The national community is yet to come to grips with the recent accident on the construction site of the second bridge over the Wouri River in Douala and which is said to be causing in delay or a push-ahead for the delivery date of the project.

The question about citizen concern here is not so much about the harm caused on the bridge under construction. It has to do, first of all, with the reckless nature of the accident and the very high expectations of the population especially on the way and manner the bridge, when completed, is going to impact national economic performance. It is reported that last Tuesday, a 100-metre ship transporting debris from the dredging works being carried out on the river, in one of its movements, hit the built up installations serving as a temporal bridge causing considerable damage.

The provisionary bridge was put up, incidentally, to ensure that machines and other heavy-duty equipment circulating around the construction site, do not use the old bridge which is just a few metres away. The damage caused is such that all equipment will have to use the old bridge while a solution is found. Experts say a final solution cannot come before two months, even if in three weeks some progress might have been covered to enable some work to continue.

This accident was most unwarranted! Talk on the construction of the second bridge over the Wouri had been so much at the centre of national attention, especially with regard to its important role in achieving economic emergence status, that when construction time came, the Head of State, President Paul Biya personally came to Douala to launch construction work on November 11, 2013. The sheer turn-out of the local population and even people from the neighbouring South-West and West Regions for the event was the best illustration of the long-awaited desire to see this bridge constructed and in so doing relieve the urban population and economic actors in these regions from the difficulty of commuting (for locals) and ferrying in or taking out goods (for the economic actors).

By all accounts and in view of this strategic economic importance of the bridge, anything happening here has far-reaching ramifications and can hardly go unnoticed. Moreover, the accident has not only come to extend the reception date by some two months, but has also brought back the sad memories of traffic over-crowding on the old bridge because of the obligatory presence of construction equipment being used on the new bridge. This bridge incident unfortunately brings back an old debate about the wisdom in the decision of constructing the second bridge over the Wouri just next to the old one.

Certainly, it is not the presence of the old bridge that is responsible for the accident, but outlying the new bridge from this busy industrial site could have had the advantage of reducing pressure on the bridge through the scaling down of users while the new bridge on a site located much farther away would have decongested traffic from this area as well as created new economic zones in other parts of the city as well as serve other commuters to get to other settlement areas without much difficulty.

But this is not the main issue here today. The issue here is about responsibility, especially in strategic economic locations. One has the impression that enough security attention is not paid to such important construction sites, otherwise what can explain the fact that a ship, which is not moving at supersonic speed and ostensibly moving in a highly-busy setting, can hit a firm installation, visible from afar?  If unchecked, this trend of recklessness could continue. A similar niggling incident of heedlessness occurred at the Douala International Airport where a moving vehicle was reported to have damaged parts of an aircraft preparing for take-off, causing the cancellation of a scheduled flight. The Wouri bridge accident falls in this category of imprudent acts and can only be qualified as most unwarranted!