Impoverished West African workers organize and fight

Mali and Niger are so poor that many young men, and some young women, spend two years walking across the Sahara desert to Morocco. There they risk their lives trying to climb the fortified fences around Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish enclaves in Morocco, or try to slip into Spain by boat.

They are in search of a job that pays enough to help their family. Many, if they are caught and deported back home, make the dangerous trip again.

The United Nations Human Devel opment Program considers Mali, Niger and the Central African Republic (CAR) among the 10 poorest countries in the world. All are former colonies that for generations were robbed of their resources and even their people, laying the basis for their “indebtedness” today.

CAR stops paying government workers

The CAR government was so destitute at the end of February 2005 that it stopped paying its 20,000 employees. Relying on the solidarity of their families and the community and expecting they would get paid sooner or later, they kept on working. Finally, the workers’ patience was exhaust ed by mid-October and the Central African Workers Union (USTC) called a strike.

They went back to work in the beginning of November, under threats and promises. CAR’s president, François Bozizé, said, “We don’t have any money to pay you, that comes from abroad. We are between the hammer and the anvil and it’s only your work that can save us.”

But the workers went back out on strike in the middle of November.

In early December, France came through with a loan of 4 million euros, which allowed the CAR to pay salaries and feed its troops through April. France is the CAR’s former colonial ruler and still plays a dominant economic and military role in the country.

Having received another loan, the CAR finally scraped up enough money by the end of December to pay salaries through the end of May.

The USTC, after a series of heated general assemblies, decided to “suspend the strike.” Noel Ramadan, the deputy secretary general of the USTC, told the prime minister, according to the BBC, “We do not want our comrades to face administrative harassment after work resumption. We would like workers based in the various provinces to receive also their salaries. The government should ensure that all civil servants throughout the country receive their salaries till the month of May 2005.”

According to the latest reports from the CAR, the workers are still back on the job.

While the USTC was nominally striking against its employer, the government of the CAR, it was really putting pressure on France, which could see a small, but for Paris profitable, portion of its sphere of influence in Africa facing the real risk of chaos and a collapsed government. So it stepped in, but not far enough to satisfy the workers entirely.

Mali: a golden poverty

Mali is one of the main producers of gold in Africa, after South Africa and Ghana. Some years Mali produces more than Tanzania, others less. There are a handful of large, modern operations in the country, mainly along its southern border with Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast and Guinea, as well as a large number of sites where hand panning is done.

Gold is now more important to Mali than its traditional cotton.

Yet Mali is so poor and so indebted that the research group CADD-Mali (Coalition of African Alternatives, Debt and Development-Mali) estimates it will take 106 years for Mali to pay off its loans.

Mali avoided the extreme hunger that killed hundreds of people a week in neighboring Niger, where locusts ate whatever the drought left. But Mali still had a lot of trouble feeding its people in 2005.

The open pit mine at Sanso, a small city in southwest Mali, is run by the Morila Co., a subsidiary of the South African transnational Randgold. In July 2005, 530 Malian workers walked out and the struggle is still going on. A subcontractor called Somadex manages its day-to-day operations.

Somadex refused to pay the bonuses it was contractually obliged to pay since 2000. After the union took it to court, Somadex paid the bonuses but treated them as a salary advance, which meant the workers really didn’t get anything.

So the union struck for what was supposed to be three days. The workers had other grievances. Their housing had no electricity, no running water, no plumbing. Their rates of pay were not fixed. The cyanide and arsenic Somadex used to extract the gold polluted the air the workers had to breathe and the ground water.

Somadex fired 17 miners for striking and accused a union leader, Amadou Nioumanta, of being a “thief” and a “communist.”

The union then decided to stay out indefinitely. After 25 days, Somadex tried to break the strike by locking out the workers. After two buses transporting scabs were burned, the cops arrested 35 miners.

Nine of them were still in jail as of Jan. 15. Four members of the union’s executive board and Amadou Nioumanta are underground. The Morila mine, according to a Jan. 11 report in the South African newspaper Business Day, is set to resume shipments any day now, once its differences with the Malian government over tax payments are resolved.

One of the points the miners’ strike raised was a sweetheart deal that Randgold had gotten from Mali.

Another mine opened up in September 2005 near Sikasso on Mali’s southern border with the Ivory Coast. More than 20,000 West African nationals from Mali, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Niger and Ghana showed up looking for work. This is the context in which the strike at Sanso took place. The miners there knew very well what they faced but they also knew what they had to do to get what they needed.