By Doh James Sonkey
The Minister of Public Works, Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi has given new orientations for all road and buildings stakeholders to follow in Cameroon in order to ensure better execution in 2025. He dished out the orientations after chairing a 4-day consultation with stakeholders at the Emergence Ministerial Building in Yaounde last April 14 to 17, 2025. Minister Nganou Djoumessi called for improvement in administrative, technical and financial monitoring of projects in the country in order to ensure their better execution. Some 98 infrastructure projects were examined for better anticipation.The Public Works boss stressed that, ‘‘it has shown the need for better monitoring, better sharing our experiences, better defining the expectations of the beneficiaries. It has shown the need for us to take into account a specific period of time. First of all, we have validated a strategy note on sustainable road maintenance, which specifies the chain of services. It is good, I say it again, that this note is at best popularised. Some copies are there, which will be given to all the regional delegates who are there and to all the managers of the central services. Engineers must be inspired to define the phased services, in other words, phased services must be adapted to the strategy note on sustainable road maintenance. We have also stopped a strategy of periodic or comfortable road maintenance. This chain must also be known and respected.’’The Minister said ‘‘these two strategies must be completed by the execution procedures. It seems to me that this insufficiency could explain the difficulties in respect of these two strategies. Consequently, I charge the General Inspector in charge of the technical questions to seize it so that the procedures in respect of these strategies are completed. These are the conditions of success that must be respected when we go towards the quest for performance. In a general way, it is always about roads. We can intervene effectively on a road network that we do not know.’’He explained that ‘‘we need a narrower follow-up of works by removing the conflict-related relationships. This narrow follow-up must include relationships with a certain periodicity, or at least, monthly relationships. We spoke earlier about buildings in order to observe that our role of accompaniment seems to be played out in a suitable way. I indicated at the meeting of these exchanges that there are insufficiencies on the part of some collaborators of the concentration services, which deliberately cause delays in the processing of documents. I have two cases. We have already gotten rid of one case. There is still the second one which we are going to get rid of it here. The accounts are examined at the meeting of the construction site.’’Nganou Djoumessi asked that ‘‘a ten-day period aimed at the contractualization of all the works still pending be stopped. This ten-day period will run from the next day, that is, from tomorrow.’’ The Control Mission, Public Works Engineer, Moukam Alphonse revealed to reporters that the Head Office Building of the Ministry of Public Works will be completed by June 25, 2025.
