'We are doing our best to ensure efficient water supply'

With water being one of life’s most cherished commodities, the Lord Mayor of the Limbe II Council, has stated that they are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that there's adequate supply of water within the municipality, so as to effectively register the locality as “New Limbe”, as it is fondly called.

In a chat with The SUN at his office recently, Duncan Molindo explained the need for the creation of more water networks within the municipality, and some of the projects already in progress.

“We all know that water is life and a population cannot live without water, thus it is one of the priority projects we are dealing with, in our municipality, because of the growing population which has increased from 22,000 to 25,000 because of the extension of SONARA and also the Shipyard project”.

The mayor said that they have been engaged in water projects since 2011. “We started first with the Mokunda Water project, a village which is about 4KM from the municipality, where the inhabitants had been living for over 30 years without a drop of water flowing from their taps.

We took it upon ourselves to go in for a loan from FEICOM where we had FCFA 135 million. We have installed water in this village successfully”.

Also, mayor Molindo explained that at their headquarters, Mokundange, “We also acquired another loan of almost FCFA 160 million, where water is now installed in the village and the people are very happy”.

Another loan from African Development Bank, ADB, of FCFA 140 million the mayor explained has been recently acquired and it is being used to extend water from the catchment of Mokunda which is at Bwando, to put up a reservoir tank around Krata which will distribute water to the nearby villages of Bota-land lay-out, Sokolo, Mokindi and may be up to Ngeme village.

“We are not sleeping, we are trying our best to satisfy our population with this very important resource” he said.

According to Mayor Molindo, work on the project is ongoing and is about 35% done.

On whether the council gets financial help elsewhere to support these projects apart from loans, the Limbe II Council boss stated, “These are major projects and for now, we don’t have partners who can assist us in financing, so we depend much on loans, but we’ve also had money from the State of recent, FCFA 134 million for the Kie Water Project which is also in the pipeline.

We did the studies, sent the documents to Yaounde and it has been approved. If we have reservoir in Kie, it will distribute water to most of our villages within the municipality”, he explained.

For public stand taps, the mayor explained that they are aware of its necessity, “We need to make a study, it is one of our concerns because you cannot have a place without public taps, because even deranged people need water and do get it mainly from these taps".

In Mokundange, we have about 25 public stand taps and the Mokunda project which will touch other villages to give way to the creation of about 15 stand taps”.