Kumba City Stinks!
For many, the first experience of Kumba City, aka K-Town, in Meme Division of the South West Region is a sprawling junction of hamlets and an appalling stink. The nose-tingling, spit-churning stench wafts from the manholes, gutters, streams and leaves the hot humid air smelling fresh as a soak-away tank.
By Azore Opio
On really bad days, the foul odour hits visitors and residents alike as they step off motor taxis and taxi cabs and follows them along as they go about their businesses. Add dust and hot air to the rancid smell and it can overpower a pleasant chat along the newly paved Buea Road-Town Green street of the city's downtown, or interrupt an outdoor goat pepper soup meal in the same neighbourhood.
Robert Ngalim, a visitor from the coast who arrived in Kumba City one recent afternoon, detected a foul smell while waiting for his bags.
"What is that horrible smell?" he asked someone standing close to him, "this is no way to welcome visitors."
The stink problem is a result of poorly managed domestic waste and the city’s trash in a sprawling metropolis whose population outgrew its infrastructure decades ago.
Authorities have not sought to find a solution.
K-Town residents agree that the main source of the rotten air that blows into some areas of Kumba City intermittently is from an overwhelmed sewage system and polluted uncovered drainages.
The city's streams have to accommodate sewage and the population is constantly intoxicated with the metropolitan stink.
To make matters worse, the city streets are have loosely covered gutters that act as traps for motorists.
"What is happening is that nobody seems to care," Patrick Mbaku, a K-Town resident said.
Kumba City residents note that the stink problem comes and goes. And for such a huge metropolis where boiling dust from unpaved roads and exhaust smoke from thousands of motorcycles and cars fume along many streets, things could be worse.
"There are smells in the city, bad smells and they make life very miserable," said Etuge Emmanuel, a teacher at the PHS Kumba.
