Mayor Moukondo Daniel speaks out after a year in office

In an exclusive interview on the occasion of the first year of his second mandate as mayor of the SDF-run Tiko Council, the spritely, ebullient and workaholic mayor Moukondo Daniel presented an eulogious balance-sheet and said the best was yet to come. He was interviewed by The Median’s Fako correspondent, Sarah Nkongho Ojong. Excerpts on page 3.

Celebrating one year in office as mayor of Tiko council, how do you feel?

It has been one year of direct dealings with the population, one year of constraints. But all that not withstanding it has been one year of collaboration, one year of team work with all the stakeholders that make up the Tiko municipality. In just a short time in office I think we have already done 80% of the work we set out to do this year. You can do a Vox Pop out there and see what rating the population will give to us. I should say that we feel proud our our achievements for this first one year; I think we are on the right footing.

Looking at your achievements so far, if you are asked to evaluate yourself, how will you do that and what are your general impressions of the journey this far?

Usually I don’t like to judge myself. I leave it to my collaborators, the population, the syndicates of taxi men and bike riders, business people etc to evaluate me. Their evaluation makes you to have a better picture of what you have been doing and the impact it has on the community. If I take upon myself to list out the things we have done you may look at them from the perspective of a politician talking. So I think a 30 minutes talk with the people out there, the group of people I have just named will give you a run down of our activities and achievements. However, I should say it has been great here. You know we received the Head of State here in the municipality.

Before his coming we made sure Tiko was clean and shinny; we rehabilitated all our major roads, built culverts everywhere, gave support to schools, supported the vaccination campaigns that took place here, awarded scholarships to some school children, gave benches to some schools.

We have even started doing the most dreaded Mudeka-Mongo road which is one of the worst in the municipality; we created a comfortable area for the bread vendors in Mutengene; the Tiko motor park project is progressing wonderfully; the Tiko main market is receiving finishing touches with electricity connections going on, the gates will soon be fitted. In fact in a few days from now the market will kick off. There are a lot more things we have done that I can not readily recall.

Lord Mayor how do you envisage the 4 years ahead? What are the projects in perspective?

4 years will not be the same because this first year much time was spent on seeing how to put the council in order. When we came here we met workers in different camps, some working and putting money in their private pockets, some workers were not duty conscious and it needed some time to put us all under one roof. However, the Reunification 50th Anniversary was before us and we were key players to ensure success of the event.

So, all these things will not be there in the coming years; that will give us more time to concentrate on the projects that we proposed for funding through the Feicom-medium cities decentralization program, I think if these projects notably the one on water supply and that on sand exploitation are sustained, it will go a long way to change the live of the Tiko municipality.

A message to the people of Tiko and the public at large?

The message I have for them is that we have come to work for the general interest of the people of Tiko; we are their servants and will continue to remain servants. So, when we deliberate in council sessions and come out with decisions they should help us to enforce those decisions. I also call on all other political parties that challenged us in elections that the time of electioneering has come and gone, now is time to build our municipality.

Our doors are open for any body with the interest at heart to develop our municipality. Together we can think better and make Tiko better. To inhabitants of street 1 to 7 of Tiko who were given a 2-year deadline to transform their plank structures into permanent block structures they should be reminded by this medium that the campaign is still on and those with plank structures along the road should endeavor to change them to permanent structures.

We need our town to look more beautiful. Those who have containers along the road we are calling on them to remove the containers. We want that by the end of our mandate there should be no dirty structures along the streets of Tiko municipality.

Let all of us together change our town so that when some one travels out and comes back, he or she should see a different Tiko, not the Tiko of old that we come and meet year in year out.