The project's 8th meeting held in Yaounde on Wednesday.
Stakeholders of the Kribi deep seaport project are multiplying strategies to harmonise their actions and respect the project's calendar so that the first phase could be complete by 2013 when the first cargo ship is expected to anchor at Mboro, some 30 kilometres, South of Kribi.
Steering committee members, charged with the follow up of the FCFA 300 billion project, held their 8th meeting at the Yaounde Hilton Hotel yesterday to evaluate the path covered and what is still left so as to speed up work.
Chaired by the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Louis Paul Motaze, yesterday's meeting focused, among others, on the situation on the ground and the calendar of activities, environmental studies, effective take off of construction work, compensation of the population who will be displaced as well as on the financing of basic infrastructure. Speaking after the meeting, Louis Paul Motaze said the meeting served as an opportunity for experts to present some results of the survey carried out in Kribi. "We made an appraisal of the entire project and we can say that before the end of this year construction will start", the Minister assured.
According to the project's calendar, land and maritime technical equipment of the port sites were acquired in April this year, the drawing up of the technical file of accompanying projects, like access roads to the project sites, electricity and potable water, are ongoing and will end in November, 2010. Compensation of the affected population, the calendar shows, begins in August and they are expected to be relocated to new sites by October 2010. In January this year, 14 containers containing equipment destined to start the foundation of the deep seaport were shipped to Cameroon to drill boreholes on the seabed in order to determine the depth and content of the seabed.
For the first phase of the project, construction of access roads to the sites is expected to span through September 2010 to March 2011 while the selection of private partners is expected to be finalised by December 2010. Work begins on phase two in mid 2011 and the construction of specialised terminals (aluminum, hydrocarbons and containers, et al) takes off from 2013 while the port's specialised terminals, everything being equal, would go operational from 2014 - 2015. Upon completion the project is expected to benefit the country in the exportation of its mineral products like bauxite, iron, cobalt and nickel as well as open a vast economic corridor for Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and Congo, among others.
29 July 2010 (Cameroon Tribune)
