Edison Fru Ndi's Dreamland Connect defies all odds to bring Oshie out of prolonged darkness with PPRD electricity project

Edison Fru Ndi's Dreamland Connect Brings Psalms 119:105 Alive in Oshie as Electricity Finally Get Extended After Years of Darkness 

Colbert Gwain | The Muteff Factor 

There are some Bible verses one only understands fully after living their opposite. In Muteff, I learnt early that darkness could be more than the disappearance of the sun. When night fell over the hills, children bent over schoolbooks under the feeble flame of kerosene lamps while mothers fed fuel wood into fires whose smoke competed with the little light they produced. It was against such a reality that Psalm 119:105 seemed almost written: “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path."

To move from one household or compound to another at night in Muteff, one needed a kerosene lamp to light his/her steps. A lamp, in that ancient world, did not illuminate the entire journey. It simply gave the traveller enough light to take the next step and it was common for one to stumble and fall if the lamp went off.

For years, Oshie village in Momo Division of Cameroon's North West Region has been waiting for that next step. While electricity, water and good roads are taken for granted in many communities, Oshie has had to endure their absence as a daily reality. Darkness became particularly cruel when it followed children home from school.

Students preparing homework and examinations had little choice but to study under kerosene lamps or beside fuel-wood fires. The poor illumination and smoke made learning an ordeal rather than an opportunity. Villagers have associated the prolonged exposure with eye problems, deformities and other illnesses, while the absence of electricity has continued to constrain education, household activities and economic enterprise.

That sad reality is now a thing of the past. Oshie now is beginning to glow because through the Presidential Plan for the Reconstruction and Development of the North West and South West Regions (PPRD), electricity has been provided and extended to the village, with the project realized by Dreamland Connect PLC. But the story behind the light is almost as important as the light itself.

Edison Fru Ndi, CEO of Dreamland Connect PLC, had to pursue the project under exceptionally difficult conditions. Mounting insecurity had already forced previous, fair-weather contractors to abandon the undertaking. Yet Fru Ndi's attachment to the North West and his determination to contribute to its recovery compelled him to keep going where others had withdrawn.

The Oshie project consequently joins a growing list of Dreamland Connect interventions in the North West, including reconstruction and rehabilitation initiatives intended to restore public infrastructure and community life in a region battered by years of conflict.

This is why the new electricity connection should not be viewed merely as another infrastructure project.

It is a small but significant piece of a much bigger puzzle: returning normalcy to a region where conflict has made abnormality the norm.

The PPRD was conceived to help rebuild lives, infrastructure and confidence in the North West and South West. Bringing electricity to communities such as Oshie gives that promise a tangible face. It also complements the ongoing Communal Dialogues called for by the Head of State, because dialogue becomes more meaningful when communities can see concrete evidence that recovery is possible. And such projects cannot be done satisfactorily realized without determined and well-meaning contractors like Edison Fru Ndi.

For a child in Oshie, the meaning may be much simpler because he or she will open a textbook after sunset and actually see the words. It would also mean preparing for an examination without fighting a smoky flame. It means a mother no longer worrying that the light helping her child study may itself be damaging the child's eyes.  And for a village that has lived for years without what others consider ordinary, it means something even more profound: the feeling that it has not been forgotten. 

Perhaps that is the most fitting way to read Psalm 119:105 today: God's Word is a lamp for the feet and a light for the path. It had to take Edison Fru Ndi's Dreamland Connect to transform these Psalms into concrete reality in today's world.

For the people of Oshie, after years of darkness, the physical lamps have finally come on—and with them, the possibility of a brighter journey ahead.