? They had been friends long before Alamine was appointed Minister of Finance. He was the DG of Afriland First Bank and Elung was not a stranger in that bank.”

                Meantime, we learnt that the extraordinarily commendable job that Paul Elung has been doing at CSPH since he was appointed DG in May 2013, is still continuing – an indication that his management of the house continues to be efficient despite his pressing ministerial duties.

The report of an internal audit carried out in 2013, prior to his appointment, had alerted that if the state corporation continued to be run in the catastrophic manner that it was run at the time, it would likely go bankrupt before 2016. But this is 2016 and CSPH is waxing stronger than ever before!

                The DG’s secret, we have been informed, centres around three things: discipline, discipline and discipline. He has reportedly blocked all avenues in the house through which material and financial resources were being wasted, and made sure that workers are rewarded only on merit at the end of every year. That is why, after barely three years at the helm of the corporation, The Median learned, Elung was able to make CSPH have a reserve of more than 50 billion FCFA as against a paltry 2 billion FCFA which he inherited when he took over  the management of the company.