Limbe City Council grappling to save the City of floods

As the rainy season lingers the population of the city of Limbe is once more wrestling with the fears that flood incidents yearly visit upon them.

The Government Delegate to the City Council, Andrew Motanga Mojimba, is voicing worries over those leaving in flood-prone areas of the municipality and is grappling with strategies on how to manage the situation.

While consoling the victims of the recent flood incident, Andrew Mojimba reminded them that the solution to floods does not lie in the hands of the city council alone. Nonetheless, he told the population to rest assured that his administration is doing everything possible to minimize floods in the city.

Speaking to the Cameroon Journal, the Government Delegate partly blamed the recurrent situation to the poor behavior of some city dwellers whom he said, are in the habit of ignoring norms for proper disposal of refuse.

The Delegate grumbled that, “even with existing public trash cans, some still choose to empty their household refuse in running streams and gutters. The refuse block the rain water from flowing into proper drainage and there is nothing else to register than flood.” He said.

He equally expressed concern over people erecting buildings haphazardly on water ways, which he said deflect the flow of water from its proper channels.

Limbe, which is considered the cleanest City in the country, the Gov’t Delegate said will be launching the “Cleanest Quarter” contest as an added incentive to curb the situation and winners will earn a handsome reward from the city council.

Besides the floods, Limbe also has to deal with aging infrastructure, unemployment, poverty, lack of portable water, urban migration and skills shortage in the municipality.

In a related story, the Limbe city council made an impressive stride in its 2013 revenue collection.

The revelation was made by the Limbe City boss during the first ordinary session of the council summoned to examine and adopt the 2013 administrative, management and stores account.

Speaking at the session, the city boss described the year 2013 as a relatively positive year in terms of realizations. During the year, he said, the city council recorded 101.55% as revenue recovered, “ a milestone achievement considering the very difficult moments we had in 2012," he said.

Breaking down the revenue, he said, of the FCFA 5,589,791,068 recovered, FCFA 2,638,747 was brought forward as effective realization at the 2013 fiscal year as reserves earmarked for operations.

The Government Delegate said, FCFA 2,367,429,749 was gotten as proceeds from business licenses, while FCFA 2,868,810,631 came from council additional taxes.

FCFA 186,816,657 came in as proceeds from management of land and services, proceeds from miscellaneous gains and sunder revenue, while common decentralization recurrent fund amounted to FCFA 6,867,900.

Motanga, however, said nothing was budgeted for investment revenue. In the area of expenditure, the city council estimated FCFA 5,506,867, 900 with FCFA 6,867,900 of this amount being additional budget voted.

He said, FCFA 5,345,673,883 was actually spent thus giving a percentage of 97.07%.

The city’s expenditure for the given period was broken down as follows -FCFA 47,128,641 spent on street lights. FCFA 63,923,348 was spent on public stand taps, FCFA 59,967,125 for youth empowerment such as jobs for the youth and holiday jobs for students.

FCFA 38,838,340 on subsidies to school, FCFA 374, 996,051 on personnel expenses, FCFA 230,946,335 on taxes, FCFA 69,982,519 on maintenance of water and electricity network, FCFA 98,189,180 on maintenance of earth roads and FCFA 139,381,261 on studies for projects.

FCFA 145,164,606 was spent on development of gardens and spaces and the beautification of the city for the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Reunification, FCFA 29,899,749 on the purchase of transport equipment, FCFA 24,717,694 for the purchase of computers, office equipment and furniture; FCFA 892,595,629 spent to complete the payment of the tarring of the Cassava Farms-Limpsum road and the Taxation-Crystal Gardens road, passing through the Limbe central police station.

FCFA 109,734,285 on household refuse disposal equipment and FCFA 438,348,705 on construction of other council buildings.

Of the total revenue of FCFA 5,859,791,068, total expenditure stood at FCFA 5, 345, 637, 883, indicating a savings of FCFA 244,117,185, which was carried forward to 2014 as reserves earmarked for overheads.

The Senior Divisional Officer for Fako, Zang III, though he said he shared in the council’s effort to make Limbe a better city, challenged the Limbe city council boss to fine tune their revenue collection strategy and also exploit other revenue sources.

He urged the Government Delegate to create a commission to probe into the issue of building permits.