Africa, energia, Angola, povertà Nyt 06-06-16
Nell’Angola ricca di petrolio, il colera imperversa sui
più poveri
SHARON LaFRANIERE
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L’Angola è
nel pieno di un boom di introiti petroliferi, 1,4 mn. b/g esportati; nel 2005 crescita
economica +18%; il surplus di bilancio del governo oltre $2MD.
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Per il 2006 attesi
$16,8MD d’entrate petrolifere, oltre il doppio dei $7,5MD del 2004.
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Per il 2007
previsto un incremento del 30%; il governo angolano ha più denaro di quanto
riesca a spendere, e non riesce a risolvere neppure il problema dell’acqua
potabile e delle fognature, per corruzione (l’Angola è al 7° posto per
corruzione nella lista di Trasparency International), incompetenza e i 27 anni
di guerra civile (iniziata nel 1975, anno dell’indipendenza dal Portogallo e
continuata fino al 2002), che hanno riempito la città di rifugiati.
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Secondo un
rapporto del ministero degli Esteri (americano?) del 2002 la ricchezza del
paese è concentrata nelle mani di una ristretta elite, composta da funzionari
governativi.
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Intanto è in
corso un’epidemia di colera, una delle peggiori degli ultimi dieci anni in
Africa, che dopo un decennio senza colera nel paese ha trovato gran parte della
popolazione senza difese immunitarie; da febbraio sono morte otre 1600 persone,
ammalate 43 000; gran parte della città non ha fognature; solo la metà
degli slum ha una latrina anche solo all’esterno; l’acqua venduta da 10 000
acquaioli nella capitale Luanda è pompata direttamente dal fiume Bengo, molto
inquinato, ed è usata anche da bere.
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Da un
quartiere di Luanda si è diffuso in 14 delle 18 province dell’Angola.
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L’acqua è
venduta a 12 cent di $ al gallone (4 lt.), una somma astronomica per un paese dove
i 2/3 della popolazione vive con meno di $2 al giorno, equivalente a 160 volte
il prezzo pagato dai più benestanti per l’acqua delle pompe.
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Solo 1/6
delle famiglie di Lunata dispone di acqua corrente, per lo più proveniente da
una pompa della comunità.
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I poveri
limitano a 2 galloni il giorno il consumo quotidiano per persona (tutto
compreso), ben inferiore al minimo di 5 galloni raccomandato dall’ONU, e 1/26
della media di consumo dei paesi occidentali (dati Medici senza frontiere). Il
governo ha iniziato a distribuire acqua potabile gratuitamente, ma ha
organizzato finora 20 camion contro i 300 privati, e ai primi di giugno il primo
doveva ancora entrare in città.
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Il comitato
di crisi del governo ha iniziato ad operare dopo due mesi dall’inizio
dell’epidemia, e ha destinato solo $5mn. di finanziamenti d’emergenza.
Nel 1994 un’associazione per gli aiuti allo sviluppo calcolò che ci
sarebbero voluti 22 000 camion a rimorchio per sgomberare Lunata dai
rifiuti, e allora aveva solo la metà degli attuali 4,5mn. d’abitanti.
Nyt 06-06-16
In
Oil-Rich Angola, Cholera Preys Upon Poorest
By SHARON LaFRANIERE
LUANDA, Angola, June 10 — In a nation whose multibillion-dollar
oil boom should arguably make its people rich enough to drink Evian, the water
that many in this capital depend on goes by a less fancy name: Bengo.
The Bengo River passes north of here,
its waters dark with grit, its banks strewn with garbage.
Two dozen roaring pumping stations suck in 1.3 million gallons from the
river each day, filling 450 tanker trucks that in turn supply 10,000 vendors
across Luanda’s endless slums. The vendors then fill
the jerry cans and washtubs of the city’s slum dwellers, who buy the water to
drink and bathe in.
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This is one reason, health experts here say, that Luanda’s
slums are now the center of one of the worst cholera epidemics to strike Africa
in nearly a decade, an outbreak that has sickened 43,000 Angolans and killed
more than 1,600 since it began in February.
But it is only one reason. Cholera
typically spreads through contact with contaminated water or sewage, and in
Luanda’s slums, both are everywhere. Neighborhoods here are ringed by mountains
of garbage, often soaked by rivulets of human waste.
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Only about half of slum dwellers have even an outdoor latrine.
Children stripped to their underwear
dance through sewage-clogged creeks and slide down garbage dumps on sleds made
of sheet metal into excrement-fouled puddles.
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Much of the city has no drainage system; in heavy rains, the filthy water rises hip-high in some of the
poorest dwellings.
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One development group estimated that it would take 22,000
dump trucks to clear away the trash. That was in 1994, when Luanda had half the
population of 4.5 million it has now.
"I have never seen anything like
it," said David Weatherill, a water and sanitation expert for Doctors Without Borders,
which is leading the response to the epidemic. "You see conditions like
this on a smaller scale. But I have never seen it on such a huge scale. It is
quite shocking."
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Angola is in the midst of a gusher in oil revenue, its
hotels crammed with oil executives and its harbor filled with tankers carrying
away the 1.4 million barrels of crude pumped here each day. The economy grew by
18 percent last year. The government racked up a budget surplus of more than $2
billion.
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This year it is expected to
take in $16.8 billion in revenue, well over twice the $7.5 billion it received
in 2004. Next year, revenue is expected to rise by a third again, almost all
because of oil.
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Economists say the government simply has more money than it
can spend.
Yet it seems powerless to address even the basic issues of clean water
and sewers that would make such epidemics entirely
preventable — a paradox that
critics attribute to corruption, incompetence or the hangover of a 27-year
civil war that flooded the capital with refugees, or all three.
"We are talking about a government
that has the means," said Stephan Goetghebuer, East Africa coordinator for
Doctors Without Borders. "There are a lot of things they could be doing.
The living conditions are really terrible, and they are terrible even if you
compare them to other places in Africa."
Sebastião Veloso, Angola’s health
minister, said the scope of the problem defied a quick fix. "We just do
our best," he said. "The lack of infrastructure is a very complicated
administrative problem. We are doing our part at the Ministry of Health, and
the rest of government must do its part. We are pressuring the government, because
otherwise these epidemics will continue."
Only one in six Luandan households is lucky enough to have running water, and for many of them, it comes from a community standpipe,
according to Development Workshop, a nonprofit group in Angola.
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The often-contaminated river water from trucks that roam
the slums costs up to 12 cents a gallon — a hefty sum in a nation where
two-thirds of the people live on less than $2 a day, and up to 160 times the
price paid in better-off neighborhoods with piped water.
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So the poor ration their water
use, limiting themselves to
about two gallons a day per person for drinking, bathing, washing clothes and
cleaning. That is far below the five-gallon daily minimum recommended by the
United Nations — and one twenty-sixth the average use in Western countries,
according to Doctors Without Borders.
In an attempt to beat back the epidemic,
the government, with the help
of the United Nations, is distributing a limited amount of free clean water.
The few distribution points are easy to spot. Hundreds of people rise before
dawn to set their plastic buckets in lines that stretch for blocks. The crowds
remain long after the water is gone.
One afternoon last week, dozens of
people crowded around one empty plastic water tank about eight miles from
downtown. "They are waiting for the last drop," said José Mateus, a
neighborhood coordinator.
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No one knows precisely why
cholera arose out of the slums this year after a cholera-free decade in Angola.
Epidemiologists say the long
absence of the disease worsened the outbreak because the population had no
built-up immunity.
Once it began, not even the tidiest slum
household could halt it.
It first hit Boa Vista, a shantytown
minutes from downtown. Ombrina Cabanga, a 20-year-old mother of a 2-year-old
girl, did everything to protect herself, said her sister-in-law, Oriana
Gabriel. She washed vegetables, rinsed plates and cleaned the latrine the
family shares with three others. As the Health Ministry recommended, she used
bleach to disinfect the drinking water she bought from the neighborhood vendor.
But her house is a few feet from a giant
trash-filled gulley. Her latrine, like everyone else’s, drains directly into
it. And she sold soap every day in the city’s famously squalid outdoor market,
a job she hoped to escape by taking adult literacy classes.
One Tuesday in late March, she came home
and vomited into a bucket. Two nights later, she was dead.
"I am just a working man, I don’t
know why the government doesn’t help us," said her husband, Vieira Muieba,
27, a construction worker. "I don’t know where the money goes. We become
angry but we don’t know what to do."
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From Boa Vista, the epidemic moved along the major highways
to all but 4 of the nation’s 18 provinces. Maria André
lost her 15-year-old daughter, 13-year-old niece and 4-year-old nephew in the
span of two days. Five other children in the household were also taken ill but
recovered.
Ms. André is racked with guilt nearly
three weeks after the deaths. "I don’t know what happened," she said.
"I heard about the disease on the radio, and all of a sudden, it was here.
They were all healthy and now, they are dead.
"It is not easy to lose three
children all at once."
Angolan government officials say there
is no overnight solution to the lack of basic water and sanitation. In late
May, President José Eduardo
dos Santos promised new measures to improve conditions, including moving
Luandans out of the most appalling slums.
But the government’s plans are in their
infancy and, despite the gusher of oil revenues, short on financing.
Consider the government’s plan to take
over some of the provision of water to Luanda’s slums. Four months into Angola’s cholera epidemic, 20 trucks
have been ordered — minuscule compared to the fleet of more than 300 private
trucks now supplying the poor. As of early June, Mr. Veloso, the health
minister, was still waiting for the first delivery.
The government’s harshest critics blame
corruption for the abysmal living conditions. Transparency International, which promotes good governance
worldwide, ranks Angola as the world’s seventh most corrupt nation.
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The State Department said in a
2002 report that Angola’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite,
in part made up of government officials who had enriched themselves on an
enormous scale.
Other diplomats and analysts say Angola’s ruling party is still
trying to get on its feet after a civil war that raged almost nonstop from
1975, when Angola gained independence from Portugal, until mid-2002.
Dauda Wurie, a project officer for the
United Nations Children’s Fund, said the war had eviscerated the government’s corps of competent managers,
leaving disarray.
"I am not defending them," he
said of the government officials. "They buy big cars. They live in big
houses. But it would be wrong to expect that everything will turn around just
because war stopped."
Doctors Without Borders officials say the government response to the
outbreak has been woefully slow and underfinanced. A crisis committee began work
only two and a half months after the epidemic began, and the government has set
aside a mere $5 million in emergency money to fight the disease.
Assessing the water taken by private
truckers from the Bengo fell to Doctors Without Borders. Last month it issued its report:
laboratory tests in April showed the raw river water was unsafe to drink.
But only one in 10 truckers chlorinated water tanks; the others simply delivered untreated water to the city.
Presented with those findings, the government did nothing, the report
states. So Doctors Without Borders organized the distribution of free chlorine.
It now plans to insist that the truckers pour chlorine crystals into their
tanks while inspectors watch, lest they sell them instead.
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How much those truckers — and
the neighborhood vendors they supply — earn in profits is unclear. But Janetta
Jamela’s bedroom in eastern Luanda is one hint. Fifteen bags of concrete are
stacked against the wall — to add three new bedrooms and a new kitchen and
bathroom.
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Since she and her husband
scraped up $200 to build an underground water tank three years ago, she
estimated, she has earned about $235 a month selling water — $75 a month more
than her husband earns as a government security officer.
"But you have to have the $200 to
start with," she said.
The cholera epidemic is now waning,
having run what epidemiologists call its natural, devastating course. But
without an improvement in slum conditions, said Mr. Weatherill, the group’s
water and sanitation expert, the respite may last only until the next rainy
season.
"Unless things change, we probably
will be back the next year," he said in a telephone interview, "and
the year after that."
New York Times