Contrasts in Cameroon over huge pipeline
© 2000 Reuters Limited
November 21, 2000
Story by Tansa Musa
KRIBI, Cameroon - Kribi, on Cameroon's Atlantic coast, was a lazy fishing town with beaches of white sand, but oil is starting to change all that.
Four years from now, it will be the terminus for a 1,050-km (655-mile) pipeline bringing oil from landlocked Chad and, in advance of the oil, hope for a depressed community.
That, at least, is the view of many of the 48,000 locals, who have been angered and frustrated over the past couple of years as rights and environmental groups held the project back.
House-painter Simon-Pierre Metimbwe is among the optimists.
"Kribi has been on the decline since Kritikos left in the early 1980s," he said, referring to a Greek cocoa and coffee exporter who also owned many of the shops in town.
"The pipeline is too good an opportunity to be missed, to let Kribi take off again and get back to the good old days when Kritikos was here," he added.
Christian Ombang Mendeng, an unemployed graduate reduced to using his motorcycle as a taxi, calls Kribi "a future emirate".
"The pipeline is going to bring us work. It's going to change the face of Kribi and make it a great town. Oil has made communities in other countries rich, we hope it will be the same for us," he said.
Then there are the sceptics, like those who say Cameroon has been an oil producer since 1978 and not much wealth has trickled down, so why should be it any different with Chad's.
Even if it is, the money will probably go to Douala, the commercial capital to the north, where the Cameroon Oil Transportation Company (COTCO) has its headquarters, they say.
"That's where most of the big fish working on the pipeline are going to work," said Kribi resident Anne Njanjongi.
Efforts to transfer COTCO headquarters to Kribi got nowhere. COTCO officials argued that Douala had much of the necessary infrastructure already in place, notably communications links.
OIL TO START FLOWING IN 2005
A consortium led by Exxon Mobil is investing $3.7 billion in developing Chad's oilfields and building the pipeline, which will take oil to an offshore terminal.
The presidents of Chad and Cameroon laid foundation stones at each end of the pipeline in mid-October. It is due to be completed in 2004 and oil will start flowing the year after.
According to the World Bank, and depending on prevailing oil prices, the project could be worth $2 billion for Chad over a 25-year production period and $500 million for Cameroon.
As a comparison, Chad's gross domestic product (GDP) in 1999 was $1.58 billion and Cameroon's $8.68 billion.
For Kribi, this will mean investment in oil services, new construction work, plus new social amenities for workers which will also benefit the local people - hospitals, schools, better roads, water and electricity supply.
Some benefits are already on the ground.
A tarred road links Kribi to the industrial town of Edea, some 130 km (80 miles) away, and thus to Douala and Yaounde.
New hotels and hostels continue to be built and a better telephone system should be operational soon.
"The government has been doing much to help us, but I honestly think much of what you are seeing today is because the pipeline terminal will be constructed here," said Kribi's mayor, Samuel Minko.
COTCO has received more than 30,000 applications for jobs with the pipeline, 5,000 of them from Kribi alone.
However, according to COTCO general manager Michel Gallet, the construction of the pipeline will bring 3,000 to 3,500 temporary jobs and only 250 permanent ones on the three pumping stations along the pipeline and the terminal.
Other sectors will benefit, though. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and bar owners are rubbing their hands in anticipation. Sex workers are already trooping into town from Douala and the capital, Yaounde.
WORRIES ABOUT POLLUTION, SEX AND ALCOHOL
Social worker Antoine Biyiha Binam sees only doom.
"You cannot but bring up the risk of pollution to the environment or a pipe explosion as seen elsewhere, in Nigeria, for example," he said, worrying too about sexually transmitted diseases and the effects of odontol, a highly toxic, locally brewed gin named after a mouthwash.
The World Bank delayed its funding for the project, which was vital to get all the private sector operators on board, until it was satisfied that the environmental impact could be limited and managed.
Those concerns have not gone away, however, with some Kribi people especially worried about the impact of any oil spill on the fishing industry that has enabled the town to live until now and will continue to do so once the oil has dried up.
"This project could pollute our waters," said Louis Eko, a fisherman known to all the locals. "We are not great farmers. Fish accounts for 90 percent of our income here in Kribi. Without the ocean we are dead people here."