Cameroon :: Nearly 40 Million CFA Francs: This is the Cost of the Medical Evacuation of Joseph Owona :: Cameroon
We learned this through a laconic letter from the Presidency of the Republic addressed to the Minister of Finance so that the latter gives instructions to the payroll of the Cameroonian embassy in Paris, France so that it can financially support Joseph Owona, member of the constitutional council.
In this correspondence which dates from December 7, 2023, and which leaked on social networks, Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, the Minister of State Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic of Cameroon orders the Minister of Finance to make available to the Pay Office of the Cameroon Embassy in Paris the sum of 39,500,000 FCFA (thirty-nine million five hundred thousand FCFA), to “support Mr. Joseph Owona, member of the council constitutional medically evacuated to France. Emergency particularly noted” he wrote Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh in his correspondence to Louis Paul Motaze..
Let’s say it bluntly: abandoning the health institutions of one’s country to seek treatment abroad is, at the very least, a mistake for our leaders. This is irrefutable proof that they do not want to build a decent health system on site.
If, as soon as they are sick, even slightly, they jump on the plane to the West to receive care, it is also because they have not encouraged the development of national medical expertise.
Getting treatment abroad is also a huge injustice to the rest of the population.
Indeed, while poor Cameroonians are condemned to go to health structures that have become death halls, the country’s leaders shamelessly take public funds to come to the West to receive care. And it is often a matter of big money: the hospitalization bill for a leader of the national assembly of Cameroon at the American Hospital in Neuilly has climbed to 95 million CFA francs. It was 2023.
In Cameroon, the most recent figures are more than three years old. In 2020, the management of the organization of care and health technology of the Ministry of Health estimated the number of medical evacuations from Cameroon at around a hundred cases for a cost of around more than one billion FCFA according to its estimates.