Alarming highway carnage: Gov’t, not road users to blame!.

But in Cameroon, such careless, avoidable deaths, some even say murders, on the highway, are laissez-faire.

The cause was officially said to be the routine excessive speed, driver drowsiness and the absence of approved safety and monitoring equipment on board the vehicle that ran into a stationed truck with planks on board. 

They are excuses and common occurrences that leave no cause for alarm as the government points stained fingers elsewhere.

In a swift reaction, the Minister of Transport, Jean Ernest Massena Ngalle Bibehe, without even visiting the horrific scene of the accident, suspended Mangwa Boy transport agency, impounded its vehicles and slammed a penalty of five million FCFA on the agency owner, for illegally operating as a road transport operator.

Curiously, the driver involved in the accident who reportedly died on the spot was banned from driving for one year as if he would resurrect! The Douala-Bafoussam-Yaounde road has been nicknamed ingloriously as the “triangle of death”. 

It is one of the busiest roads in the country; and like all others on the national territory, have gendarmes, police, Mixed Control and Road Safety Brigades; from the Ministry of Transport. The controls are present on the road all year round.

But because of corruption that has become synonymous with road checkpoints, defective vehicles, overloading and some even without registration numbers, ply through.

Isn’t it the government to blame for the carnage on highways, because of corruption that allow defective vehicles and drunk drivers to bribe their way through?

Minister Jean Ernest Massena Ngalle Bibehe, in his annual report to Parliament, said there were 1,588 deaths caused by road accidents as at 2024.

According to some estimates, Cameroon records nearly 100 deaths per month. 

On November 5, 2024, the Dschang cliff disaster, a double landslide that engulfed buses and cars; killing 14 people, illustrated the vulnerability of the road to severe weather.

The World Health Organisation, WHO, data is more bloody; pointing to about “6,000 fatalities annually; substantially higher than official local police tallies.”

WHO pointed out that government data is low because “official local records often cite about 1,000 to over 1,600 directly reported fatalities,” without taking into consideration “unregistered deaths and delayed post-crash mortalities”.

It noted that the rate of accidents in Cameroon “ranks among the highest globally, driven heavily by poor infrastructure, speeding, mechanical failures, and unhelmeted or vulnerable road users.”

However, as the Transport Minister told Parliament recently, there is progress to a gradual reinforcement of road safety policies, by introducing a centralised system to manage and monitor interurban transport.

He said the system uses artificial intelligence to detect and report risky driver behaviour; with the goal of preventing accidents. 

The minister added that in 2025, innovative application identified 296,139 high-risk behaviours, including 126,502 speeding cases, 81,676 instances of drowsiness at the wheel, and 84,939 cases of distraction or phone use while driving.

During the same year, 11, 410 control operations, and three rounds of special awareness campaigns, were carried out across the country, “resulting in a compliance rate of 46% for average travel times on accident-prone routes, seatbelt usage rate of 27% among passengers, 35% decrease in alcohol and psychoactive substance use while driving. There was also 28% decrease in speeding cases, 16.5% reduction in driver fatigue and 12% reduction in overloading.”

He added that the system using artificial intelligence tool remains active and “helping to reduce accidents by 34% in 2024 compared with 2020”.

There is no doubt that road safety goes far beyond the AI initiatives to raise questions about the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Works, whose mandate is to ensure safe road infrastructure, adapted to the country's needs.

Cameroon’s national highways, not to talk of secondary roads, continue to deteriorate with potholes, damaged bridges, inadequate road signs and delays in road repairs, which all add up to make roads slaughter slaps for which the government cannot be exonerated from blame.

Although the Minister of Public Works, Emmanuel Nganou Djoumessi, claimed in the National Assembly that "the hell on Douala-Bafoussam road is not real", Hon Nourane Foster, like many road users, disagreed on the media.

"While the minister turns a blind eye in his air-conditioned office, road users are losing their lives and their vehicles on the Douala-Bafoussam road," the lawmaker said emphatically.

National Route No. 5 in Cameroon, a vital 217.8 km artery linking the economic capital, Douala to Bafoussam, has become a death trap. 

The stretch, which usually took three and a half hours to travel, now requires ten hours of ordeal; with more than a lake of potholes and craters where trucks overturn and buses get stuck.

There is also the catastrophic economic cost. 

In a letter addressed to the Minister of Public Works on August 8, 2024, the President of the Group of Cameroon Enterprises, GeCAM, Célestin Tawamba, complained of "significant delays and an increase in companies' operating costs, due in particular to the premature wear and tear of their vehicles and the accumulated consumption of fuel and spare parts," caused by bad roads.

Since his letter, the condition of roads continues to dilapidate, and human lives being lost on almost daily basis. 

At The Guardian Post, we make bold to remind government, to as a matter of extreme urgency, ameliorate road conditions, and curb corruption on the highway to ensure efficient controls of reckless drivers and defective vehicles rather than pass blames only to drivers and motorists.

This article was first published in The Guardian Post Edition No:3883 of Wednesday August 19, 2026