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The Kumba-Tombel high way remains shut down months after being paralyzed by clashes between the Army and Amba Boys. The once busy stretch is yet to regain its traffic verve months after it went dead.
Bikers and other business operators who used the road daily are yet to return to the said axis despite relative calm in the area. The road is a major electricity route into Kumba and a business for food and cash crops.
Deadly clashes in the area affected the supply of electricity into Kumba. Before the gun battles in the Anglophone crisis, Kumba enjoyed the supply from two ends. Since the Tombel line went dead, Kumba has been powered by electricity from the Buea-Muea axis.
The consequences has been a mixture of intermittent black out and low voltage lasting sometimes for weeks.
Beyond this, bikers who earned a living plying this road daily quickly fused themselves among those who circulate on the streets Of metropolitan Kumba. This saw a significant decline as the road became more of a dead corridor for travellers usually caught in the cross fire.
Farmers with estates that produce huge quality of food crops and cocoa have bore the brunt of losing their source of livelihood.
Food crops such as plantains have been abandoned to rot in the bushes while cocoa and banana farms along the broad are left unattended to.
Villages such as Teke, Etam , and Ebonji spread across this road corridors have suffered the consequences of separatists presence which often times end in security raids on homes and neighborhoods.
Families have lost loved ones, houses and propty destroyed. Kidnappings and killings have occurred along this road on an unacceptable scale. Traditional rulers in these villages have seen their powers eroded to extinction. Though a rough road axis riddled with muddy spots and gullies, people were however defiant in the days before the social pressure erupted.
The deadly twist of the Anglophone crisis is what suppressed human activity across the corridor. It is unlikely that the road corridor will open any time soon.
Culled from the The Post.
Nformi Sandah
