[WSIS CS-Plenary] Tchad-Cameroun

[Jean-Louis FULLSACK]

Bonsoir Michel
Merci pour votre courriel et voici le texte complet que vous avez demandé. Ayant de la visite familiale pour les fêtes, je ne puis malheureusement pas le traduire. Je pense que vous trouveez sans problème un/e traducteur/trice. 
Je vous souhaite bonne lecture et de joyeuses fêtes  
Jean--Louis Fullsack  

CHALLENGES 2005-2006:
New Year Offers Little Hope for Oil-Producing Chad
Sylvestre Tetchiada 

YAOUNDE, Dec 20 (IPS) - Chad has become an attractive destination for international investment since a group of multinational oil companies put together a financial plan in 2000 to explore and ship the new oil to the market. 

At a cost of 3.7 billion dollars, the plan included some 300 new oil wells at Doba, in the south and construction of a 1,070-km oil pipeline to Kribi, on Cameroon's Atlantic coast. The current capacity of the pipeline is 225,000 barrels a day, all destined for western countries. 

Unfortunately, the inauguration of the pipeline in July 2003 has not eased the pain of this central African country after 25 years of conflicts. Instead, its demons of yesteryear seem to have re-emerged. 

Serious financial problems, a battered social fabric, internal conflicts, army desertions, betrayals and risks of civil war are looming on the horizon in Chad, one of the poorest in the world. 

Two months ago, Chad's president, Idriss Deby, initiated a process to draft a new law aimed at redistributing oil revenues. The government plans to change an agreement on revenue distribution from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline so it can extract greater profit for itself and meet budgetary demands. 

The proposed law seeks to abolish a provision on the amount of money reserved for future generations. One of the poverty-reducing provisions to come out of the petroleum project was to invest 10 percent of its revenues in a special fund reserved for future generations. The rest of the money was to be invested in road, health, and education infrastructure, and bringing potable water to the people. 

''Modifications to this law'', Mahamat Abdoulaye, an official in Chad's embassy in Yaounde, told IPS, ''consist of establishing a realistic approach to the management of petroleum revenues by integrating current priorities with preparing the future of our people''. ''My country has serious financial problems and the money from the fund reserved for future generations will allow us to correct injustices and insure equitable development and peace in Chad,'' he said. 

But civil society groups doubt Deby's government will use the money to augment development budgets. They strongly suspect that the money will be used to buy arms to defend the floundering regime. 

''Deby is doubtlessly eyeing this fresh source of cash as a way to insure his regime survives, given the constant strikes, which are poisoning the social climate, the defection of his closest and most loyal associates, and the rebellion which has been festering for several months in the east,'' commented Mathurin Nna, a professor of political science at Cameroon's University of Ngaoundere. 

According to Nna, ''Chadians who say they are disappointed in their president have rallied around a rebel movement, Base for Change, National Unity and Democracy. The whole thing could explode anytime in N'djamena, the capital''. 

The World Bank, the main supporter and funding purveyor for the Chad oil pipeline, has criticised the plan to use the money meant for future generations for security purposes and for bailing itself out of its current financial crisis. 

In early December, the World Bank said it was considering sanctions against the Chadian government if it went ahead with its plan to temper with the petroleum revenues. 

When Chad began exporting oil in 2003, its programme to set aside oil revenues was considered exemplary, especially in comparison with other African oil-producing countries, where the manna of petrodollars has simply lined the pockets of the elite. Like Nigeria, Congo-Brazzaville, and even Gabon and Angola, the flood of new oil revenue has done little to stem the tide of a growing poverty. 

''Deby's choice puts a serious kink into the fight against poverty, something that the World Bank had been fighting to eradicate,'' Jules Monthe, a consultant at the World Bank mission in Yaounde, told IPS. ''Chad does have problems, but a change in the petroleum revenue law doesn't seem to me a reasonable way to fix them.'' 

Others blame the World Bank. ''The condescending rhetoric from the experts at the World Bank about poverty reduction from the Chad project revenues was nothing but a sinister farce,'' Ursule Bakondock, from the Catholic Relief Services in Yaounde, told IPS. Her office coordinates activities in neighboring countries such as Chad and the Central African Republic (CAR). 

Bakondock fears that ''the World Bank's petroleum project would end up lining the pockets of a notorious dictator, who has changed the constitution to allow himself to be re-elected endlessly.'' 

Deby's second and final five-year mandate was supposed to end in May 2006, but he changed the constitution in 2004 to eliminate term limits, in spite of strong opposition from civil society groups. 

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Oxfam-America and Friends of the Earth-France have all called on the World Bank, whose approval of the project opens doors to other financing sources, to take a leading role in stopping the amendments, even through penalties. 

They urge the World Bank to suspend all financial arrangements to Chad, withhold disbursements on active loans, and postpone consideration of future projects "until key demands of Chadian civil society groups concerning the management of government finances are met". 

Chad, a semi-arid country, ranks 173 among the 177 poorest nations in the world, according to a 2005 United Nations Development Index. Its population is around 10 million, 80 percent of whom live on less than a dollar a day. 

According to the World Bank, Chad has received about 306 million dollars in oil revenues, 27.4 million of which have been placed in reserve for future generations from the time the pipeline began pumping until the end of September 2005. (END/2005)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/pipermail/plenary/attachments/20051224/fbcaf923/attachment.html