Unkept Ring Road promise awaits Biya in Bd’a

Written by Eugene n. Nforngwa, Standard Tribune Reporter

Saturday, 26 December 2009 10:12

An unkept promise he first made more than 20 years ago will stare the president in the face when he visits the North West in January 2010.

Ring_Road2 YAOUNDE –On separate trips to Bamenda in 1983 and 1991 Paul Biya told cheering crowds that he will “personally supervise” the tarring of the Ring Road.

But as he returns there early next year for his fifth official visit in 26 years, the president has yet to honour his words.

Patches of the road have been tarred since Biya’s 1991 visit, but far from the promise he made, the Ring Road has mostly remained a badly mainatined dirt road.

Hopes were dashed once again after it emerged from budget 2010 that the road, on which several feasibility studies have been conducted, was unlikely to be built in the coming year.

Biya is due back in Bamenda to chair an event to mark 50 years of the Cameroon army and is expected to use the occasion to press the need for the nation to stay united.

A keynote address by the president and military parades are expected to constitute the high points of the event, which falls around the 50th anniversary of Francophone Cameroon.

A date has not been set for the visit, but Armed Forced Day is often held on 1 January of each year.

The choice of Bamenda is strategic for two main reasons: its deep-seated opposition leaning and the fact that Bamenda is also a stronghold of calls for the breakaway of Anglophone Cameroon.

But the people of that vast mountainous region would be most pre-occupied by the Ring Road, which for decades has been a bane. For many, it is the region’s most pressing development need.

Prime Minister Philemon Yang recently got a foretaste of the kind of feelings likely to be expressed when the president gets there. Speaker after speaker at an event in November to thank Biya for Yang’s appointment and to mark the president’s 27 years in power reminded the prime minister of the unfulfilled promise.

The timing could not have been better. Yang’s visit came after weeks of prolonged rain left sections of the road completely cut off, with hundreds of travellers left stranded for days. When Biya would be in town, the road would be a long blanket of dust.

Winding across valleys and over hilltops, the Ring Road is seen as the key to unlocking the economic potential of the region, where the people are among the most dynamic in the country..

The road leads to the country’s largest tea farm and factory in the chilly Ndu sub-division and a vast oil palm production basin in the warm Mboh plain.

Also the country’s largest cattle producers after the Adamawa, a dairy and beef processing industry has failed to develope because of transportation difficulties. And tourist potentials like the Menchum fall and the magestic rocks in Ndop have been left unexploited.

During the visit of the prime minister, traditional authorities of the North West invited Biya to the region “to see the conditions under which we are living.”

These concerns would no doubt be raised during the visit in speeches or briefings the president would receive.