“There are forces at work to frustrate my mandate”

Patrick Esunge Ekema

- Patrick Esunge Ekema, mayor of Buea
In an exclusive interview with CRTV-radio, the mayor of Buea, Patrick Ekema Esunge said he is having serious headaches running the municipality because of piles of unpaid bills that were left by his predecessor(s) and manoeuvres by some persons who only want to see him fail in the mandate that he won under very laborious conditions. The Median recorded and transcribed the very long interview for your reading pleasure. Excerpts.
    Which are some of the Reunification infrastructures that have been handed over to the council to manage?
    So far the ministry of energy has formally handed over the street lights to the Buea council. Though the reception of the contract did not involve the council; we only saw it on paper being handed over to the council with a huge debt burden on street lighting: Of course we wrote back to the competent authorities protesting that if the project has to be handed back to the council it should be formerly done; it should respect laid down procedure. Normal procedure requires that a commission be put in place to receive the job, this, after ensuring that the prescribed guarantee period for the job expired with the lights still in good condition. This was not done. We only received a letter from the regional delegate of water and energy instructing the council to take charge of the overhead costs. This is embarrassing especially when you imagine that the contract was not conceived by the council. How do you bankroll the running cost of a project that you never conceived or participated in its conception? It will be difficult for the council to so easily cough out the 110m FCFA that was presented to us as bill street lighting. We needed at least to evaluate the conditions of the street lights at the time of the hand over. It may interest you to know that as at September last year most of the street lights had been vandalized especially those from Mile 17 up to Molyko; the cables had been taken away, bulbs and other gadgets vandalized. As for the reunification monument, we had written to the minister of culture, requesting that the monument be handed to the council for proper management. That has not been done. Today when you go around the place, you find it littered dirt; you find people moving in and out without any order. If handed to us, we plan to erect a metal fence to protect the monument. We also plan to construct a small relaxation point around the monument where with a symbolic amount you can have access to the monument and also relax yourself. In this way we thought that monument would be self sustaining. So we are still waiting for Yaounde to respond. As for the roads, most of them, especially the peripheral roads are already degraded even though the guarantee period has not expired.  The effects of the last rainy season were telling on the roads. But at our level we have always ensured that the shoulders of the roads are kept clean. The grandstand too is up to date, though it has not yet been handed over to the council.

    You talked about a bill that was handed over to the council along with the street lights that were put up during the Reunification Anniversary. The bill spans over which period, the period before the anniversary or after the anniversary?
    The mandate we are running at the council is a little bit punitive. People may wonder why I say punitive. It is punitive because all the bills owed by the council to utility companies, taxation, CNPS etc that have accumulated for a period of 10 years and above were piled and are only resurfacing during our mandate. Even bills owed to contractors. Last year we settled debts owed to contractors to the tune of 50m FCFA. The bills mentioned on street lighting do not span between the 50th anniversary and January 2015, they date as far back as 2010. The water bills that were presented to us in the month of December 2014 stretch as far back as 1996. I keep wondering and asking my self questions as to what provoked these bills to be accumulated only to resurface during this mandate.
    In other words you are insinuating that there is a major problem that you inherited from your predecessor(s)?
    I am not saying it is a problem as such because there is continuity in administration. But the fact that there’s continuity in administration and all accumulated debts owed by the council are brought during my first year of office sounds a little embarrassing. I don’t want to attribute it to any individual. But I think there are some forces bringing about this influx of unpaid bills.
    It sounds paradoxical that you should be complaining whereas the man on the street sees you as a blessed mayor who took over when almost all the projects were done..
    May be I am blessed because of the époque. But because I came in when these projects have been done some people are trying to create obstacles for me just so that the man on the street should see me as incompetent to manage the municipality and the projects that I came and met. But you should also know that there projects that the Buea people want me to realize, projects that were not in the envelope of the Reunification Anniversary, projects which we promised to populations during our election campaigns and which we have been tackling and which we will keep on tackling and possibly complete before the expiry of our mandate. But I say it again that it is not normal that bills that were consumed during previous mandates be pushed into the council only during our mandate. You should recall that our accession to this mandate was highly contested; we understand why these bills are being pushed for us to settle. It is to make it difficult for us to satisfy the many demands of the population and in this way render us unpopular; it is a way of frustrating our mandate. We are conscious of this and have adopted strategies to overcome these childish manoeuvres.
    But apart from the debts that you inherited, you also inherited assets, and economist say that when you inherit assets you should be able to take charge of the liabilities.
    The structure that now houses the council was constructed by FEICOM. I was the 1st deputy mayor during that mandate. I inherited the bill for that debt owed to FEICOM and I am the one paying the loan that was given the council by FEICOM. I started paying the loan and I have a letter of congratulation from the General Manager of FEICOM for having settled the loan successfully for the 1st year. We have already started settling that for the 2nd year and we will go on paying until the loan is paid completely.
    You talk about accumulated bills that are on your table. No one will expect that you pay all the bills at once. Can you not meet with the companies concerned and work out a consensus schedule for the payment of the bills?
    For bills that accrued on services rendered to the council by contractors we have letters which preceding Governors – the supervisory authority wrote to my predecessors to settle those bills. Of course they were adamant, and because we thought that we should be more humane we formulated a program for the payment of these bills. I will cite the example of one enterprise which had a bill of 14 million FCFA; as at now we have paid 12 millions. We agreed with the enterprise that we will pay piecemeal that is, 1 million every month. For the whole of last year we paid up 12 million. By February we would have cleared the remaining amount. There are several of such situations and all have been programmed. We will clear these debts according to the programs we have agreed with the companies concerned. For bills that emanated from deductions from salaries, it is a little difficult and tricky. We have set up a commission to examine the situation because we want to avoid a situation of double payment. Preliminary findings indicate that these amounts were truly deducted from the salaries of council staff but were never paid to the relevant institutions – Taxation, CNPS and others. And if the deductions were made and the moneys collected but not paid to these institutions then the moneys should be lying some where. Definitely it is difficult for us to remove money from the council coffers to pay taxes that had already been deducted and the amounts collected.