A few of you have asked about the development 'needs' of Sao Tome and Principe STP. So, I figured maybe my next blog should offer a view of some of these issues, all be it one that is limited by the digital looking glass of a blog and my limited experiance of the country. I won't offer any grand ideas on how to fix these problems, I'll just fill you in on what they are and what others have said. Where I can I'll direct you to others who have offered solutions. The read through should give you an idea of the place too.
Infrastructure, transport & services
Relative to the fishing villages I have seen and the few homes I have visited and been into here in the city, I live in comfort. I have running water, power and wireless internet (though it is more like bad dial up). Most Sao Tomeans clearly do not have these services. Even those that do must suffer fairly regular service failures. On average the power will go out twice a week, sometimes more sometimes less. Obviously, if the power goes the internet goes and so too does the water if it is pumped.
Power here is derived from diesel burning plants (the vast majority) and a small Hydro plant - believe it or not. Oil comes from Angola at a subsidised rate - I believe this is a hang over from the communist days - both countries used to be communist (African style). The power company I believe is also state controlled. Oil must come in regularly as there is no such thing as an emergency or strategic reserve here. If Angola decided to turn off the flow, or ran out of oil, the power here would go. Unsurprisingly, the demand for power here also outstrips the capacity and therefor part of the reason why the power goes out is because they have rolling blackouts in order to share the power around. If you are lucky, like I am, you live in an area where an important minister or the PM live and these blackouts are few, limited to the evenings or don't happen. Most Sao Tomeans cook with Charcoal - from the rapidly disappearing large rain-forest trees. Or if you can afford it imported Angolan Gas.
Obviously, while internet and power services are for those who can pay, water is provided through a surprisingly large number of communal water collection points attachd to a water grid and scattered not only around the city but as far down south as Angolares which is the last major town before you get to Porto Alegre where I surfed. These mean most people have access to relatively clean water (I'm not sure if this is treated but its not downstream river water which I'll get to later). The water grid is a Portuguese leftover but I believe the water access points which have been added to the grid and extended it down south, were funded by Spanish Aid and they appear to be one of the most useful aid projects I have yet seen - anywhere In the world.
Roads in the city, are about equal to those i have experienced in the Solomons and Tonga. There are a lot of potholes but some sections are pretty good, there are even roundabouts and the main drag has centre lines! There are also some (very limited) road signs which I don't recall ever seeing in the Pacific except for in Fiji. Vehicles are diverse, there are your usual bombs that belch black smoke and can only drive at about 20kmph before shaking themselves to pieces. There are a lot of these cars. There are also a lot of motorcycles - many more than I have seen in the Pacific. There are, to my mind, surprisingly few white Toyotas sporting NGO or UN family logos and therefore the INGO presence strikes me as being small. Having said this, I know the UNDP, UNICEF, USAID, Portugal, Spain, the EU and Taiwan have projects here - I'm just not sure how big. Outside of the beat up cars there are a surprisingly large number of shiny new four wheel drives. Many of these have Diplomatic plates which is one explanation bu
t many others don't??????? Taxis are a major road presence and they are usually painted completely yellow, except for the motorbike taxis. Bicycles also play a huge role in transport here and have got me thinking about how useful they might be in the Pacific especially with rising fuel prices. Here everyone from kids, to businessmen to merchants use bikes to move goods and themselves. I have seen surprisingly few modern boats though they are about - they are usually small launches. I have not seen a single modern sail boat. Interestingly, all the fishermen I have seen, including the ones we often buy dinner from, still fish from beautifully carved wooden boats. I have seen maybe two Fibreglass 'banana boats' which I might add in Honiara far outweighed the few wooden boats I saw.
The buildings here can be grouped in roughly three ways. First, there are the once beautiful, but now archaic and dilapidated Portuguese colonial homes that make up the city centre. If these were done up and repaired the little city centre would be one of the most beautiful places I have visited - however they haven't been so its not. There are many vacant buildings with broken windows, pieces of walls and verandas falling off etc. The sidewalks are broken and when it rains the dust turns to mud and there is often the distinct smell of human waste, though, this is not overpowering. Outside of the city centre you tend to hit wooden homes built from local wood (cut into timber planks). These are often on stilts and can be qu
ite nice little buildings. I imagine this is what most Sao Tomeans live in. I have seen no Slums and i don't think there are any - at least nothing like I have seen in South Africa. Having been inside a few of these wooden homes, they are basic but usually have three or four separate rooms and are waterproof. Third, there are the 'new' buildings. These range from giant villas to 1970/80s concrete blocks, to ex-pat homes like the one I live in. Most of the homes aren't too bad. The villas are over the top and the concrete blocks look like they came straight out of east Germany.
Hygiene, health & ethnicity
Compared to my limited experience with Africans living on the continent, Sao Tomeans are probably some of the healthiest Africans I've met. There is no real shortage of food here as in the Pacific the climate allows just about anything to grow and the ocean provides all protein needs. That's not to say much isn't imported, but still, the bulk of food consumed here is local (with the exception of rice). This is a distinct difference in my mind to the food situation in the Polynesian Pacific and increasingly in the Melanesian Pacific. I have seen very few obviously sick people though there are many crippled and visually impaired - we run a few projects in this area. Nonetheless, it is well understood that disease is a major problem here. There have been recent Typhoid outbreaks, hepatitis is rampant as is stomach illness. Above all is Malaria which almost any Sao Tomean will tell you they have had on multiple occasions. This region of the world has some of the worst rates and most antibiotic resistant strains. While not only killing hundreds, particularly children, it is a major burden on peoples productivity, knocking them out for weeks or months.
Hygiene is a slightly different matter. While there is access to relatively clean water, and rivers and the ocean work as showers and baths, human waste is more problematic. I have seen both men and women stop in the streets and urinate (all be it sort of discretely - think back turned), and just about any ocean side property is used for doing number 2 - as a surfer this breaks my heart. Alternatively, I have heard that there is a business which collects human waste from the few septic tanks that exist, processes it and sells it as fertiliser. However, I haven't seen this myself.
Ethnically, there is an amazing mix of African culture here. Oddly enough, this is the result of the island once being one of the most horrific and long lasting slave stations in the world. Another positive twist of fate that has come from this is that there are few if any ethnic tensions here - at least nothing like those that have frequently so destroyed the social fabric of other African countries. It is as if past identities were wiped away in the post slavery independence era and there was no option but to build a new one as Sao Tomeans. There are short people, tall people, skinny people, curly haired people, straight haired people, light skinned and dark skinned etc. There are very few 'fat' people and the men at least are extremely well built and musculer, be they thin or big. I barely held my own in a game of football with the local men the other day - hard work.
Having said this, there are clear disparities in wealth. Those who live in the north of the Island - closer to the city, tend to be wealthier, better educated, healthier, and have access to more reliable services. The reverse can be said of those in the south. Typically, many have told me I would have had to pay a lot more if we had gotten stuck in a river up North!
Environment
The environment here is st
unning. Tropical rain-forest, huge trees, waterfalls, unique flora and fauna and amazing marine life. However, there are major problems. Timber for houses has made the big forest trees scarce as has the need for charcoal. Taiwan has provided the city with giant dumpsters for the collection of rubbish and on the whole the city is clean for a developing country. However, there is still litter everywhere. There is an informal dumping ground right by the airport - I run past the kids picking through it. I know of no formal landfill though I assume there is one. This is also a small island with rising waters and many coastal towns, fortunately it is not on the hurricane path. People also talk much of the Spanish fishing fleets that come and ravage STPs waters as there is only a very basic coast guard - I haven't seen there boat - not sure they have one. The best simple example I can think of in relation to environmental impact that might be easy to imagine is washing clothes.
Typically, most villages, towns and cities are built next to a river or stream. Obviously this was and probably still is in many cases for drinking water. It is also for washing.
Here, you can not pass by a river or stream during the day and not see at least 5 women (usually more like 25) washing clothing. They have usually blocked sections of the river with rocks to create pools and they stand waist deep signing and washing as a large communal group. This is back breaking work and the sun here is killer but it is one of the coolest things I have yet seen. When the clothes are washed (soaked scrubbed, banged on rocks) they are then lain out to dry on the grass, bushes, road etc around the river edge. If you glanced out the window of a fast moving car you might think a fabric truck had exploded as the colours include everything and they literally spread the clothes out over anything and anywhere. The downside of this practice is the downstream effect it has. At any one time there may be up to 5 groups of women at different points along the stream washing clothing and they are using your regular washing machine washing powder imported from Portugal. This stuff is not environmentally friendly. When I first arrived here, I noticed that the river water by the river mouth close to where I live was a cloudy greyish colour. Without much thought I assumed it was probably some sort of natural runoff from the heavy rains which often occur upstream and that if it was pollution, washing detergent wasn't high on the list of ideas. The reality of course is that it is detergent washing downstream. Another teacher and I once went looking for some students who had been missing class in a village called Santana. To find one student we had to walk off into the jungle behind the family house and down to the river where the girl was washing clothes with the other women. Amongst the rock pools filled with singing women, laundry and detergent, I could see black fish the size of your hand swimming by the rocks edges - no doubt chocking on all the detergent. All rivers lead to the ocean and almost all protein sources for Sao Tomeans are fish.
Economics Oil, governance and Development....
STP has some 160,000 people and earns about 5 mill in exports from Cocoa annually. Bar a fledgling tourist industry owned by the elite, Cocoa is its only major revenue earner and the cocoa industry here is dilapidated and lacking important technologies. Most Sao Tomeans get buy through subsistence farming and fishing with some small local trading. STP is therefore AID Dependent, receiving about 30 mill annually - it is also a Heavily Indebted Poor Country (HIPC).
Typically, it is also corrupt. There are stories of aid money being siphoned off in different ways, politicians own key businesses and abuse their powers, and there are even stories of individuals flying hard currency in on small planes from the continent and unloading it right there on the tarmac. I don't doubt it as I can walk across the airfield.
The government provides a bare minimum of services and policies are few and far between and often outdated. Similar to the Solomons, many things don't get done because politicians don't expect to be in power for long enough to actually achieve anything which likely promotes the run on government funds. Govt, coalitions collapse frequently and as I understand it party members are not as loyal as one might expect.
In many ways the small NGO community here provides many of the basic services one might expect a government to oversee - education, health, etc. This frequently leads to NGO clashes with the govt who argues these roles are its responsibility but then fails to provide.
Most of what I have read suggests that STP can be 'developed' by promoting the following sectors. Most of this comes from the esteemed J Sachs and his Columbia team who have set up a webpage http://www.earth.columbia.edu/cgsd/STP/index_actionplan.htm and who have been providing pro-bono (no one knows why) development advice to the STP government. There are rumours that this relationship has since soured???:
Agriculture and fishery management/reform - land here is not well utilised and is essentially still mono-crop cocoa. There are entire cocoa, palm, and coffee plantations here that sit un
utilised. The coffee and the chocolate was once some of the most sought in the world and I have tried both and they ARE good - especially the Chocolate which is unreal! The soil is rich volcanic soil - almost entirely organic as there have been no fertiliser imports for years and the climate will allow just about anything to grow. The fisheries speak for themselves. This is an island with huge marine resources, but it needs the ability to police this territory and to make sustainable fishing agreements.
Tourism expansion - this place is stunningly beautiful, equal to anything in the Caribbean or Pacific and with its own unique differences. I might also add that people are extremely friendly and polite, and it is the safest place in all of Africa - I am starting to feel like it is safer than parts of NZ. I will note problems here - for example, the village where I surfed actually used to live in an Island about 10 minutes south. The entire village was forced to move when a up market retreat was built on the Island.
Infrastructure - the roads need to be improved, the airport needs to be improved, and ports need to be improved. After years of fighting in West Africa trade with the continent was not really much of an option, but things have settled and this is one clear option as is increased trade with Europe, especially Portugal the old Coloniser. Services also clearly need to improve and there is a lack of private service providers. Power is a good example. There are ample rivers here and these could be harnessed using small scale (no dams) turbines - in fact companies have offered to explore this in the past and mutually beneficial arrangements could be made.
Heath - the diseases here are easily preventable and manageable. A Taiwanese run Malaria control project has had amazing results and if continued could reduce the risk significantly more than it already has. HIV/AIDS is thought at most to be only at about 1.5% of the population.
Education - overall, education is the king pin. People here want education so badly. Primary enrolment rates are high but then it falls as there isn't much infrastructure after that. My students are smart intelligent hard working youth who want to work and achieve things for this country - there is no absence of will. When the Portuguese left, they had not trained anyone in anything. As a result farmers here have very limited knowledge regarding their crops and could be massively advance with some technical training and support with bulk transport, cold storage etc...
Oil - Finally, there is oil. Clearly, there are many who think Oil will save STP and there are many who are worried about what it might do. I just finished a book called 'Africas Poisoned Wells' (recommended to anyone interested). My info is pretty much from that but it is a well researched book. In the late 90's a tiny American firm ERHC (which had little experience with oil) negotiated a 'feasibility' contract with the govt here. This didn't mean that they would look for oil, drill etc. This meant they would negotiate with other oil companies for the rights to drill on behalf of STP (sounds dodgy already). STP sits right off of Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Congo Republic (not to be confused with the DRC). These countries are rich in Oil and Nigeria is known for its 'light sweet crude' the best for making petrol. Therefore, as oil prices have gone up and the mid east has become more unreliable, the snooping for oil has moved elsewhere, and Africa has been ideal. Extend this thinking further and the simple theory is that if all these other countries close to STP have oil, then why not STP. The only barrier 'was' the deep-water, but as we know in NZ or should from the recent oil hunt down south, the technology is getting better and the price higher. To cut a long story short, ERHC, cut a scandalous deal where by they would receive 40% of any profits. They were eventually bought by a Nigerian firm after Nigeria strategically disputed STPS territorial water boundary and therefore the 22 drill zones in the region that STP was trying to get firms interested in. Not wanting to mess with Nigeria, STP essentially capitulated in the dispute and settled with a deal allowing Nigeria to split profits from a 'joint development zone' 60:40 in Nigeria's favour. I should add that this came after a bloodless coup here in STP which some say Nigeria backed, and which then forced to hand back power to the STP president - possibly as a simple display of power.
Once the joint development zone was agreed upon it was opened to drill bids. In 2005 the big multinationals rolled up, Chevron and ExonMobile. They offered their terms and Nigeria agreed. Chevron and ExonMobile then made their initial deposits - to a Nigerian bank - in order to began looking for Oil. The bank insisted that STP agree to the terms also, despite Nigerias original role as controller of all Oil deals in the zone. Much to Nigeria's luck, STP was in the middle of a public service strike (driven by the desire for oil money to increase minimum wages here). STP needed to pay up or it faced no public service. So, STP agreed to the deal and took the money from the Nigerian bank and settled the internal strike while simultaneously allowing two of the worlds most notorious Oil companies in the front door which Nigeria is the gatekeeper for. The irony of all this is that about a decade after this all started, there is still no 'viable' oil... Sao Tomeans are sceptical but still cling to the hope of getting rich quickly and oil bringing them into the 21st century - development by black gold....
So, that is a viewpoint of STP and its 'development' challenges - in a nut shell.
with the locals.
m cans of the small dump site that is also at the end of our road. I jumped over a few large stagnant puddles and walked into the over head bright green grass that has exploded in colour and height since the rains started this month. I followed the narrow path through the grass until it abruptly ended at the edge of the airport runway, I looked both ways and walked across the rough tarmac feeling the heat through my warn sandals - one of which the new puppy had a go at last night. Back into the grass on the other side of the runway and I embarked down a single mud path that I am familiar with from walking the dog. Ever mindful of the 2m long Cobras that lurk here (the only poisons snake on the island and introduced?) I cut my way through the wet grass until the familiar black lava rock boulders of the runway's far outer break-wall appeared.
towards the beach that curves out and away from the runway break-wall, I could see a group of about 5 meninos (boys) bodyboarding in the beach break. I often walk this end of the beach/break-wall and watch the kids body surf the slushy waves in the distance. Today though, the waves were actually surfable (just), both at the break-wall and down at the beach though they looked better at the break-wall.
end of the break-wall to get a better look at the swell coming in - by this stage I had managed in very broken Portuguese to explain that I surfed. This posse of young grommets came to meet us, bounding down the lava rock carrying their boards on their heads like a row of ants dressed in coloured Y fronts that seemed brighter than they actually were, contrasted against their black skin and the grey light from a cloudy sky. They jumped straight past the white guy and his teenage amigos and into the swell.
tting out I realised I had ripped a fin clean off my board. There were some large boulders not too far under the surface and I guess I nicked one on one of my two waves??? The spot wasn't exactly the deepest I've surfed...
