Here is the situation regarding payment of salaries and wages in Pamol. We have two categories of workers. The field workers who we consider more vulnerable and sensitive. We give them priority when it comes to remuneration. This category of workers are paid up to the month of February 2026.
So we are owing them the month of march and April. Two months. The rest of the workers including management and myself speaking to you people are paid up to the month of January 2026. It means we are owing them February, match and April.
Note should be taking that after five years this is the first time we are faulting in this responsibility. I will take you guys through certain details so you understand how we get to where we are.
Pamol is a company that operates on about eleven thousand hectares and pre crises it had a labour of about 3 to four thousand workers. With a production capacity of about 13 to 14 thousand metric tons of palm oil per anum.
Generating revenue of about 8 to 10 billion francs CFA per anum It is interesting to note that presently it has two mills running and both were conditioned in 1967 if you do your maths they are both close to 60years old.
It is interesting to note that for this period of time, they have not seen any significant revobishlent. You can imagine the state of this infrastructure. We have plantations were about 65 to 70 percent exceeded their economic viability.
There are some trees that are up to fourty years. Quite a significant portion of the plantations has trees that are taller than the average length of our standard harvesting poles.
Which now requires climbers and we only get this expertise from Nigeria. Nigerians come with their special ropes and they can climb.
You can imagine the state of the plantation. Now the potential of that area is about the highest in western central Africa which ranges between 18tons per hectar per annum.
That is the potential. But because of the situation we find ourselves, we register less than 2tons per hectar per annum. This is not a very interesting scenario because of the age of the infrastructure.
Now I join the team with my deputy in the month of October 2020. The labour force at the time was less than 400. production as well we made about 450 tons in 2020.
It will be good to equally sight that during the crisis, the company was forced to shut its doors down in the month of may 2018 when insecurity caused management and workers to flee.
It remained shut down until September 2019 when my predecessor gathered some workers and were able to restart operations at the Ndian estate.
Ndian though it's the name of the division but the estate is equally called Ndian. It has the mill as well. We joint them in October 2020 and since then it will be good that I run you guys through.
How the performance of the company has been up till this point. When we joint, only Ndian estate was operational. The insecurity in love be was very high and prevented any possibility of relaunching any operation.
So the figures I will be giving you people for three years according to 2020 will be those provided by just Ndian estate.
Ndian alone in the year 2021 produced 2660 metric tons of palm oil. In 2022, it produced 3039 metric tons of palm oil. 2023, 2808 metric tons, 2024, 3692. You already see a train. Each year better than the previous year. 2025 it was 2556 metric tons. If you did a graph you will see that we picked at 2024, then sharp drop in 2025.
The difference between the short falling in production between 2024 and 2025 is more than a thousand metric tons of palm oil. This is because by the end of 2024, we suffered a boiler crisis because of age, the tubes in the boilers started firing because they could no longer hold the pressure at which the boilers operate.
A boiler in simple terms is an intricate network of steel pipes linking an upper drum and a lawyer drum. Including other structures. All of this exists around and above a furnace that produces heat.
This heat is used to convert water into steam. The steam by the special design of this plant is held a pressure of about 22bytes. Just so you understand what that means.
The vehicles you drive, the tires they hold air pressure at between 2.5 and 3bars . I am sure you must have heard the explosion of an inflated tire. The sound alone.
Here we talking about 22bytes of about 10times that pressure. It is a very delicate vessel and it's heart of the industry. Without the boiler you don't have a mill. Pressures are built up to 22 bars because you need to run a steam to bar.
A steam tobar b cause you must generate electric engine. You are generating electric energy because you must run the stations using electric power. I must remind you that both factories are presently not connected to the national greed.
So the oil mills are designed in such a way that they are autonomous in their own energy generation. They generate the energy they need to run the process. Imagine you have a boiler that is limping, you cannot generate energy. This is the heart of the factory.
It's as if you don't have a factory. Though we suffered this crisis in late 2024, it started having it's effect in 2025. That's how you saw the poor production in 2025.
It is a plant that cannot be renovated in a hurry. Formally you will even import competence because you cannot find local competence. But today we have a few companies that tried their hands on boiler revobishment.
So we realized that we had no choice but to embark on revobishment of the second boiler . The second boiler it self had been out of use for some time. So a lot of work had to be done to get it right.
Since it takes a lot time to get this boiler revobishment and get it to a state where it works, and it's performance, we had to continue using the limping boiler. This took us way into 2026.
The poor performance of 2025 and the short fall in production that was registered is what affected our ability to generate revenue. Imagine in commercial terms,more than a thousand tons of commercial oil is at the level of 700 to 800 million francs CFA.
If you consider that from 2020 there was steady fine in production, 2025 normally was expected to be better than 2024 where we had the best performance. The revenue that we have lost could be almost a billion.
This certainly affected our revenue situation and we became difficult for us to meet up with our recurrent commitments. So that is how we started facing salary issues towards the end of 2025.
You will realize that the good result of 2024 it's effect pushed into 2025 and we could feel the financial crush towards the end of 2025.
We started faulting with salary payments at the end of 2025 and right up to this moment it has not been stable because the only boiler, work is still ongoing for the boiler which is undergoing revobishment.
Now I have just taken you down through Ndian. Ndian was the bread basket of the company at that time.
So if you suffer this kind of effect in the boiler, in normal economics terms, if we had our way we would have shut down the Ndian factory and gone through this work because the way it is running now the boiler has detororated to a point where it can no longer sustain operations you must run a generator along side to be able to generate the energy you need to keep the process running.
These mills are not designed to run on generators. It is costing us a lot. We would have been able to shut down Ndian factory and carry out maintenance to completion but the fact that it would have affect field operations as well.
Normally the two factories can work intermittently. Meaning that you can shutdown one for maintenance and all crop is diverted to the other. But where we find ourselves now the road linking mundemba where one factory is and ekondo titi is currently impassable.
We cannot afford to shut down the factory and then divert all crops to Lobe. We will not be able to achieve that. So this is the current strategy management is trying to take to get out of this situation, just like I mentioned the revobishment of the second boiler is ongoing.
We have replaced all the 135 tubes and we are at the level where the government watchdog, has to come in and do their pressure test and if we pass the test they will homorograde the boiler for use and we can start doing finishing touches. They submitted their performance invoice for this exercise.
Hopefully within the days ahead we should be able to comply with their financial requirements and then get them down to do the work. Though Lobe factory came in to operation in 2020.
Have since after 2018 . Four years after, came in timidly in 2022, picked up in 2023 but even then, we all observed that their extraction rate which is how much oil you can get for a particular volume that is fresh fruit bunch and standardly, 22 percent of the bunch is actually oil.
If you can get an extraction rate of 20 percent it means you are Operating at about 80 to 90 percent efficiency which is good. We realized that for Ndian it's better.
Ndian does 20, 21, but Lobe borders around 17, 18 the loses there is immense. We are bringing a particular apparatus which is called the decanta because right now love and Ndian can process the same volume of crop.
But Ndian will have more oil because the extraction efficiency is better. We have to push up the extraction efficiency for Lobe as well. So plans are on to acquire that particular apparatus that will help us push up the extraction efficiency for Lobe to be able to increase our efficiency as well.
Now we are with the government as well because at every step of the way we keep on keeping the government informed of our difficulties. The consequences of this regular pay issue is that workers moral is dropping.
Once worker moral drops, production equally drops and your revenue slides down as well. Now we have submitted report to the government. We are asking the government to accompany us for the payment of some of these arias so we can close the gap and restore the worker moral and get back their motivation to production levels.
We are working with other financial partners to help and stabilize our finances so that we can pick up. We are hoping that once we get this boiler running again, Ndian will come back to production wills.
But then we may stabilize but Pamol cannot level off at that because where we are our best production which was in 2024 is still not up to 50 percent of what the grate value was.
So Pamol cannot stabilize with a labour force of under 1000 which we are now And a production of about 6000 tons. This will not align with the government economic plan for the area.
So we are saying that at the current state of things we are going to be unable to achieve pre crisis labour. There must be investment, recapitalisation, there must be renewal of structures to be able to get Pamol back to it's productive ways and then every other aspect of her responsibilities follow.
We sat down with my team and enacted a strategic master plan. This is 10years development plan which is spread across short, medium and long term. It is supposed to cost about 21 billion cfa and this investment has a social dimension to it because we have some indebtedness that are running.
Taxes, cnps, areas of workers wages and salaries so that amounts to another 15billion . If we put the two together, we are talking about 36 billion package.
Now this plan has been submitted to the government and the state has reacted created an inter administerial commission to work with us.
The primary responsibility was to all align this document to current state investment regulations so that the projects can be bank able. sessions held in Yaounde they were here last Tuesday we had sessions with them and they even visited the sight on Wednesday.
So the state is taking this business very seriously. They are to hold a meeting on Monday to review their field experience and then chat a way forward.
At the end of which there will be a report to the state and recommendations on ways and means to finance pamol achieved some of this program objective.
In the plan, we will see the following We envisage a brand new oil mill in Lobe. 30metric tons per hour oil mill. To refurbish Ndian mill. Because in it's current state, the performance level is not the best.
Refurbishment shall entails replacement of some major stations components. We shall be renewing plantations. like I mentioned earlier 65 to 70 percent of our plantations have exceeded their economic viability.
We will equally be rehabilitating social housing. In our package we sort the services of a civil engineering consultant and he has giving us a design for new structures.
The recent structures are old and not suitable to provide the best human conditions for optimum performance of the workers. We are redesigning all of this. We are equally going to improve on health facilities and recreational facilities for the workers.
All of this is included in the package. Then road rehabilitation. Unfortunately the crisis has really cost road networks to be extremely delapidated. Access is a challenge.
As things get better we should be able to access, acquire equipment to work on some of this roads cause it's a major epidemement to smooth evacuation of crops to the field and to the factory.
Then we have bridges. All of that will fall in the investment package of the 21billion for capital investment. Like I explained earlier, it's programmed to run for short, medium and long term.
The documents carries all those details. So if we get this done, we are hoping to multiply the potentials because right now, we have a potential of about 16000 metric tons, we plan to go to to about 36000 metric tons of palm oil per anum.
If we get this strategic master plan executed to completion and most of all we know that the state created this companies to provide employment for Cameroonians, to bring economic activities to the area of their operation and three by their products we make our own contribution to the value chain.
We have a lot of refineries in the Douala area that depends on our products and all of this falls within the state economic plan and we are looking forward to creating about 2000 extra jobs by the time we are done executing this strategic master plan.
In summary I have out you where we where, where we are and where we intend to go. Thank you for your kind attention.
