Editorial: Cameroon needs order on highways!.

“The SDO is the supervisory authority in the Division. Any activity or control in the Division, by the Municipal Police, must have clearance from the SDO. The Municipal Police should not exercise violence of any form on road users, traders or citizens in our towns,” he warned.

Atanga Nji instructed mayors to henceforth recruit elements of the Municipal Police in their respective councils, strictly on the basis of good conduct, morality and sound training.

“The mayors must put in place proper mechanisms to control the activities of the municipal police in order to avoid the abuse of power, extortion of funds from traders or motorbike riders,” he instructed.

“I urge motorbike riders and the Municipal Police to be law-abiding, so that we can collectively protect people and their properties, which remain the cardinal point in the work of administrative authorities,” he added.

Well said, Mr Minister! But this is not the first time fatal accidents have occurred on checkpoints nationwide, mounted by Municipal Police agents, gendarmes or police officers.

Hardly, offenders of road safety regulations are taken to court. Yet, it is very common to see them observing vehicles without even matriculation numbers, worn tyres, overloading and excessive speeding.

Like the minister warned, motorists, traders and bikers should not be extorted. But that is what they go through. There have even been occasions where in order to dodge the checks, some stubborn drivers have gotten involved in accidents.

There is no qualm that the roles of the police, gendarmes, and the Municipal Police are well defined so as not to overlap each other and cause confusion.

The police are said to control traffic within the towns and cities while gendarmes and its sister wing of Routier, do controls on the highways. But it is common to find all types of control even within 50 metres of each other! 

Take the case of Mutengene, for instance; a Control by Routiers is permanently stationed in front of the Presbyterian Church at Tiko Road. Some 30 metres from it by the Three Corner is also a police control and almost opposite by the abandoned filling station is a mixed control, while by the Mutengene Market on the Buea Road is that of the Municipal Police!

It is not only in Mutengene where a cluster of such controls exist. They are almost the same elsewhere, especially in the North West and South West Regions.

Screaming headlines like "Taxi drivers decry numerous checkpoints, extortion in Bamenda-Bambili Road ", "Bamenda-Ekok Road: Drivers Request dismantling of illegal checkpoints", "Cameroon clears security checks after truckers protest…" are legion in the media.

Checkpoints in theory are supposed to ensure safety and security on the highways, but there is incontrovertible evidence that many of them have become a problem, especially those of council police.

The decree creating Municipal Police does not empower them to mount checkpoints on the highways, but they do it even to the point of using iron spikes to force vehicles to stop.

Security forces are not supposed to fire at vehicles that refuse to stop when flagged down. 

However, there have been cases where they do that, and in the process, even killing innocent passengers.

The Yaounde incident attracted the attention of the minister just because being in the capital, the media zoomed in on it. If it were in the rural area, it would just have been written off as an unavoidable accident on the road.

While The Guardian Post calls on the government to prosecute those who, through commission or omission, caused the death of the biker and his passenger, it should also drastically reduce the number of checkpoints, especially in the North West and South West Regions.

Municipal Police should be barred from highway controls, which of course, is not in the decree creating it so as to eschew the type of avoidable deaths and protests that occurred in Yaounde last week.