How come there is still so much dilly dallying with the government projects announced by the Head of State when he sought – and later got elected – for the current term of office.

At the close of the campaign for this running term in office, he told the people of Kribi where he had come to lay the foundation stone for the Kribi Deep Seaport that Cameroon was being transformed into a vast worksite. Hear him as he spoke on Saturday October 8, 2011: “during our previous seven-year term … we worked hard to secure financing. This has been accompanied and from next January, as I have stated before, Cameroon will be become a vast construction site.

However I want to state that for this policy to succeed, we must work harder, we must absolutely eradicate for good the scourge of corruption which severely constrains our country’s development. Remember that when someone steals from the State, it is not only the State, but each and every one of us that loses.”

Nearly six years after that very clear declaration of intent, much has certainly been done with work on the Kribi port virtually ended while many other important face-lifting projects are also going on without too many hitches. But it will be dishonest to leave the impression of a quiet flowing river when it comes to analyzing all those projects the President of the Republic identified as those capable of quickly taking our country to emergence economy status come 2035.

In the face of the snail-speed many of these projects were taking and midway his term, an obviously irate Head of State decided to institute a three–year emergency plan in December 2014 with the hope of filling the huge gap observed in the attainment of objectives he had set at the beginning of his current term.

The emergency plan involved a whopping FCFA 925 Billion with huge investments in the key poverty-reduction sectors of energy, health, town planning, agriculture/stockbreeding, roads, water and security. The year 2015 has come and gone, meaning that one year is already out of the three-year objective with little to show even if bureaucrats would argue that the first year of the plan was set aside for planning and that veritable work  on the ground is expected to start but this year.

But signs from the field are rather disturbing! Ministers have intensified site visits to ensure that work is effectively on. A few days ago, the Minister for Public Works was out on the Obala –Bouam road project suffering from several setbacks which are holding down the construction calendar.

Later, the Minister was in the south of the country to inspect work on the Mengong-Sangmelima-Bikoula road, a project started in 2011 and which is still dragging for even simple issues as the payment of compensations! The Yaounde-Nsimalen double carriageway project has been in the news for nearly ten years and numerous visits by Ministers and other ranking officials have never really made things move.

Several other projects are in the same situation around the country and are not only limited to roads and bridges as many think. Even water, with all the stakes it carries, has been a headache without a breakthrough in view. Just last Friday, the Minister for water was at the Akomnyada water supply site out of Mbalmayo where an extension project is currently on.

It was observed that the project, supposed to have been carried out within six months is still not done, two years afterwards. We have had a very clement weather period of nearly four months, enough to carry out mammoth works and with the rains coming in shortly, all excuses will again be about the difficulty of accessing worksites! There is clearly a rift between the President’s very laudable intentions for his people and those responsible for implementing the policies on the ground.

One is bound to ask if there still exists even a modicum of patriotism in many of those charged with executing these poverty-alleviation projects given their scandalous indifference in the face of the huge developmental deficit our country is suffering from in terms of roads, energy and water particularly.