A year after Chad joined the ranks of African oil exporters, development groups question whether a government weakened by corruption and instability has the will and the ability to use its new wealth to combat poverty.
"The record of Chad's first year as a petro-state provides many reasons for concern," the Maryland-based relief and development group Catholic Relief Services and the Washington-based World Bank watchdog the Bank Information Center said in a report released Thursday titled Chad's Oil: Miracle or Mirage?
The two groups noted that Chad has been touted as a model because a World Bank loan that enabled it to start exporting oil required it to pledge to devote oil earnings to anti-poverty programs in a country where 80 percent of the 9.5 million citizens survive on subsistence farming. As part of the World Bank agreement, the first of its kind, Chad also set up a monitoring body comprising representatives from government and civil society and charged with ensuring oil revenues were properly used.
Those steps reflected an acknowledgment that elsewhere in Africa, adding oil to repressive, corrupt and poor countries resulted in more repression and corruption -- and not necessarily any alleviation of poverty.
The remedy the World Bank proposed for Chad was innovative, but incomplete, Thursday's report said.
For example, regulations on oversight of oil activities and revenues do not apply to developments outside the first three fields in southern Chad, operated by a U.S.-Malaysia consortium of ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and Petronas, according to the study.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
UNCERTAIN TOLLS: Images on social media showed small protests that escalated, with reports of police shooting live rounds as polling stations were targeted Tanzania yesterday was on lockdown with a communications blackout, a day after elections turned into violent chaos with unconfirmed reports of many dead. Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan had sought to solidify her position and silence criticism within her party in the virtually uncontested polls, with the main challengers either jailed or disqualified. In the run-up, rights groups condemned a “wave of terror” in the east African nation, which has seen a string of high-profile abductions that ramped up in the final days. A heavy security presence on Wednesday failed to deter hundreds protesting in economic hub Dar es Salaam and elsewhere, some
Flooding in Vietnam has killed at least 10 people this week as the water level of a major river near tourist landmarks reached a 60-year high, authorities said yesterday. Vietnam’s coastal provinces, home to UNESCO world heritage site Hoi An ancient town, have been pummeled by heavy rain since the weekend, with a record of up to 1.7m falling over 24 hours. At least 10 people have been killed, while eight others are missing, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. More than 128,000 houses in five central provinces have been inundated, with water 3m deep in some areas. People waded through
RSS