Nkendem Forbinake
31 August 2009
The national community had hardly finished heaving a sigh of relief following the end of repair work that enabled Bamenda, the North-West regional capital, to be reconnected to the rest of the country after the collapse of a section of the lone highway to the area when tragedy struck again a few days ago.
The just-ended weekend was particularly throbbing for the people of Douala and Yaounde. In Douala, erosion swept away a home in the Ndokoti neighbourhood, killing one person. In Yaounde, there was a succession of three heartbreaking accidents: two train accidents and a fire in an open market, built with rickety material in the heart of the city.
The Yaounde train accidents - one at the Obobogo railway crossing and the other at the Abattoir-Etoudi neighbourhood - left seven people dead (two at Obobogo and five at Abattoir-Etoudi) and over 300 wounded, some very seriously. Given the scope of the accidents, one can easily understand that very many families are involved - those grappling with efforts to bury their dead and others attending to the sick in various hospitals in Yaounde. The moment of these accidents is, unfortunately, quite inauspicious; not that they could have been welcome at a different moment, but because they come to add salt to the injury of multifarious problems citizens are facing with the back-to-school movement and the expenses involved.
In difficult moments like this, affected families deserve immediate financial assistance to address such needs as buying medicines and bearing other medical costs, burying the dead and repairing homes and market stalls destroyed in the accidents. The government has initiated this effort by promising to pay for the bills of the hundreds of victims admitted into Yaounde hospitals. The prompt attention shown by government is also manifested by the massive presence of high-level government officials at the accident sites within minutes of their occurrence, beginning with the Prime Minister and Head of Government Philemon Yang.
It is now left for ordinary citizens to cue in the same unhesitating posture as government and take the movement of national solidarity as far and wide as possible. The churches, NGOs and other humanitarian bodies have one opportunity now to make good the objectives they often claim to stand for.
But as this solidarity builds up to help the needy, it must also be said that it equally behoves decision-makers and all those entrusted with the public authority to sit up. It is also a way of showing national solidarity, a notion which should be extended to include the fact that citizens should consider themselves each others' keeper. This entreaty is even more evident for those entrusted with public authority.
If such care had been effectively manifested, some of these accidents could have been averted. Take the two railway accidents. Cameroonians watched, with utter dismay on television, the rotten state of some of the wooden sleepers carrying the rails around Obobogo. In such a situation, an accident of the scope of Friday's was literally unavoidable.
So was the accident at the Abattoir-Etoudi area where coaches detached themselves from the locomotive and ran off the rails. The fire incident in Yaounde could also have been averted simply with more resolution in ensuring that the occupants of this fire-prone location, expelled some months ago, were prevented from resettling.
The various bodies will now be pontificating and taking much-publicised initiatives, all aimed at maintaining a clean corporate image. But a better corporate social responsibility is by conjuring up a citizen-friendly posture. And this can only be achieved by remaining permanently attentive to the people's concerns and yearnings, top of which is their security.
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