Minister Ketcha Courtès urges waste management companies to give Yaounde facelift.

The member of government gave the instructions during a meeting with officials of Hygiene and Sanitation Company better known by its French acronym HYSCAM. The minister’s close collaborators also attended the meeting. 

Minister Ketcha Courtès said the meeting seeks to launch a week operation which will be aimed at giving the city of Yaounde back a semblance of a capity city. 

The operation, the minister said, will continue to the end of 2024 with the aim of fighting against all forms of diseases caused by poor waste management.

According to the member of government, after a series of tours around the town, they discovered heaps of rubbish have almost colonised every part of the town.  

She said it is with the disturbing observation that she summoned the companies concerned of waste management so as to better understand why waste is littered in all streets and in most areas, not far from health facilities, schools and hotels. 

Minister Ketcha Courtès regretted that in almost all the main roads of Yaounde, there is trash littered. The situation, she added, is worrying as “Cameroon is one of the most visited countries in the Central African sub-region”. 

She partially blamed the situation on the expiration of the contracts of the waste management company some seven months back. The old contracts, she said, expired on December 31, 2023. 

Added to the lack of contract, Minister Ketcha Courtès stated that the non-payment of services and the absence of project management can equally be blamed for the trash. 

“…it must be said that the government had been willing to open up this sector to competition, so that the population could benefit from the spin-offs of this competition,” she explained.

Through what she described as “healthy competition”, the minister said, cost of managing waste in the town could be reduced “by improving the quality and performance of this basic service, for the health and safety of the local population”. 

She regretted that despite the fact that a new service provider was brought it, the company had some financial, material and technical resources to deliver the expected results. 

Minister Ketcha Courtès equally instructed her close collaborators and focal points in the region to set up working groups so together they can ensure Yaounde gets a facelift.

“Once the streets are clean, we will instruct mayors to put up signs so that people don't dump their garbage along the streets again but instead wait with their garbage cans in their homes until the collection trucks pass by,” she instructed. 

To achieve this, she made known plans to put in place truck routes that will pass in various neighbourhoods to collect the trash. 

She equally tasked the forces of law and order and the control brigade to carry out routine checks on the truck route plans of the various companies and service providers involved, to ensure that the routes have been respected and that the garbage has been removed. 

This story was first published in The Guardian Post issue N0:3178 of Wednesday July 24, 2024