Communities, Companies and Safety issues in Cameroon

The communities and Companies in Cameroon have no enough understanding of the importance of safety and its impacts on the quality of life of the population. During the day of October 21st, the economic capital city of Cameroon was cut off from the political capital Yaoundé due to the collapse of a bridge in the village Matomb. This situation interrupted the heavy traffic of the national road #4 which deserve Center, East, Adamawa, North and Far North regions, Central Africa Republic and Tchad, through Yaoundé city, then, Littoral, South West, and South regions through Douala City.

From this unwanted situation, thousands of road users reverted massively to the railway station to catchup the train that delayed the departure time to 11:15, to re-adjust vehicle totransport a maximum of passengers crowding the railway station. Unfortunately, that train finally loose his brake control on his way, which resulted into a tragic accident around 1 PM with more than 75 peoples dead and about 600 severe injured (official provisional figures).

Further, some survived passengers explained how hard it was to stay more than 4 hours later desperately awaiting the proper emergency assistance.

This situation reveal the lack of safety awareness of the population and companies in Cameroon. Some questions may come to our mind such as: Why the bridge of such an important road collapsed suddenly when many engineers are supposed to check the road infrastructure safety? Why there is no secondary road? Why should the government request the railway company to increase their transport capacity after the bridge of the road collapsed? Why should the rail way company doubled his transport capacities in less than 4 hours? Why should deciders make such mistakes? Why passengers should overloaded the train instead of waiting safely the next time to travel? Why should the first emergency plan don’t response automatically? Why should the safety not be the priority of people?

Answers of these questions will never bring back life of people and we will not stayed and say as usual “Cameroon is Cameroon”. Let us respect rules and regulations, avoid corruption that biased our daily activities and expose unsafe us.

Anyway, let us learn to do things properly to be safe and save others. Safety at Workplace of GHI is taking the responsibility to aware people about any attitude that can biased the safety of people wherever they are.

Rodrigue Fotie & Daniel Teguo.

ghi@2016