Interesting. However, it raises the question -- why wait for the government to fix the road? Why don't the people band together and fill the potholes themselves?
They must be drinking the same kind of water they drink in NO.
Consider the costs and benefits of joining in on a voluntary road repair project. Imagine yourself as an average Cameroonian. Someone comes along and asks you to join with others in repairing the road in your town. If you join in, and the road is repaired, you are rewarded with easier travel. In an indirect way, you will also derive some benefit from the increased commerce in your town that results from the improved road.
But what are the costs? Well, for a day or two you'll lose the wages at your job, or perhaps the food you might find from scavenging or gardening, while you work on the road. For a poor Cameroonian, that might be a dangerous proposition. Even if you can get by without a few days wages, the benefits derived from the repaired road might not make up for it. If you get paid $4 dollars a day, but could only expect to receive an overall benefit of $2 in the decreased travel time and increased opportunity from the road, it wouldn't make much sense for you to join in on the project.
Also worth considering is that if enough people join in on the effort, but you don't, you still get to benefit from the road without contributing anything. Or in the reverse situation, if you're the only one out there filling in potholes, the road still won't be repaired and you've lost a few days wages. That's going to make you- and everyone else- less likely to join.
Those are just the economic disincentives. You also have to consider the political angle. Suppose a group did form and was making progress on repairing the road. A wealthy local contractor with political connections was expecting to get his hands on some tax dollars by "repairing" the road in a year or so, when the government finally got around to addressing the problem. He sees your group out there about to take care of the problem on your own. I suspect he might have a conversation with the police about getting rid of all you pesky people with shovels and picks, out there blocking the traffic on the road.
Of course, you can't always reduce costs and benefits to something like wages. Otherwise, we wouldn't see a lot of the volunteer work that is done in our own country. Sometimes people find benefit in helping others, or in getting things done, and that benefit outweighs material considerations. I think people are a lot more likely to favor non-material benefits when the threat of starvation isn't a real and constant threat, however.