Blue Star Media, Daily Brief, Monday 7 September 2026.

The commitment is easy to state. The Port autonome de Douala (PAD) is planning a "total and effective" dematerialisation of its platform by September 2026, built on a port information system meant to gather the data of shipping lines, agents and stevedores into a single module and make it available to other stakeholders. The wording belongs to Jean Yves Massouka, who heads the trade facilitation unit at the PAD; it was made public at a regional workshop held in Douala on 12 February 2026 and reported five days later by Investir au Cameroun.

The word carrying the weight of that sentence is "total". A dematerialisation is judged on its perimeter, not on its principle, and the perimeter is precisely what an independent survey has named.

The Observatory of Abnormal Practices on the main Central African corridors (OPA-AC) was set up under the Programme d'appui à la gouvernance des infrastructures régionales et nationales en Afrique centrale (PAGIRN), financed by the European Union under the 11th EDF. It is run by the Institut sous-régional de statistique et d'économie appliquée (ISSEA), a CEMAC institution.

The protocol is worth knowing, because it determines what the figures are worth. The OPA did not survey perceptions. It placed field agents and tablets aboard a sample of trucks, tracked from the port gate through to issue of the release order and on to the Yassa checkpoint. Licensed customs brokers were interviewed in parallel, and a sample of transit cargo followed to estimate durations by procedure. Observations cover 2021 to 2024. The project held its closing regional workshop in Yaoundé on 11 March 2026, under the patronage of the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, presenting the surveys carried out at Douala, at Kribi and on the land corridors.

The results should be read with their definitions attached. Eight days is an average customs clearance duration for a consignment. Thirty nine days is a peak observed between manifest validation and the start of clearance, not an average. Three days is average truck dwell inside the port. Miscellaneous formalities can reach 180,000 FCFA per truck, with high payments for weighing and GPS, roughly 274 euros at the fixed peg of 655.957 FCFA to the euro, a Blue Star Media conversion given as an indication only.

For a shipper the most useful figure is not the average but the distance between the two. An eight day average alongside a 39 day peak describes a spread, and it is the spread that costs money, because it is unpredictable and cannot be provisioned for.

The survey concludes that dematerialisation remains partial. The tools exist, Guce and Camcis are live, but their adoption is incomplete, and the issue of both the transit title and the international waybill still involves physical steps. The observatory also records that bond release, GPS beacon fitting and SGS processing are "mostly judged above normal" in duration and cost.

These are four named objects, not a general assessment. That is what makes the September deadline verifiable, and that is where it should be tested rather than against any overall statement.

Then there is the question of perimeter, which is decisive for an exporter. ISSEA puts the annual traffic capacity of the Douala port estate at 15 million tonnes and notes that it serves as the gateway for Chad and the Central African Republic. The PAD states that more than 80% of Cameroon's international trade passes through it. But the OPA's observation begins at the port and continues along the Douala to N'Djamena and Douala to Bangui corridors, where the checkpoints, the border waits and the procedures of a second and then a third state are found. A fully operational port information system does not dematerialise a border post. That share belongs to the CEMAC joint brigade now being stood up, to bilateral transit agreements and to corridor governance, all of which featured in the OPA-AC closing recommendations.

The overall movement is documented and it runs the right way. ISSEA recalls that in 2003 average port transit time at Douala was 14 days, which led the Cameroonian state, with support from its partners, to launch a transport and transit facilitation programme. When the OPA-AC report was handed to the PAD on 4 September 2025, overall transit time was put at 8 to 9 days, with Professor Ngonthe Robert, adviser to the director general of ISSEA and deputy project head for the OPA-AC, speaking of an "honourable mention".

PRIMARY: ISSEA, OPA-AC project pages and the announcement of the closing regional workshop of 11 March 2026, issea-cemac.org and opa-ac.issea-cemac.org; observatory run under PAGIRN, financed by the European Union under the 11th EDF; Drewry, World Container Index of 3 September 2026. SECONDARY: Investir au Cameroun (Stratline group, a single source family together with Business in Cameroon and StopBlaBlaCam), 17 February 2026; Camer.be via allAfrica, 5 September 2025; Ecomatin.

OPA figures come from surveys conducted between 2021 and 2024 and are dated as such. They do not describe conditions today. The conversion of 180,000 FCFA to about 274 euros is a Blue Star Media calculation at the fixed peg of 1 EUR = 655.957 FCFA, flagged as indicative. No amount is converted into dollars outside the sources that publish it.

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