While government officials in Bamenda were caught up in the excitement of Prime Minister Joseph Dion Ngute’s recent visit, Secondary Education Minister Prof. Nalova Lyonga took a sharply contrasting tone, as she felt embarrassed over the city’s deplorable roads.
Addressing dignitaries, including the Prime Minister, at the Bamenda Congress Hall on Saturday, Prof. Nalova strongly criticized the state of roads in a city President Paul Biya has once described as his “second home.”
“I have to start by saying that I’m completely, completely just shocked by the state of the roads in Bamenda,” she said.
The no-nonsense minister called on government officials to avoid pacifying the population with high-handed promises that they cannot fulfill.
“And I think what is wrong with roads… I will say let us not make promises which we cannot fulfill. Let us make a promise short, even for one month, two months, you do what you said, and the population is going to see that you have done just what you could do within that period. Let’s not make some high-faluting points and then it turns out that we cannot,” she said.
Part of PM Delegation
Prof. Nalova was among senior officials who accompanied PM Dion Ngute on a three-day working visit to Bamenda to assess the progress of the Presidential Plan for the Reconstruction and Development of the North West and South West Regions (PPRD-NW/SW).
One component of the plan includes rehabilitating Bamenda’s crumbling road network, a project that has seen repeated delays.
During his visit, the Prime Minister assured the population of “the imminent start of rehabilitation works on the Bamenda city roads.”
While the pledge sounded hopeful, residents remain sceptical after years of unfulfilled promises.
Ironical Situation?
However, considering the deepening crisis in the education sector under her own stewardship, Prof. Nalova Lyonga’s outrage over Bamenda’s crumbling roads appears petty. Across the North West region and beyond, secondary schools are grappling with chronic teacher shortages, decaying infrastructure, insecurity, and poor learning conditions—issues that have festered during her tenure with little sign of coherent reform.
Classrooms remain dilapidated, students lack basic textbooks, and many rural schools operate without electricity or functioning toilets. If Bamenda’s roads symbolise neglect, then the state of secondary education mirrors a systemic collapse—one that has unfolded squarely under the watch of the very minister who now rails against dysfunction in another sector. Her criticism, while justified, exposes a troubling irony. She is part of the same system that fails people on multiple fronts.
That however, does not take away from onus of her criticism.
For several years, Bamenda has suffered severely from deteriorating roads, with most intra-city routes eroded and riddled with potholes, standing water, and collapsed drainage systems.
Last year, the World Bank approved FCFA 30 billion for road reconstruction in Bamenda, including an urban crossing project expected to give the city a long-overdue facelift.
However, implementation is yet to start.
