Cameroon: Ebune Confiance Urges SW Elites to Champion Course for Peace & Development

By Synthia Lateu

BUEA, May 15, 2023 – Confiance Ebune Balungeli, special envoy to the South West peace and development forum says elites in the region should chat a course for peace and development of the region and for them to be the master of the region's destiny.

The Director of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet was speaking in Buea, capital of the South West region of Cameroon during the maiden South West Peace and Development forum that unfolded from May 12 to May 13, 2023.

The peace and development forum was a platform where South West stakeholders in different social, political, and economic spheres converged to discuss ways for peace and development in the region. It is also one of the outcomes of the 2019 Major National Dialogue.

Ebune Confiance said South Westerners needed not to wait for anyone to work out peace and development in their region but to take full responsibility. Referring to the 2019 special status granted to the two English regions, he said: “The head of state has given the status but we have to do the content of the status."

The Prime Minister's representative expressed hope that the different projects launched in the region will bring proper development. He called on those holding arms to drop them and give peace a chance.

For the past six years, the South West and North West Regions have seen their economies dwindle due to the ongoing violence. Separatists in these two regions want to create a breakaway state they call Ambazonia, separate from Cameroon's French-speaking majority. The U.N. says the rebel conflict has killed more than 3,300 people and displaced more than a half-million since fighting broke out in 2017.

Convened by the South West Regional Assembly, one of the outcomes of the Major National Dialogue, the Southwest Peace and development forum brought together close to 1,000 delegates from the Region's six Divisions to chart ways forward for peace and development in the region.

Concerns about the different sectors including, education, economics, agriculture, health energy and water alongside others to strategize and enhance peace and development in the region were tabled by the delegates.

Despite having realized developmental projects, the SW is still lagging in several domains. The delegates regretted the limited access to health facilities in the region and urged the South West regional assembly to revive abandoned district hospitals while calling on the government to assist the health authorities in the specialization of the six divisions in the medical domain.

Agriculture Needs Modernization

The South West region, it was noted, needed to pay more attention to the provision of farm-to-market roads and rural electrification. With a population of over 1,5 million inhabitants, the SW region is enriched with resources including petroleum, cocoa, coffee, rubber, tea, and banana. Poor access to farm-to-market roads impedes the exploitation of the raw materials endowed in the region.

Prof Funge Beatrice, a specialist in Biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and toxicology, lauded the efforts put in place to converge and sort ways out for peace and development in the region. She suggested that forgiveness between parents and children in the region is the way to go and said there is a need for arms to be dropped, to look at the development of the region for peace and development.

According to Funge Beatrice, some important aspects were given less attention during the two-day talks. She said: "One major thing they did not emphasize was water because you cannot talk about agriculture when you don't have water. You cannot talk about energy when you don't have water...”

“There was a recommendation that we should dig boreholes. Now, do we dig boreholes haphazardly? Have we studied the hydrology of our region?... Another aspect that I did not hear them talk about is that there are basic developmental projects that could have come up and I look at it critically on our coastline,” she said.

Funge Beatrice fears that in some time to come, fishes may all disappear from the water. “We have the longest coastline. What are we doing with it? Is it only to go and harvest fish? And even if it is to go and harvest the fish like it was said in the domain of agriculture, we have polluted that system. Go to Limbe you will see all the plastics...”