It has been over a hundred years urbanisation history seems to be a time-development mismatch lethargy with almost nothing added to justify the merited colonial town status of the German rule. This article probes into the genesis of this dawdling Edea development hypothesising a paradigm shift in developmental instruments to be more of externalities than internalities. Accusations take on energy production plants, the creation of the Kribi deep sea port as well as the swallowing incidence Douala over Edea. A methodology involving multi-temporal Landsat satellite images 1990, 2007 and 2017 were used to monitor the spatial growth of Edea. These were complemented with field survey through interviews and observations to denote the spatio-temporal dynamics. Some 108 questionnaire were administered to appreciate stakeholder perception and knowledge of urban development. Findings portray that Edea witnessed a crawling expansion of built-up space from 0.56% in 1990 to 3.01% in 2019 with a timid population increase from 25,398 inhabitants in 1987 to 66,581 in 2005 and 78,601 inhabitants 2019. This paper suggests that the creation of spill over companies in Edea from overwhelming Douala and Kribi could well give the development Edea its historical stand.