Aid agencies have withdrawn their staff from four refugee camps in eastern Chad following disturbances. UNHCR said the trouble began at Iridimi and Touloum on Monday, when the camp residents refused to take part in a refugee registration exercise being conducted there by UNHCR officials. In nearby Mile and Kounoungou, protests erupted when the camp residents refused to take part in a food distribution exercise which involved verifying the number of people actually present.

More than 100 people have died from measles in the Chadian capital N'djamena and the surrounding southern provinces and up to 24,000 people could be infected with the virus, Medecin Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Friday. Since the beginning of the year, there have been 6,000 reported cases nationwide, but MSF said the real figure could be two to three times higher.

While schools had finally opened a few months back for the younger children, for the many young men and women of Am Nabak camp, education had halted. They do not have the opportunity to enroll in secondary school to further their studies or take part in structured programs targeted specifically for their age group. There is a shortage of skilled teachers who can provide secondary education. According to this group, many of the specialized teachers have either been killed in Sudan or have gone elsewhere.

A government plan to give conservative Chad a new family law banning practices such as beating wives has provoked uproar. "At Friday prayers, Muslim preachers have taken to saying that President Idriss Deby and his family will burn in hell because it is against the Koran to say a woman is equal to a man," the weekly newspaper Notre Temps observed. The draft code is a 246-page document drawn up with the help of funding from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and Deby pledged to speedily adopt it in a speech on 8 March to mark International Women’s Day.

After an extremely slow start, United Nations agencies and aid organizations have improved their response to the roughly 210,000 refugees from Darfur living in Chad. Refugees have been relocated from the border and are now living in camps where their basic needs are being met, although water and firewood will always be issues. Many refugee children are in school, and more schools are under construction. Refugees say that with the exception of threats from surrounding host communities, they generally feel safe in the camps.

City dwellers can spot the young maids fresh from Chadian villages from afar - by their ragged dusty clothes and unsophisticated hair, and the way they shy away from cars speeding up and down the streets. Teenagers from far-off rural villages are flocking increasingly to the capital N'djamena nowadays to become domestic workers, one of the most elusive forms of child labour. "They're aged between 8 and 15, and earn very little," Felicien Ntakiyimana, who works on child protection for the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Chad, told IRIN.

The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children visited ten of the eleven refugee camps along the Chad-Sudan border from January 12-25, 2005, to collect data on the protection of refugee girls and on their access to education in the camps. While the violence continues in Darfur, the more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees who managed to escape into eastern Chad continue to face their own challenges. Women and girls still must endure life-threatening dangers, and numerous barriers exist to education.

A senior Chadian mediator on Wednesday said he had received unverified reports that one of the main rebel groups in Darfur had broken a fragile ceasefire by attacking government troops in Sudan's western region. Allam-Mi Ahmad, a top member of a Chadian team which has been mediating between Sudan's warring parties, told reporters that rebels from the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), had reportedly attacked government troops south of Nyala.

A coordinated monitoring and alert system to track the use of oil revenues should be developed by civil society groups in Chad, says a new report on the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline by Catholic Relief Services.

The report recommends that civil society groups identify existing structures or networks at the regional and local levels that can help disseminate and collect information about project execution to and from the population at large. On an international level, civil society should continue to hold International Financial Institutions, oil companies, and Northern governments to account for their responsibilities with regards the project. The report says the project is "hanging by a thread" and cites "critical loopholes" with regards revenue transparency, accountability and management.

"It is too early to declare Chad's oil project a failure or a success. But, the experience to date confirms the danger of investing in the extractive industries before a country is shown to meet minimum conditions of respect for human rights, fiscal transparency, and demonstrated government capacity to implement pro-poor programs," says the report.

The World Bank financed Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project transports oil from landlocked southern Chad to the Atlantic coast of Cameroon for export. It was billed as the first project to contain significant checks and balances to make sure that oil wealth translated into development.

Chad's prime minister Moussa Faki has resigned after a series of strikes by unpaid civil servants and signs of increasing tensions with President Idriss Deby, diplomats and parliamentarians said on Friday. Faki, who comes from the same influential Zagawa tribe as the president, was appointed prime minister in June 2003. He stood down last Thursday and was replaced by Pascal Yoadimnadji, a former agriculture minister, state radio said.

Despite fears of a major new influx of refugees fleeing civil war in Sudan's Darfur region, only a trickle of people entered the string of refugee camps located in the arid wastes of eastern Chad in the last weeks of December. Despite early warnings by UN officials that Chad's refugee population of 200,000 could rise by as much as a third, with 100,000 new entrants seeking shelter in the coming weeks, aid officials said that to date there were relatively few newcomers to the 11 camps. The situation in terms of housing, food and water therefore remained stable.

Ms. Delphine Djiraibe of Chad has been selected for the 2004 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award. Ms. Djiraibe was chosen by an international panel of distinguished judges for her tireless efforts in promoting the human rights of the Chadian people, often at great personal risk to herself and her family. Ms. Djiraibe is being recognized for her work on the Chad/Cameroon Oil and Pipeline Project. Her multifaceted campaign encompasses fighting governmental corruption, ensuring that the Chadian people benefit from the pipeline and its resulting profits, and preventing environmental devastation resulting from its construction.

Water supplies are drying up for tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad, warned the UN refugee agency, saying that at least one refugee camp could run out of water within two weeks. Eastern Chad is one of the driest places on earth with a rainy season of only three months per year. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that this year's rains came late and far between, with total rainfall only about a third of normal amounts.

Le conflit entre le gouvernement tchadien et le consortium qui exploite le pétrole continue de susciter l'intérêt de la presse. L'hebdo « L'Intelligent » et « Le Courrier Africain » reviennent cette semaine sur un dossier sensible. N'Djamena accuse Exxon-Mobil et Chevron de ne pas respecter le contrat. Les pétroliers affirment jouer franc jeu. Qui dit vrai?

« Quand le brut sent le souffre ». Tel est l'article « L'Intelligent » qui écrit que « rien ne va plus entre le Tchad et le consortium qui exploite les gisements de Doba. N'Djamena formule un certain nombre de griefs à l'égard du consortium. Notamment le fait que le comptage se fasse au port camerounais de Kribi où transite le pétrole tchadien et non à Komé, lieu d'exploitation, comme le stipule la convention signée entre les sociétés pétrolières et le Tchad. Pour ce journal, « Cette affaire risque de se transformer en crise durable (…) ».

Justement, « Le Courrier Africain » publie un article indiquant qu'une ONG africaine plaide pour qu'obligation soit faite aux compagnies de déclarer les sommes versées aux gouvernements des pays producteurs. Une procédure qui pourrait devenir gênante pour certains Etats comme la Guinée Equatoriale ou l'Angola mais qui serait profitable au Tchad où la transparence est de rigueur. D'ailleurs, le mensuel parle de « kleptocraties » pour désigner les régimes angolais et guinéens.

L'Intelligent-Jeune Afrique N° 2284 du 17 au 23 octobre 2004 Le Courrier Africain, octobre 2004

Chadian authorities are tightening security in and around 10 United Nations refugee camps in the east of the country - where more than 200,000 Sudanese people have gathered after fleeing violence in the Darfur region - after three refugees were killed there in the past week amid rising tensions with locals. Some 180 Chadian gendarmes have started patrols around the camps and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has handed over nine vehicles for the gendarmes to use.

CARE, the charity running the camp in eastern Chad, reckons there are about 4,500 children who should be in school. But with the formal education programme yet to swing into action, it admits that only half of those children are currently having lessons. Some 800 pupils are lucky enough to learn in one of the five school tents erected at the centre of the camp. Another 1,400 cluster more informally for classes under trees and the rest wile away the hours either helping with chores or playing in the dirt.

Chad's refugee camps, already straining at the seams, should steel themselves for the arrival of at least another 100,000 people fleeing Darfur within the next seven months, UN officials said. Chad has already provided a safe haven for almost 200,000 civilians who have escaped the campaign of slaughter, pillaging and rape being waged by the pro-government Janjawid militia in Sudan's Darfur province. But the end is not yet in sight.

On Friday, October 10 2003, before African head of states and foreign dignitaries in Kome, Chad, President Idriss Deby symbolically turned the tap that opened the flow of 225 000 barrels of oil. The $3.7 billion crown jewel project of the World Bank (WB) is the biggest foreign investment in sub-Sahara Africa. For the next 25 years, approximately 900 million barrels of oil will be pumped from 300 oil wells drilled in Doba, south of Chad, along a 1070km pipeline to Cameroon on the Atlantic coast.

WB financing, which totalled just 4 percent of the cost, was crucial to the project. The oil consortium comprising of Exxon, Petronas, and Chevron considered the participation of WB as a necessary political risk insurance, which enabled them to raise more money on international capital markets. Meanwhile, the WB embraced the project as an unparalleled opportunity for land-locked Chad to lift its 6.5 million population out of acute poverty, and for ocean-bordered Cameroon to generate much needed revenues.

Some months after Chad, the world's fifth poorest country, entered the pantheon of Africa's petro-states, it is worth taking stock of the overall project impacts now that the exploitation phase has started. Has the project broken free from the traditional gap between expectations and dismal realities of oil exploitation? Better still, has the oil been a Weapon of Mass Poverty (WMP) or a Weapon of Mass Development (WMD) to Chad and Cameroon?

The background to any petroleum project is key in determining the development outcomes. In fact, the underlying development problems associated with the extraction of black gold are not inherent in the resource itself. However, there is little disagreement on the ability of oil to ratchet up pre-existing conflict in a society; oil can become the very rationale for starting war. In this light, the socio-political environment in which WB approved the project was a potent recipe for poor development outcomes.

There is an endemic mix of corruption and civil strife in Chad and Cameroon. For instance, Chad, since independence, has been marred by a vicious cycle of conflicts and war. Besides the absence of basic ingredients for the growth of civil society, elections are shamelessly rigged, fraud is rife, and the regimes have shown a predilection to violently repress dissenting voices.

For example, villagers were coerced to give their accord to the project in consultations prior to its approval. Tales in Kome, where villagers were consulted in the presence of government forces and rebels, are all too glaring. The village chief was imprisoned for his unfavourable attitude, and the oil company representative arrived accompanied with military police. Given this background, most people were too intimidated to speak out against the project.

Given that Cameroon has consecutively crowned Transparency International's rating of the most corrupt countries in the world, it was no surprise that a bellicose climate of non- information disclosure concerning the project was the norm.

International civil society organisations in 1997 argued for the project's postponement to ensure the two countries upgrade their governance capacities. Contrarily, WB in June 2000 discounted this burgeoning corruption and civil strife in Cameroon and Chad respectively to approve the project. Shortly after, civil society partners were proved right when the Chadian government, on receiving $25 million from the project consortium as a signature bonus, admitted to have used the money in procuring arms to quell a rebel insurgence in the north of the country.

More recently, soon after the project's official inauguration last October, the government closed down the country's only independent radio station, FM Liberté, which had close ties to the country's human rights organisations. Then residents of the capital city, Ndjamena, witnessed the first public executions in more than a decade after court trails which human rights groups described as a mockery of justice. Hence, a warning signal to critical voices in the country to stay quiet.

It is worth noting that the WB's own Operations and Evaluation Department (OED) review commissioned in 2001 finds the Bank wanting on issues of governance. The review points out that while the WB is aware of the underlying causes for the underperformance of resource-rich countries, it has yet to formulate and implement viable approaches to address them. The recently released report of the WB sponsored Extractive Industry Review, primed the role of governance in shaping development outcomes of oil projects. Unequivocally, it recommended the WB to stop support for petroleum projects in areas of conflict or at high risk of conflict.

Broken livelihoods and promises

Approximately 880 km of the pipeline traverses Cameroon's fragile ecological zones. These include one of Africa's unique coastal rainforests, home to several indigenous peoples. Before the commencement of the construction phase, thousands of affected peoples living in villages and communities along the route of the pipeline were identified for eventual compensations. One hundred and fifty families were singled out for resettlement. Many village lands were expropriated, crops and plants destroyed and water sources polluted. The compensation plan, that included individual and communal compensations, was very limited in scope and inadequate to restore or improve on broken livelihoods.

Despite compensation being paid to replace agricultural land, most of the funds did not go into agricultural production or reinvestment to make provision for the future. The affected communities have been left alone with little or no skills to face the long-term impacts: funds had no impact in terms of generating new livelihoods for villagers; prices have increased due to shortage of labour and agricultural goods on the market; rural-urban exodus has increased and conflicts between locals and migrants attracted by the new found wealth have also increased.

The communal compensation plan, which had as its objective to compensate communities with social development projects, was very limited. Communities, who were supposed to identify projects themselves through consultations, were instead constrained to choose from a restrictive list of options proposed by the consortium.

The project thus raises a crucial issue: that of balancing profits with ecological and social principles in petroleum exploitation. Driven by the ethos of cost minimisation, the consortium was motivated to fast-track its operations, while time-intensive social and environmental components such as capacity building lag on. To what extent therefore can multinational corporations be constrained to synchronise the evolution of their exploitation operations with that of social and environmental safeguards?

Turning oil revenue into long-term benefits for the masses is the most contentious issue in resource-rich countries, particularly in Africa. Ultimately, this depends on the quality of public policy. The WB prides the revenue oversight mechanism in the Chad-Cameroon pipeline as an innovation to the extractive industry.

Under pressure from WB, the Chadian government decreed a petroleum management law in 1998. The law provides for the following division of the $2 billion royalties and dividends that would accrue from the project in the next 25 years: 10 percent set aside in a future generation-fund to prepare Chad for a post-oil future; the remaining 90 percent would pass through an offshore petroleum revenue account; 80 percent of which would go to five priority sectors (health, rural development, education, infrastructure, and environmental and water resources); 5 percent would go to the Doba oil producing region; and the remaining would be used by the Chadian government to tackle pressing operational needs.

To mainstream transparency, accountability, and participation, an oversight committee, comprising representatives from civil society, government, administration, and the judiciary was created to monitors the flows and approve spending from the offshore account.

Undoubtedly, this initiative is laudable. However, there are some flaws, which incapacitate it. For instance, three months after Chad started to taste the oil revenues, the committee lacked basic office facilities. In addition, the 5 percent allocated to the Doba region is inadequate. Worst of all, the allocations contained in the law can be changed by the government unilaterally after five years.

In addition, the law covers only direct revenues generated from royalties while indirect revenues such as taxes and customs duties are precluded. These could account for up to 45 percent of the total oil revenues expected over the lifetime of the project.

Conclusion

Several conclusions about petroleum development in Africa become apparent from the Chad-Cameroon pipeline project.

Firstly, oil corporations cannot be transformed into development agencies even with the best of intentions and monitoring mechanisms. Secondly, global wielders of development outcomes like the WB cannot exercise sufficient clout on the penchant for profits of oil multinationals. Thirdly, WB is incapable of respecting even its own weakening safeguard policies, which are premised on controlling damage rather than avoiding harm.

Fourthly, the embryonic neoliberal governance structures in Africa are incapable of constraining Foreign Direct Investments, which are principally attracted by ground mineral resources, to respect ecological and social principles. The flawed contention of the WB is "one cannot eat omelettes without breaking some eggs'' but the eggs are more often the poor who end up with no livelihood opportunity and become even poorer.

Finally, Public Private Partnerships (PPP), the buzz paradigm of sustainable development, are fundamentally incapable of readdressing the unequal power relations between fattening multinationals, weakening states and the World Bank.

As it turns sixty, it is time therefore to pressure the Bank to retire from financing development and environmental disasters like the pipeline. In sum, just like the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline is an illusive Weapon of Mass Development. It is time to send some United Nations development experts to Chad and Cameroon to uncover Weapons of Mass Poverty.

* Akong Charles Ndika is an energy policy analyst with Global Village Cameroon

This organisation is recruiting people with experience in Community
Services, Education and Protection (specifically issues around sexual and Gender Based Violence). Candidates should have experience in relief & development, preferably working with UNHCR in a refugee camp context, and must be fluent French and/or Arabic.

Out here in the sandy moonscape of eastern Chad, you don't expect to see a diminutive Frenchman marching around, muttering, and staring at his global-positioning device. But Alain Gachet has come here to outdo generations of witch doctors, water diviners, and PhDs. He aims to pinpoint, with scientific certainty, the right places to dig the costly wells that pull precious water from beneath the sand. About 200,000 refugees have fled to Chad from Sudan's violent Darfur region. They each need four gallons of water a day.