The Government Delegate to the Bamenda City Council, Vincent Ndumu Nji, has warned that anybody violating the terms of the privatisation of public taps will face the law. This followed the vandalisation of public taps by some youth recently which has left most parts of the town without water. The Government Delegate also said operators who are collecting FCFA 25 per 20 litres instead of FCFA 15 will be sanctioned. This was in an exclusive interview with Eden’s Richard Nde Lajong.
He began by throwing some light on the privatisation of public taps in the municipality. Excerpts.

Before the process to privatise public stand taps was launched, we held a press conference where we elaborated on the procedure that led us to come out with the decision to privatise water. Before March 2009 when I took over the council as Government Delegate we were faced with unpaid bills amounting to FCFA1.3 billion. We held a meeting with the supervisory authority (SDO) for Mezam and the Regional Director of Camerounais Des Eaux (CDE) where it was decided that we have to henceforth pay all our bills. It was a special deliberation that allowed us not to pay the FCFA 1.3 billion. It was then that we held a platform meeting of the city council and the sub divisional councils where it was decided that by May 2009 the public provision of water to some parts of the population will be privatised. Statistics indicate that not up to 15 percent of the population uses public water, meaning that 85 percent actually pay for their own water sources.

Meetings have been held within the last one year where we have sent out communiqués and sensitising the population on the issue of privatisation  of water because of necessity to allocate resources that we have been using in that particular activity elsewhere that it can benefit the rest of the population.

The exercise came to a conclusion on 1 June 2010 when most of the water points which had subcontractors were handed over for privatisation. And we only asked for FCFA15 per 20 litres from that part of the population as subvention for maintenance.

The bone of contention now is the collection of FCFA 25 instead of the FCFA 15?

I agree with you. This is the dishonesty of some of the people operating in that domain. What the city council is planning to do in the days ahead is to put signposts embedded into concrete around all the public taps indicating that 20 litres of water is equivalent to FCFA15. We will also start sanctioning those operators who are applying more than what was done in their contract because we had a contract with them.  It is therefore out of the question that they should charge more than FCFA 15 for 20 litres of pipe-borne water.

Most of these public stand taps have been vandalized with meters removed and water flowing uncontrollably. What is the position of the city council?

The alternative, which we have applied in certain cases, is asking CDE to close water supply in the whole neighbourhood. And so some of the neighbourhoods have already taken measures to redress the situation and avoid these vandals, taking care of them and stop them from depriving the rest of the population with water. In any case, this is an irreversible decision which is for the interest of the entire population. We cannot be imprisoned by 15 percent of the population or less because we want to provide water for them.

Before the FCFA 1.3 billion debt you inherited as Government Delegate and since taking over, how much have you been paying monthly as water bills before the privatisation?

I will be very frank to say that whether from my predecessor or even me, the city council or the Urban Council then, could not afford the monthly bills of about FCFA 25 million. There is no activity that we carry out in this city that requires FCFA 25 million every month which is about the monthly bills that were accumulating every month leading to the FCFA 1.3 billion. By the time we were privatising on 1 June, the bills had gone up to about FCFA 1.9 billion. So it is prohibitive to us to honour those types of bills. Street lighting that we are providing to all our citizens within the city, everything being equal, we will eventually provide street lights to all our nooks and crannies. That is a service that benefits the entire population without any remuneration. It is a measure that was taken to guard against insecurity. But for water, people have to contribute because we cannot even pay up to FCFA three million for public lighting

The opinion of some citizens is that they prefer the free water to the street lights.

They are not in the position to decide what the entire population of Bamenda should consume. I earlier said such people represent only less than 15 percent of the population

Mr. Government Delegate, the council police have been off the streets for close to a month since the unfortunate incident that involved a commercial bike rider and a lot of cacophony now reigns, what measures have you taken to have them back on the streets?

At times it is important to take a step back and watch what is happening. We came into town to redress the disorder that was reigning and instituted numbered jackets for all commercial bike riders, who have all appreciated that decision. We later came in with the municipal police. To all good intends and purposes, this was to put order in our day-to-day activities. In the exercise of their duties they might have been committing certain errors which are all human and which are subject to corrections with time.  So during an incident that led to the death of a bike rider which investigation later come out to say that this guy was killed not by the action of the regular police force but because he was trying to escape. As a result of the death of this bike rider, the others went on the rampage and undressed a few of our municipal police, went around with their uniforms and threatened to burn them down and even aggressed some of the female municipal police who were not in uniform but whose identification was said by some market women around the food market. What we are doing is that we are studying the situation. Nobody should have the impression that the municipal police have left the streets or that the commercial bike riders will go uncontrolled. Far from that. We have been able to make our own mea culpa. From the inception of the municipal police, we have been advising them that they are young men and women who have the tendency of maybe collecting a hundred francs here and there and bringing disorder. These problems have been brought to our knowledge and we have identified some of these problems.

A look at some of them now, you notice their names and numbers clearly spelt our in such a way that you will be able to identify who is carrying out a certain activity that is contrary to his or her domain. That person should be reported to any other authority within the city and he will be sanctioned accordingly.

We have studied the situation and they will come back in full force. And if we have only one commercial motorcycle rider in this city who will put on the identified jacket and paint his or her bike yellow, it will be better for us. The commercial bike riders cannot be above the law. What we are doing for this city is for the benefit of everybody.

Any message, to the population?

My message is that anything we are doing should be for the good of our population. The commercial bike riders should also understand that they are responsible for the death of so many people within the city. Statistics have shown that from the day of the unfortunate death of the bike rider, ten other people have died through the recklessness of the commercial bike riders.
Our mission is to control them in such a way that they don’t use this very important economic activity within our community as a source of death.