Everything being equal, Cameroon will in no distant future possess a national railway master plan that will regulate railway activities and give socio-economic development contained in the country’s 2035 development vision, a push. Stakeholders say the project to draw up a national railway master plan which began in 2006 is on course and that when complete, it would regulate the system, lay down the rules, set out the standards so that whoever wants to develop a railway to enable them exploit natural resources in any part of the country will line up with the standards.
Members of the follow up committee on the drawing up of a National Railway Master Plan of Cameroon met at the Yaounde Hilton Hotel yesterday December 2, 2010 to present the second progress report of the project, code-named, “Development Scenario.” Speaking during the meeting, the Secretary General in the Ministry of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Paul Tasong, who is also the president of the follow up committee, said within the framework of the implementation of the ten-year development plan contained in the Growth and Employment Strategy Paper, emphasis is laid on economic growth. “For us to come by the growth, we need to have the right infrastructure to sustain all the heavy projects,” he explained. He said no country can ably ensure sustainable economic development through exploiting its natural resources without an adequate and modern railway infrastructure. “The railway is a transport infrastructure that will take us to where we want to be in 2035; that can give us the hope that we want to get by 2020 in terms of growth and employment strategy”, Mr Tasong said.
Railway development, he stressed, is a long term project. “What we are doing is simply drawing up a master plan, but the physical and concrete implementation will depend on each project. There are several people out there who want to develop rail networks, but we cannot just let them go do it the way they want,” he said. The SG added that it will be a railway owned by the government but which will generally be developed by private enterprises.
The project materialised last year when government reached a deal with a South Korean consortium for the latter to carry out feasibility studies and produce a National Master Plan for the country’s railway network. According to the terms of the FCFA 761, 769,000 contract, the consortium comprises the Korea Transport Institute, Chungsuk Engineering, Korea Rail Network Authority and KOREPEC, who will come up with the plan aimed at modernising the country’s railway network.
