Cameroon has added the largest hydropower plant in its history. Households still count their outages in hours per day. The gap between generation and supply is where the money goes missing.

Central Africa’s electricity problem is usually described as a shortage of generation. That description is increasingly wrong, and Cameroon is the clearest case. The Nachtigal plant on the Sanaga river, developed with international lenders and EDF as an industrial partner, added a very large block of hydropower to a grid that had been starved for decades. Yet load-shedding persists, and some neighbourhoods report outages lasting weeks.

Where power gets lost

Four bottlenecks explain most of the gap, and the article should quantify each.

• Transmission. Electricity produced on the Sanaga must reach Douala, Yaoundé and the North. Lines and substations have not expanded at the pace of generation.
• Distribution losses. Technical losses plus unbilled consumption swallow a large share of what is produced.
• The utility’s finances. The distributor is caught between regulated tariffs, unpaid public-sector bills and its own arrears to producers. A grid cannot be maintained by a company that cannot pay its suppliers.
• Industrial offtake. Large consumers, aluminium in particular, negotiate tariffs that shape the economics of the whole system.

Why it is a business story

Every manufacturer in Douala budgets for diesel. Every cold chain operator prices in spoilage. Every data centre project weighs the grid before it weighs the tax code. Electricity is the single most quoted obstacle in investor surveys across the region, ahead of customs and finance.

The comparison to draw

Gabon, Congo and Chad face variants of the same problem: generation projects announced with fanfare, networks left to rot. A regional comparison of tariffs, losses and outage hours would be a genuinely useful piece of journalism, and nobody publishes one.