Cameroon Has Let 79 Train Victims Wait Ten Years for Justice

Seventy-nine people boarded a train in Cameroon and never got off. On October 22, 2016, a Camrail intercity train on the Yaoundé-Douala line derailed near Eseka, in the Centre Region. It was the worst railway disaster in the country's history. Hundreds more were injured, some for life. Ten years later, the people who buried their children, parents, and spouses are still asking the same question: who will answer for this?

Let us be precise about what that question means. It does not mean asking whether a tragedy happened. It happened. It means asking why a country that moves its elites by air and its cement by road allowed a passenger train to become a death trap, and why the people responsible have not paid a price anyone can see.

The derailment was not an act of God. Investigations and the reporting that followed pointed to familiar failures: an overloaded train, questions about speed on a curve, and a rail network that had been neglected for years. Overcrowding is what happens when a country runs a transport service it cannot afford to maintain and cannot be bothered to police. Every passenger who squeezed into those carriages was paying for a system that treated their lives as acceptable losses.

The line was operated by Camrail, a concessionaire majority-owned by Bolloré Africa Logistics, the African arm of the French conglomerate Bolloré. This is the kind of arrangement that gets sold to African governments as modernization. A foreign operator takes on infrastructure, promises investment and efficiency, and collects revenue over decades. But a concession is a contract, and contracts come with obligations: safety standards, maintenance schedules, inspection regimes, and liability when things go wrong. When a concession fails at that level, the question is not only what the operator did. It is what the state, as regulator and as guarantor of public safety, allowed it to do.

So ask the government the uncomfortable questions. Who approved the safety oversight? Who inspected the rolling stock and the track? Who decided that the Yaoundé-Douala line was fit for passengers? Where are the published findings that would let Cameroonians check the answers for themselves? A transparent state would have released its full accident report, named the failures, and prosecuted them. Instead, the families have been left to navigate a justice system that moves slower than the trains ever did.

This is the pattern. Across the continent, we see the same shape of failure. A government signs away critical infrastructure to foreign operators, often with weak public oversight, and when citizens die the accountability chain dissolves into lawyers, delays, and quiet settlements. Cameroon has been governed by one man, Paul Biya, since 1982. Four decades in power should be enough time to build a railway that does not kill its passengers. Instead, the country has built a political system where the powerful are rarely required to answer for anything, and the poor are expected to accept their dead as the cost of getting to work.

And we must be honest about who benefits from that silence. Concessionaires keep their contracts. Officials keep their posts. Investors keep their returns. The people who bleed are the market traders, schoolchildren, and laborers who had no other way to travel. When justice is delayed for a decade, it is not neutral. It is a decision, made repeatedly, that some lives carry less weight than others.

There is a better way, and Africa has already shown it. Botswana built one of the continent's most respected governance records by insisting on transparent institutions, professional public service, and independent oversight of public resources. Mauritius, with a strong rule-of-law tradition and independent courts, has attracted investment precisely because contracts are enforced and regulators are not for sale. These are not perfect countries. But they understand something Cameroon has refused to accept: markets and private capital are welcome, and they work best inside rules that protect citizens first.

Here is what Cameroon must do. Publish the complete findings of the Eseka investigation, in French and English, without redaction. Establish an independent railway safety authority with statutory power to inspect, sanction, and shut down unsafe operations, funded and staffed without ministerial interference. Review every rail concession for safety obligations, maintenance commitments, and liability clauses, and make the contracts public. Create a victims' compensation fund that pays out on fixed timelines, not on the whims of negotiation. And give the independent judiciary the mandate and the resources to try the operators and officials who failed these passengers. If the state cannot do this, the international community should press for it, but the primary duty is Cameroonian.

The civil society organizations, unions, and bar associations of Cameroon have a role here too. Keep the Eseka file open in public view. Track every court date. Document every delay. Demand that parliamentarians ask the transport minister, in writing, what has been done in ten years. The private sector should understand that a railway where passengers die without accountability is bad for business, bad for investors, and bad for the country's reputation. Good governance is not charity. It is the foundation of any economy worth building.

And citizens must demand more than sympathy. Demand a date. Demand a name. Demand a published report. Demand a court verdict you can read. When a leader gives a speech about development, ask him how many families from Eseka have been compensated. When a foreign company talks about partnership, ask it who inspected the track.

Seventy-nine people did not die so that a ten-year silence could be the official response. Their families deserve more than a commemoration. They deserve the truth, the law, and the consequences that should have arrived in 2016. Cameroon, the question is no longer whether you know what happened at Eseka. The question is whether you have the courage to say who is responsible, and to make them answer for it.

Based on reporting by FRANCE24