GABON

Rapports sur les relations éthniques / Reports on Ethnic Relations

01 / 27 / 2004

IRIN

"Student riots crystalise frustration with education cutbacks"

Four days of rioting by secondary school students in Libreville last week highlighted a growing frustration with education cutbacks in Gabon, a country that grew rich on oil, but which is now struggling to cope with a steady decline in production.

The country's main technical school remains closed after four days of rioting over cutbacks to a free student bus service in which one student was killed.

A shortage of seats on a free school bus sparked a clash between students from the Omar Bongo Ondimba Technical School and pupils from a rival college.

Only 65 of the 100 school buses in Libreville are operating because the government says it does not have the money to carry out repairs.

If there is no school bus, students have to walk miles to class, or pay for a bus or taxi, like most of their counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa.

But in oil-rich Gabon per capita income is 10 times higher than the average for the continent and people have got used to a more cosseted lifestyle.

The cutbacks in the free bus service therefore caused an outrage.

Angry students destroyed three of the school buses that were still working and wrecked classrooms and college equipment. Some, brandishing machetes, set up roadblocks on the streets of the capital.

Education experts said this violent outburst of anger was a sympton of deep-seated malaise in the education sector.

Over the last five years there has been a problem of falling quality in Gabon s schools, explained Michelle Elvis Kenmoe, the field manager of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

Kenmoe said the private sector had been invited in to bridge the gap as the government found itself unable to meet the demands of Gabon's 1.2 million population.

But many private schools are just in it to make money - this is a big concern for the government, he told IRIN.

UNESCO recently conducted a joint survey on the education system in Gabon with the government, but its report has yet to be approved by the Ministry of Education and Kenmoe was reluctant to comment on its findings in detail.

However UNESCO officials expect the report to paint a sorry picture of declining educational standards and deteriorating infrastructure.

Last year," Kenmoe said, "there was only a 35% pass rate for the baccalaureat - the main high school leaving exam. As a result , he added, there is a high drop out rate at secondary level.

The results were particularly bad last year because teachers brought in from other West African countries went on strike for four months after the government threatened to take away special benefits for staff recruited overseas. The baccalaureat pass rate used to average around 60 percent.

Primary education is free in Gabon, but secondary education is not and fees, as well as standards, vary widely.

Fees at private schools vary from 20,000 to 70,000 CFA (US$40 to $140) a month and if the costs of buying uniforms and books are included, that bill is more than doubled, Michel Moussavou the head of one private secondary school told IRIN.

While many students are dropping out of secondary school, the government is cutting back on the number of students being sponsored to go to university.

For example, the state used to send doctors for overseas post-graduate training, often in France. However, the government agency that awards bursaries to students wanting to study overseas says it can no longer afford to fund such luxuries.

Windfall earnings from oil exports have helped to give Gabon a higher standard of living than its neighbours and have helped to keep President Omar Bongo in power for 37 years - longer than any other head of state in Africa.

But according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), falling production from the country's mature offshore fields has reduced government revenue in recent years and forced it to make heavy cutbacks in spending.

Oil accounted for 60 percent of Gabon's government revenues during the 1990s,

However, after peaking at 370,000 barrels per day in 1997, production has declined by a third to around 250,000 at present, according to US government statistics.

The IMF predicted in mid 2003 that oil output would plunge by half again over the next five years as existing reserves were depleted.

High world oil prices have so far helped Gabon to absorb some but not all of the pain.

The IMF has forecast a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of US$4,276 for Gabon this year.

That is 18 percent down from the peak of $5,214 touched in 1996 at the height of the oil boom, but still generous when compared with the average of $475 for Sub-Saharan African as a whole.

Corruption and the mismanagement of Gabon's existing resources have contributed to declining standards in public services.

In its 2002 report Escaping the Curse of Oil? The Case of Gabon, the IMF said: Although spending on public health and education has tended to be rather high in Gabon, results have been disappointing.

It cited examples of contracts being awarded to the cronies of senior government officials and the appearance of totally ficticious contracts in government accounts.

The European Union and the Islamic Development Bank had allocated funds for the upkeep of the free school bus service, the spark for last week s riots.

However, Gabon's main daily newspaper, L Union, accused the government of reallocating this cash to other areas such as election campaigning. It also accused the government of buying second hand buses from Morocco rather than new ones.

The financial constraints on the government are not just visible to Gabon s schoolchildren and students.

Even new school buses would not survive long bumping through the Libreville s increasingly potholed streets, which the government no longer repairs regularly. Outside the capital the roads are even worse.

There is no main road linking Libreville with the oil city of Port-Gentil, which lies 100 km to the south as the crow flies. To travel overland between the two, drivers have to negotiate over 600km of bumpy rural roads. According to airport officials, 80 percent of people who make the journey choose to fly instead.

The flight takes just 15 minutes and costs about US $ 120 return. But the Gabonese are lucky that they are still rich enough to afford that.

01 / 23 / 2004

IRIN

"Equatorial Guinea-Gabon: UN mediates dispute over Corisco Bay islands"

Equatorial Guinea and Gabon have agreed that a UN mediator should settle their territorial dispute over a handful of small islands that hold the key to potentially oil-rich offshore waters.

The foreign ministers of both countries signed a communiqui in New York on 19 January, accepting the appointment of Yves Fortier, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, as mediator, and outlining several steps to be taken in future talks.

The dispute concerns Mbanie, Cocotiers and Congas, three small islands in Corisco Bay, just north of the Gabonese capital Libreville, near the border with the continental territory of Equatorial Guinea.

The dispute has been simmering away quietly since 1972 and has prevented oil companies from carrying out a full exploration of the nearby offshore waters.

However, it came to a head in February 2003, when Gabonese Defence Minister Ali Bongo, the son of President Omar Bongo, visited the Corisco Bay islands and reasserted his country's territorial claim to them.

Gabon and Equatorial Guinea are already major oil exporters and Nicholas Shaxson, a Berlin-based expert on oil and gas issues in Africa, said there was a good chance that the disputed waters held large commercially exploitable reserves.

There are fields on both sides of the Corisco Bay area. These wells generally have reserves of several hundred thousand barrels of oil and there are very probably more wells of a similar size here, he told IRIN.

The Corisco Bay dispute is the latest of several border quarrels to arise in Africa, where hopes of finding oil have encouraged both sides to dig in their heels.

Nearby Nigeria has been arguing with Cameroon for years over the disputed Bakassi peninsular and hopes of finding oil onshore have exacerbated Ethiopia's border dispute with Eritrea over the small town of Badme.

The underlying problem is that Africa's modern boundaries were drawn up by European colonizers 100 or more years ago and all too often they were not clearly demarcated. Even where land boundaries were thrashed out and by the people who lived there, many maritime boundaries have remained vague.

One European expert in maritime law familiar with the Corisco Bay dispute said the Spanish colonial authorities in Equatorial Guinea removed a French presence on the disputed islands in the mid-1950's without provoking any protest from Paris. The argument over their ownership only reemerged two decades later after both Gabon and Equatorial Guinea had become independent, he noted.

Shaxson, who is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, said the United States was particularly keen to get the Corisco Bay and Bokassi Peninsula disputes settled quickly so that oil companies could move in their drilling rigs.

Concerned about the security of oil supplies from the turbulent Middle East, Washington is made no secret of its ambition to import more oil from more reliable sources in West Africa.

The United States is particularly keen to get disputes in the area resolved as quickly as possible, worried as it is about the future of OPEC, Shaxson said.

When Ali Bongo visited Mbanie, a 30-hectare island inhabited by a handful of fishermen, and declared it part of Gabon, there was a swift reaction from Equatorial Guinea.

Prime Minister Candido Muatetema Rivas said in a radio broadcast: My government expresses its deep concern and its indignation vis-a-vis Gabon s illegal occupation of the small island of Mbanii.

The African Union and United Nations then intervened to try and resolve the dispute before rising tensions got out of hand.

Gabon, whose oilfields are mainly operated by the French multinational TotalFinaElf, is a mature oil producer which is struggling to maintain its current output of 350,000 barrels per day.

A diplomatic source familiar with the region said that France, the former colonial power, had in the past lent strong support to Gabon's claim to the disputed islands, which could hold the key to bolstering Gabon's falling reserves.

Equatorial Guinea, on the other hand, only discovered oil in 1995 and is increasing its oil and gas production rapidly. The small country has already reached Gabon's level of output and will soon overtake it.

However, whereas France controls the oilfields Gabon, Equatorial Guinea's offshore oilfields are mostly operated by the US oil giants ExxonMobil, Amerada Hess and Marathon.

It is very acrimonious, Shaxson said. President Omar Bongo is being usurped as the oil power in the region by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema (of Equatorial Guinea), who is now asserting himself. Bongo in the past helped out Nguema but now the tables have turned somewhat.

According to the Bank of Central African States (BEAC), which manages the CFA franc currency used by both countries, Equatorial Guinea has already overtaken Gabon in terms of national prosperity, even if the full benefits of black gold do not filter down from the ruling elite to ordinary people.

BEAC estimates that thanks to the oil bonanza of the past decade Equatorial Guinea's 500,000 people now enjoy a gross domestic (GDP) per capita income of nearly US$7,000.

Gabon's 1.2 million inhabitants, on the other hand, have a GDP per capita of less than $5,000.

However, that is still 10 times the average for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated that in 2001, Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole had an average GDP per capita of just $475.

While Washington may be pushing for a quick solution to the Corisco Bay dispute, the UN mediation is not guaranteed to produce a quick fix.

Nigeria and Cameroon refered their dispute over the Bakassi Peninsula - 1,000 square km of densely populated swamp land - to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 1994.

However, Nigeria rejected the court's ruling in October 2002, that the territory should belong to Cameroon.

As a result, the dispute smoulders on.