ENVIRONMENT: Pollution Takes a Backseat in Congo

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Anjan Sundaram

MUANDA, Congo, Sep 17 2005 (IPS) - Yellow flames from oil rigs light up the night sky, helping Richard Vuadi guides his boat as he sets out to cast his nets along the Democratic Republic of Congo’s coast. Oil rigs that dot the horizon have polluted the water, so much that fishermen say they pose health risks.

“We have no choice, our families must eat,” says Vuadi, a 50-year old fisherman, as he steps out of his dugout canoe in the morning with a bucketful of fish that he caught overnight. He says many of the fish are contaminated.

Pollution from oil companies has long been shown to contaminate Congo’s fish populations. But neglect during the 1996-2003 civil war and the country’s preoccupation with the June 2006 elections mean that people eating contaminated fish on the coast will hardly be noticed by the rest of the country.

Congo’s elections will be among the most complex and expensive operations ever undertaken in Africa. President Joseph Kabila’s government has been plagued with financial and logistical problems since a nationwide voter-registration process began in July this year.

“We want elections, but first we need good food,” Vuadi says. “Even with a new government, will they do anything to help us?”

With the onset of the dry season, which usually begins in May, fishermen like Vuadi must travel more than 100 kilometres into the ocean in case they want to catch abundant fish. Unfortunately they find themselves fishing among the hundreds of oil rigs implanted in the surrounding waters, where crude oil stick to their nets and they return home with infected fish among their catch.

“Our children fall ill when they eat the fish,” complains Winston Ngoma, a 50-year old fisherman in Muanda, a town on Congo’s coast. “And we struggle to remove the dark oil.”

At the ministry of environment in the capital Kinshasa, officials produce documents showing extreme contamination in the waters around the refineries.

“Hydrocarbon pollution is over seven times the normal level,” says Maurice Matanda, a ministry of environment official who was on the committee that first investigated pollution in Muanda in 1996.

Matanda says the government had planned to take action against the oil companies in response to that investigation. But the tumultuous 1990s that saw conflicts, which resulted in the fall of two regimes in Congo, have meant that pollution has taken a backseat, while politicians struggle for power.

Congo’s conflict sucked in five African countries. And it left almost four million people dead and placed another 2.4 million displaced people at risk of starvation and disease, according to the United Nations.

Government officials in Kinshasa say that oil exploration has hurt both local communities as well as people living hundreds of kilometres away from it.

“The contaminated fish are sold even in Kinshasa,” says Francois Gayo, national director for fish in Congo. “And people are contaminating their bodies without knowing it.”

The pollution will be hard to eliminate, according to the ministry of environment, since oil rigs line the coasts of both Angolan and Congolese waters.

“It is difficult to say that companies in Congo alone are causing the problem,” Matanda says. “What about all the rigs in Angola and Congo-Brazzaville?”

Congo’s coast extends only about 40 kilometres, prompting Matanda to speculate that the oil exploration in Angola has contributed significantly to pollution in Congo.

“We need to analyse this at a regional level,” he says. “The war did not allow that, but perhaps now it is possible.”

Congo’s petroleum company, Perenco, was unwilling to admit journalists on its premises, and refused to comment on the effects of pollution.

Perenco spokesperson, Nganga Mundele told IPS to search on the internet if any information on the corporation was required.

The company is the primary source of employment in Muanda. It has recently contributed to the city’s infrastructure as well, building a school, hospital and a library for public use.

“Petrol brings big money to Muanda; it finances the city,” says Christophe Mvika, coordinator of Action for the Development of Community, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO), highlighting the reason many officials are reluctant to antagonise the oil corporation.

In Muanda’s central market, where most of the fish are sold on plastic sheets spread over the sand, the women grow increasingly distraught.

“It isn’t just the infected fish that are a problem,” says Charlotte Dienzi, a 49-year old woman who operates a fish-stall in the market. “There has been a gradual change in the flavour of all fish – they were once sweet, but now are mostly tasteless.”

Local officials in Muanda can do little more than sit in their offices and collect reports from the oil company and various NGOs, which are constrained by a severe lack of resources.

“We don’t even have one instrument to measure air pollution levels,” says Sambo Polo Soko, head of the ministry of environment in Muanda, who like most officials in poorly funded Congolese ministries, doesn’t even have a transport.

“With a car we could at least patrol the coast,” he says.

But with the government distracted by the enormity of the impending polls, it is unlikely that anything will be done in the coming months to address the concerns of people on Congo’s coast. Years of inaction has left them pessimistic about the impact of democracy in their country.

“We are like lemons in Muanda. They squeeze us dry and then let us fall,” Vuadi says. “Nothing will change after the elections, especially for us poor people.”