Cameroon Politics and Governance

During the last two decades, many countries in sub-Sahara Africa embraced centralization as a new management strategy to render local government, broadly understood, more democratic, accountable, and responsive to the pressing social and economic needs of their citizens. The urgency of these reforms could, in part, be explained in a global socioeconomic context defined by large scale and rapid urbanization with concomitant social, economic, and political problems. These problems find concrete outlet in housing shortages, widespread unemployment, increasing poverty, environmental and sanitation problems, and failing social services in urban milieus. The said problems have been amplified by inadequate and sometimes contradictory political and administrative responses to the worsening physical and social infrastructure that are woefully in short supply, and have therefore, failed to respond in any meaningful way to growing pressures of rapid urban population growth in Africa