Africa’s largest development project, a 1040km, $4,3-billion oil pipeline between Chad and Cameroon, is being criticised for damaging the interests of the poor — the people it was supposed to help.
Embarrassed World Bank officials have already admitted that the notoriously corrupt Chad government has spent the first $15-million of grant money it received from the consortium on arms for its security forces rather than on the educational and development projects for which the money was intended.
The project, which will provide income of almost $4,6-billion for the United States oil giant Exxon, has been criticised by human rights and environment groups. South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said: ”The Chad-Cameroon project is not the help we asked for or needed. In the absence of the rule of law and respect for human rights and the environment, financing of large-scale oil development is destroying the environment and us.”
Bank officials accept that the project remains ”high risk” because of the poor human rights and environment record of both Chad and Cameroon. At the World Summit in Johannesburg in August, the pipeline was held up by the US as a blueprint for Africa — private money providing jobs and development. Chad should get $62-million a year from the project, in effect doubling the government’s income, and Cameroon $18,6-million.
At its meeting this weekend, exactly two years after the project was approved, the bank directors will be told the Chad government has been warned about its conduct and officials now have high hopes the revenues will be spent correctly.
A coalition of environment, religious and development groups has produced two reports showing that so far the construction of the pipeline has damaged the interests of people along its entire length: water supplies have been damaged, pygmies have lost hunting lands, farmers have lost land and crops and an influx of immigrant workers has brought child prostitution and spread HIV/Aids. The development has also caused inflation, doubling the price of basic foods and so causing malnutrition among the poor.
Two years ago the bank’s internal report on the project said there was a 50% chance of failure in the project’s social and environmental objectives, but the directors, including the United Kingdom’s Development Secretary, Clare Short, voted to go ahead. This was despite the fact that Shell and Elf, two of the members of the original pipeline consortium, had decided to pull out because they feared the sort of unrest that has occurred in neighbouring Nigeria’s Ogoni delta field.
Currently 300 wells are being drilled in the Doba fields of southern Chad. The pipeline will take the oil 24km out to sea where a floating storage vessel will load 225000 barrels a day into tankers. Oil should begin to flow in 2004.
The report by human rights groups says: ”The World Bank’s wilful naivete concerning endemic corruption, the lack of basic democratic rights and the violation of human rights in both Chad and Cameroon have contributed to the high-risk situation the project faces now.” — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002