The Coordinator and his Deputy were commissioned last Friday February 10.
Management has changed hands at the multi-billion Kribi Industrial Deep Seaport Complex project and the new team urged to redouble efforts to accelerate work on the general ports site at Mboro, some 35 km from Kribi town. The President of the Steering and Follow up Committee of the project, Louis Paul Motaze, made the call last Friday February 10 while commissioning Melom Patrice and Hand Bahiol Magloire Claude as Project Coordinator and Deputy respectively.
Compensating the population affected by the project, moving the head office of the Coordinating unit from Yaounde to Kribi and above all, sourcing for financing for the second phase of the project, are the uphill tasks the new team must surmount. Thanks to Sino-Cameroon relations, government got a loan of FCFA 207.7 billion from Eximbank China and mobilised national funding to the tune of FCFA 36 billion to meet the entire budget of the first phase evaluated at over FCFA 240 billion. Unlike the ongoing first phase financed by Cameroon and China, the second and third phases are to be financed by private operators on Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) system.
Mr Motaze said the change of management, coupled with a Prime Ministerial decree of November 28, 2011, creating and organising the Steering and Follow up Committee for the Kribi Industrial Ports Complex, signal a new dawn for the project and raises much hope. "The expectations are high because it is a huge project. Before, it was only the Deep Seaport but today, we are talking about a complex. Hence, we will have a very big town, bigger than what we have there now," he said. Consequently, there is need to reflect on the future. "The roads there now are not good enough for a deep seaport. So, a lot of investments have to be carried out. This is why we have decided that instead of remaining here in Yaounde, the coordinating office would have to move to Kribi," Mr Motaze noted.
The Head of State, Paul Biya, laid the foundation stone for the project at Mboro on October 8, 2011. Reports say bulldozing work had finished and the constructing firm, China Harbour Engineering Company, present on the site since June 2011, is working to meet the deadline. The first phase is expected to end in 36 months from October 2011, meaning in 2014 when the first ship is expected to anchor at Mboro.
