This mammoth project in some bit brings to mind the saga of the Israelites on exodus from Egypt in the Bible. We are told about the manna that fell down from heaven to the hungry and desperate Israelites in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. The Chad-Cameroon Pipeline project like wise could be just another kind of manna to both countries that would sustain them through the wilderness of poverty. Given that they are all poverty-stricken, and members of the heavily indebted countries (Chad topping the league in poverty), the project could be a stepping stone to their poverty-alleviation strategies. Unfortunately, in as much as we welcome the project and look up to it with greater expectations, it goes not without its shortcomings. The negative trends of the project would certainly result to serious consequences in the near feature if the right measures are not taken early enough.
According to the World Bank, at the end of the second quarter of 2002, 11,200 workers had been employed by the project. Of this number, about 87% were nationals of Chad and Cameroon; 4,090 from Chad and 5,645 from Cameroon. About 60% of these workers were employed in skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Another 5% were in supervisory positions. Wage payments to Cameroonian and Chadian workers amounted to nearly $6 million and over $4.7 million, respectively.
Statistics as such coupled with its huge economic returns gives the project the grandeur it deserves as a real development project. However, the negative landmarks registered by the ongoing project have made it a necessary evil to both countries. Along the zones covered by the project and where the construction works are actually taking place, the workers earn reasonable salary packages and so there is an extraordinary high spending power. The standard of living is far less than proportionate to the skyrocketing cost of living. For example, the same plate of food that was bought at about 500Fcfa (Less than US$1) before the project began is today sold at 2,000Fcfa (about US$3.5). This holds true for other commodities and basic daily needs that have to be obtained from the local traders who have flooded the area at cut-throat prices thus putting in place an immeasurable but dangerous inflation and making life a little hell especially for the local inhabitants.
This would have been manageable if these troubles ended there. But of all the negative effects moving hand-in-glove with this giant project, the Presence, prevalence, spread and aftermath of HIV/AIDS is certainly the most unwelcoming news and bad kola nuts to chew. HIV/AIDS is unquestionably present and registering a landslide victory in claiming the lives of both workers and the local inhabitants.
It’s a real pathetic situation. Outside the huge number of workers that have come from all ends of the earth (Africa, America, Europe and Asia) to work in the project, there has been an ongoing influx of other migrants into the zone. These people live in the small villages along the stretch of the project thus tremendously swelling the population of these villages. These people coming mostly from Africa notably Central African Republic, the Congo Basin and other areas of Northern Chad and Southern Cameroon end up unemployed. Some resort to small-scale retail business. The very bad ones, resort to stealing and prostitution to meet up with the ever-increasing cost of living. The most dangerous waves of migration into this zone have been that of prostitutes. Most of the women who came in to seek employment ended up as prostitutes and even those who engage in small retail businesses do it mostly as a means of attracting male clients to patronize their filthy sex business. There was a time when the male to female ratio in the zone was 1:3.
An estimated 20% of the men working in the project are married men who left their legal wives and children back home and spend longer periods at the construction sites than with their families. A greater percentage of these men visit the prostitutes on a daily basis. Even those who are living with their wives still find time to visit other women. Some of the men visit more than one prostitute a day. There has thus been an unnoticed but dangerous concentration of the HIV in the area brought in by this influx of migrants especially the growing number of prostitutes who must have had lengthy and unsafe sexual histories in their areas of origin.
Dompla is a small but renowned village in the project zone and the fist site of the project on Cameroonian territory. This is a virgin village that was created for the needs of the project and houses the greatest number of camps owned by the various companies working in the project. By the first quarter of 2002, it had an estimated population of 9000 people both employed and unemployed living there.
An unpublished study carried out by this writer at the end of 2001 reveled that about 150 acts of sexual intercourse takes place every day in the village, with about 40% of these registered by the 72 popular prostitutes who participated in the study. This gave a total of 1050 acts a week and about 4200 acts of sexual intercourse a month. What would make you catch your breath about this filthy sex business is that it’s always the same women for different men.
A typical day in Dompla starts with the workers going to their jobsites as early as 4.00Am. This leaves the women (Prostitutes Inclusive) and the unemployed male population back home during the day. Gross acts of infidelity and illicit sex have been registered in these villages during the day by the unemployed left behinds. For want of money, it is commonplace for spouses to welcome their external sexual partners during the day when their better halves are at work. What is usually left undone during the day is reserved for the vibrant evenings and nights out.
Apart from the jobsites, drinking, sports and nightclubs are the only distraction for the population. Free women usually moving half naked or shamelessly dressed in tight-fitting pantaloons and attires that exhume all of their contours swarm these sports and nightclubs where the sex trade gains momentum. By the latter part of the night, they have already the client of the day and then go drinking. The day’s activities end up in their dark rooms where compensation takes place. Those who are resistant and strong enough go on about three different encounters before its morning.
Countless stories come up all the times about these women who fight over men. The saddest incidents of all where those involving four men of Philippine origin, they paid a prostitute 150.000Fcfa (About US$ 214.15) and sexed her to death; another group had a prostitute admitted to hospital at the end of a vigorous sex encounter that left her with a torn vagina. She is even quoted to have written a public notice shortly after her release from hospital, inviting more men to come to her house and claiming that she had survived. The local Gendarmerie brigade now settles Sexworker – client relationship problems than their normal work. Some of the prostitutes even keep debtors books. Recently, a senior executive worker paid as much as 500,000Fcfa (Some US$715) to a handful of prostitutes as debts he owed them when it became a gendarmerie case. They had simply regrouped themselves and took the matter first to the customary court of the village head. The gendarmes were brought in when the man became unyielding and refused to clear his bills.
The bitter and most frightening truth about the project since its take off in 1997 is that no STI/HIV/AIDS campaign or sensitization had been carried out until early December 2001. The companies involved later on started distributing condoms to their workers as part of their company regulations. Condom consumption in the month of May 2001 was 2,504. This figure is actually less than proportional to the vigorous frequency of sexual activity going on. More to it, considering the absence of sensitization on the disease and especially on condom use, most of its users don’t even know how to use it. It has become a half-a-loaf-is-better-than-nothing story and really not the solution to this spreading virus given the failure rate of the condoms. Before my own very eyes, I watched workers and local inhabitants as well as some of the prostitutes testing positive at some of the company infirmaries.
As if this was not bad enough, most of the companies didn’t really have a commitment to sensitizing their workers on the dangers of these diseases. One could easily understand their rationale given that; the time taken from initial infection to the first appearance of clinical signs of HIV is pretty long and would happen probably when the construction phase of the work must have been over. By this time, most of these companies would have been gone thus the economic impacts in terms of paid absences, sick leaves, medical care and retardation in the advancement of the work would not affect them. Probably if the construction was to last for some 8 to 10 years, they would have taken things more serious. This therefore means that the actual consequences and effects of this disease would be brought to bear on the respective countries after the project. It is clear that only those companies involved in the actual 25 years exploitation Phase of the project would have to bear the economic crunch of the disease when their workers start falling sick from HIV/AIDS.
If we can remember well our basic chemistry lessons in the secondary school, we would as well remember the end results of an atomic fission. We were told that an atom acting as a projectile, strikes a molecule to produce two atoms that would strike another to produce four atoms, eight, etc. We were also told in Biology that cell division by binary fission follow a like manner. In the same way, one can imagine the consequences of a binary fission theory in the spread of HIV from the project. Some of the expatriates working in the project who might end up being infected would carry the virus safely back to their countries of origin. The Nationals too mostly men who are working in the project with their recorded acts of infidelity would certainly take good quantities of the virus that they have been infected with back to their wives at home. If these men do have other sexual partners back home, they too would certainly be dished their own dose and who would eventually continue the distribution. Experience has thought the African hunter that when a dead animal is removed from the trap, the ants go away thus the prostitutes coming from all ends of Africa will eventually carry the virus back to their various localities at the end of the project. They would distribute it to the residents there and that’s how this virus would continue to cross national and international boundaries unnoticed. Each person in the chain infects two others who would infect two others etc… and so the unending binary fission theory for the spread of the disease continues.
We all know that in the construction company, and to the best interest of the country in which such a project is taking place, what produces good benefits is not only the liquid cash and fixed asserts invested. The real economic benefits along side the cash revenues come also in terms of personnel experience gained. An experienced work force to participate in future projects constitutes a potential human capital for the country. Considering the case of the Chad-Cameroon Development Project, I am afraid it would hardly be the case. The project would likely end with all the workforce and experience gained being lost as most of the skilled workers would have fallen sick or become bedridden from HIV/AIDS and would be in their untimely graves before other projects come. This would therefore mean that the knowledge gained would not be able to be passed on to the younger generation and thus the law of continuity reversed altogether.
I begin to ask my self where the national AIDS commission for Cameroon kept its head. It was not until late January 2002 that the first posters from the Cameroon national committee for the fight against AIDS were seen in some of the villages crossed by the project. Some very few HIV/AIDS organizations have marked present in the project since then though very timidly and often with very brief programs that leave the desperate population as confused as ever before.
Today the world over with the song of sustainable development being sang everywhere; every Tom, Dick and Harry would have expected the project to leave behind a legacy of wealth, economic growth and the resources capable of financing sustainable health projects that could help curb hazards such as the one being brought to bear on the Cameroonian populations by the HIV/AIDS thus may be somehow reaching the pass make of the “Health for all by the year 2000” cliché lunched by WHO and which registered a resounding failure especially with HIV still widening the front.
I am just afraid and too certain that until a rigorous HIV/AIDS sensitization program is set up to educate the workers and to start catering for those already infected, our dream to see this project sail us through the troubled oceans of poverty would instead see us sinking down towards the zones of the HIV. I don’t need to remind us that the uncomfortable temperatures around these zones just like those of plate tectonics could chop off a huge toll of the vital working age and thus there would be nobody with the know-how left to man the pump stations along the pipeline and the rest of the related tasks. What a counter productive project this must have been, we might find ourselves at such a time wishing to have been left alone than be pushed into destitution and irreparable grief. It would certainly be the first time that a giant development project spent time and resources developing infrastructures and forgetting to develop the people who would benefit and maintain those infrastructures. This could be pretty bad news for a country such as Cameroon and especially Chad suffering from a dangerous strain of the poverty epilepsy.
Even the Israelites in the Bible at one time while in the wilderness wished they had been left alone in their slavery in Egypt than be brought to dye of thirst and hunger in the wilderness. God through their leader Moses had and answer for them. Lord, I pray this is our own manner that truly came to save our souls and not to manufacture corpses. We are waiting for that leader to lead the way out.
Moncha Abongta Shu
Prolife Activist
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