[WSIS CS-Plenary] TIC and Development

[Jean-Louis FULLSACK]

Dear CS members 
Please find hereafter a very interesting article about investment and reality in a DC. 

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. 
(....)



After four years of WSIS promising strong benefits of ICTs for achieving the MDGs, nowhere this article even mentions ICTs for alleviating the extreme poverty in this poorest country. And despite the gouvernment has earned some 306 million dollars in oil revenues as at the end of september and therefoe would have some resources to spend in this domain. Didn't Chad solemnly sign both the Geneva and the Tunis papers which all praise "ICTs for development" and ask gouvernments to act accordingly ?
But what's even more shocking, this country is still one of the very poorest ones in the world (n° 174 of 177) and 80% of its 10 million population still live on less than a dollars a day.  
Best
Jean-Louis Fullsack
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