Unearthing scandals within extractive industries

Many African countries have been said to be geological scandals. But whether bauxite from Guinea, gold from Mali, diamonds from the DR Congo, copper from Zambia or uranium from Niger, the continent’s mineral wealth has served far more to produce multifaceted scandals and tragedies than to promote the development of its people. While shadily generated wealth accumulates, extractive industries produce misfortune over happiness.

In an opaque scene supported by a network of complicity, corruption and widespread governmental inability to implement policies that respect national interests, multinationals plunder the continent. This is a situation that facilitates failing states, but also one where insufficiently informed public opinion about these scandals perpetually inhibits the mobilisation of a defence of national interests. And looting persists with impunity until dramas begin to awaken consciences. It was with the Tuareg rebellion for example that we began to open our eyes to the exploitative conditions around uranium extraction in Niger. We also know that war in Liberia has long been fuelled by ‘blood diamonds.’ Elsewhere, in other forms, African people suffer through living on land deemed ‘too rich for them’ in areas where external appetites are satisfied with little concern for local interests.

To allow ‘access and the dissemination of independent and reliable information to citizens in general and to affected communities in particular, with each step in the exploitation of natural resources (exploration, operations, management and the redistribution of income),’ the Institut Panos Afrique de l’Ouest (IPAO) held a training workshop on extractive industries for journalists from the 6 to the 10 October, at which fifteen journalists from Mali, Niger and Senegal took part. The workshop is part of a programme to promote information on extractive industries, which will be extended by a media campaign in order to offer further information on the subject, and to bring to light issues in a sector whose economic importance is matched only by its various destabilising effects in countries in which it develops.

The campaign supports a theme that will likely form one of the main debates to be raised at the next African Social Forum (FSA), which will be hosted by Niger from 20 to 25 November 2008. This debate has often been problematic at the FSA, but this time should occupy a more important dimension in the level of mobilisation exhibited by Nigerian civil society on the issue of extractive industries. For the training of journalists, experts on extractive industry issues make various resources available to journalists in the effort to help them gain a better understanding of the sector and be better able to inform public opinion.

* Tidiane Kassé is the editor of the French edition of Pambazuka News.
* Translated from the French by Alex Free.
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