BY ATIA TILARIOUS AZOHNWI
Government, since seen as not showing concern to the plight of Pamol Plantations Plc, one of Cameroon’s agro-industrial outfits badly bruised by the socio-political unrest in the North West and South West Regions, has come to the rescue of the company. In fact, the Anglophone crisis only came to add to the problems of old factories and outdated mills rocking the company.
With the growing fragility of the social peace among the large labour force of Pamol Plantations Plc and its near collapse, President Paul Biya instructed the Minister of Finance and the Minister of Economy, Planning and Regional Development to take decisive steps towards the survival of the agro-industrial company. An estimated FCFA 12 billion has been approved by government for the company, with the construction of a new mill on course.
According to the General Manager of Pamol Plantations Plc, Chief Mekanya Okon Charles, there are fresh hopes for the company in 2019 and if all goes well, “there is no way Pamol can collapse anymore”.
In 2019, Pamol Plantations Plc will run on a budget – balanced in income and expenditure – of slightly over FCFA 20 billion ( twenty billion one hundred and sixty three million ninety thousand francs CFA). The budget, according to experts, was conceived within the framework of the Strategy Paper for Growth and Employment and the Rural Sector Development Strategy Paper of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development.
Unlike in previous budgets, the cost of rehabilitating Pamol Plantations has been incorporated in the capital expenditure, necessitated by the deepening crisis in the North West and South West Regions. The recurrent budget stands at 37.36% of the budget while investment is pegged at 62.64%.
Fresh hopes for workers as security solicited
As 2018 ebbed away, Chief Mekanya led Pamol’s management team to meet with workers in the plantations. Following measures taken by the Head of State towards appeasing the aggrieved population of the restive North West and South West Regions, Chief Mekanya and his team used the December meeting to preach a gospel of hope to workers.
Hear him: “We organised a trip to the plantations in December. I told myself that after the amnesty given by the Head of State to those who have been fighting and the efforts by the government to bring back serenity in the country, we thought that we too should play our own part in this venture.
“In as much as this has always been our cry and our endeavours to make things work, it has not been as successful as we would have wanted. We were thinking that with the hostilities in our area, and all the hardship that people have faced in the height of insecurity, we thought that the government would help us create an enabling environment for us to be able to work by attacking those terrorist camps.
“The whole thing has turned out to be some sort of armed robbery where these guys now get into the villages, kidnap and harass and ask for ransom. That is what is rife now. They put up barricades and checkpoints to ask for ransoms. This is especially so in the Ndian area, the road Kumba-Ekondo Titi and Ekondo-Titi-Mundemba. They have so many of those their checkpoints as they call it.
“We told ourselves that we should add our voice to the various initiatives of the Head of State, by going back to the plantations to call back people to work.”
Overgrown plantations, attacks on installations
Activities at Pamol have been paralysed for over a year with her plantations and factory operations grounded due to insecurity in the North West and South West Regions. Unidentified armed men are said to have caused a lot of destruction on Pamol’s assets. The plantations are all overgrown and have developed into secondary forests.
For the company to effectively resume her operations, much is therefore expected to be done to rehabilitate the plantations and installations. The workers are aware of this and have since asked for security from government for them to return to work.
The General Manager says, “Workers of Pamol are tired of waiting. Everybody wants to go back to work. All of us want to return to work. We have made correspondences to government in that light. Since November 2017, we have not been functioning. Remember that when they asked us for ransom and we could not pay, they blew off our dam in Lobe and since that is the heart of our operations, we cannot mill the palm fruits. If you cannot mill, why do you harvest? All operations were stopped.
“For Ndian, all the tanks are full since they could not evacuate oil from Ndian to Lobe. So, the whole of Ndian was grounded. Again, we saw that there was a shift of hostilities from Manyu. After Kembong where they were driven away, they sought refuge in Esoki which was their headquarters in Ndian. They would later move to Bekoko in Ndian Town. We all reported these to the competent authorities.
“The invaders were harassing the workers and chasing them away from their residences and work places. The workers were being threatened with kidnappings and death. In all these, we lost about five workers who were slain by these unidentified armed men.
“We told ourselves that now we are going into 2019 and our hopes are that things would function. That is how we made a budget of FCFA 20 billion to be able to run the year in our company.
“To bring back the fields by our assessment will cost us slightly over FCFA 1.4 billion. We will need to rehabilitate the plantations and equipment and installations which have been vandalised. All this is programmed in our budget for 2019. It will take time, but everything being equal, we will overcome. We have lost quite much but we think that if we have an enabling environment, we will pull through.
“If we don’t have security, how do we return to work? The security situation is improving. The hostilities have very much reduced but you know right now, nobody wants to take a risk. Before, the checkpoints were too many and the harassments rife. Now, they have gone down, but you don’t know when they can come up. The main centers of these their camps are still functioning. That is our main worry. Something has to be done to dislodge these camps so that people can return to their normal lives.”
Govt at Pamol’s rescue
According to Chief Mekanya, the cry of Pamol has always been for a new mill to be constructed.
“We have cried over the years. Since 2009, we have been asking the government to assist us build a new mill. You cannot run a company like this and expect it to be profitable when you run it on moribund appliances. The two factories we have are above 50 years old. That of Lobe was commissioned in 1967 and that of Ndian in 1968. You can imagine what they are today. No such factory can be profitable today given the latest technology available. We are even running less than the 15 tons per hour capacity of the mills. We are now running less than six tons per hour. The mills cannot even sustain our crop now. That is why the labour force is so high because they have to do what machines would otherwise have done.
“We saw that the only solution is to get a new mill. We have made a lot of requests from the government after failing to obtain external loans because of the current situation. Government has opted that they would like to help Pamol obtain a new mill for Ndian. Our request was approved by the Head of State who gave instructions to the Minister of Finance and the Minister of the Economy, Planning and Regional Development to make sure the money is disbursed to Pamol for the purchase of a new mill. The mill costs FCFA 9.5 billion. We have already made a down payment of 20 per cent to our suppliers, Sawipac in Malaysia. We are waiting for the other disbursements to be made so that the second phase can be paid. We have already had FCFA one billion and we are waiting for another FCFA one billion so we can send so the work can progress fast.
“It is expected that the mill will be ready in three years. We are supposed to carry out a due diligence mission to Malaysia between January and February with members of the board and the ministries concerned to see for themselves what the mill will look like upon completion.”
Workers congratulated for doggedness
During the meeting with the workers and members of the Ndian administration, Chief Mekanya saluted the steadfastness of the workers who have gone through thick and thin.
“We want to congratulate the workers who have stood the test of time despite all the harassment, torture and hardship they have gone through. They have resisted being there up till now. They have endured the pains and because of their presence, they have secured our installations. If they were not there, I can imagine what those invaders would have done to our installations. We want to congratulate the workers for all they have done. It’s just that we have no means to compensate them for that effort.”
The General Manager adds that: “We had a meeting with the workers and administration to tell them our plan of action. The meeting we had was to sensitise the workers and tell them that we on our part as management have hopes that things will get better. The government has approved us money for the mill to the tune of FCFA 6.5 billion which has been given. They had earlier given us FCFA 2 billion which takes the money to FCFA 8.5 billion. The other FCFA 1.1 billion was to come from Pamol which we will have to pay when money comes in. As I told you, the whole mill will cost us over FCFA 9.5 billion.
“Other areas too have been taken care of like the Bakassi project. The government has approved some funds for that to the tune of FCFA 2 billion. In a nutshell, we have close to FCFA 12 billion approved by government for 2019 projects for the company. We think that if things are stabilised and we are given an enabling environment to start work, we can raise FCFA 9 billion. From our farms, we have replanted and extended our plantations, with newly planted plantations coming to maturity, we are hopeful. Herakles Farms also planted in Ndian and they are counting on our mill.
“500 hectares of the Bakassi extension has been planted and we are hoping that another 500 hectares will be planted in 2019. We have constructed accommodation the Bakassi area among other installations.
“Ekondo Nene is doing fine. It is our baby in Lobe because there is high production in young areas. The crops are just that the prime. The average production there should be about 11 tons of palm oil per hectare. We count on that area very much. We have close to 600 hectares already planted there and small holdings too. You know we are promoting a lot of smallholdings. Right now, we have about 2,000 smallholders who supply crop to Pamol. And they too are extending their farms.
“It was a message of hope that we took to the workers. We assured them that we think that things will rerun to normalcy soonest. We urged them to ask their brothers who are in the bushes to return home. Many of our workers were forced to join those boys because of the illusions that were sold to them. All our cows, close to 400 of them, were all taken away. These are the cows we used for animal traction.”
Business amidst the storm
Due to mounting hostilities – kidnappings for ransom, arsons, rampant and targeted killings, the murder of the paramount chief of Ekondo Titi and former Board Chair of Pamol, intimidation – management and personnel dispersed to various safe locations. Given his sense to service and passion to grow Pamol, Chief Mekanya decided to regroup to management in the Douala branch office to ensure continuity and coordination of the company.
Pamol obtained authorisation from the Minister of Finance to export six thousand metric tons of palm oil to Nigeria duty free. The operation was difficult to carry out as the second boat carrying 50 metric tons of palm oil to Nigeria was set ablaze by unknown armed men.
Pamol’s General Manager explains this feat in his own words: “During this time, we asked for authorisation to sell oil to Nigeria. You know normally we are not allowed to sell oil to Nigeria. We were granted tax and custom duties exoneration. We were able to raise some money to handle our various operations – run the hospitals and provide domestic lighting and so forth. We even went further to supply fuel to Mundemba for the population. We had to give workers advances from money we made from those sales. All workers who were found there were given advances so they could buy food for their homes.
“Boats were hired to transport oil to Nigeria but some of them were attacked and burnt with their contents. We lost close to 600 tons of oil. We will have the real figures when external auditors would have come in.
“As we went to Ndian, our convoy was attacked. They shot on us and only soldiers were hurt.
“The minister of finance promised giving us some assistance but nothing has been disbursed. We could not just fold our hands. We had to do something. We hope that government will disburse some money so that we can be able to pay salaries for a month or two.”
Mekanya: A life at the service of Pamol
Shortly after Chief Mekanya was confirmed as General Manager of Pamol, the ongoing crisis cropped in. Despite the situation, he counts himself as the luckiest especially given that government used him in her development projects.
“I will count myself one of the luckiest for the fact that government has used me to be part of her development projects. For instance, I have been part of those who have been made to get Bakassi feel Cameroonian by being asked to develop a plantation there and populate the area. We have planted close to 500 hectares in Bakassi and build accommodation for over 150 workers. We brought life to Bakassi. All the work we did there could get a workforce of 300 persons that no other project, despite how much billions of FCFA they have spent there, did. With close to about FCFA 3 billion, we did all we did.
“For me, this is the most wonderful achievement that I think is plausible on our side. It is something that we cannot undermine.”
In three years, Pamol is expected to run a modern mill more than half a century after. This no doubt is thanks to the meticulous efforts of the Mekanya-led administration of Pamol.
“The second thing I will say we have done so far is this success to obtain guarantees and get the government to back us and give us assistance to build Pamol which was collapsing is a feat. It is a laudable effort. Even if I was leaving Pamol today, I will be leaving Pamol a happy man because I know that Pamol will take off with pockets full. Pamol has a future. If you have a budget of FCFA 20 billion, then the future is secured.
“Another thing that we have achieved is with the human resources. We have succeeded in modelling the mentality of the workers for them to know that they have to work in order to have their pay. In the past, we had this notion of ‘you work or you don’t work, you are paid’. Those days are long over. Those who don’t work have no pay.
“In a whole, there is no way Pamol can collapse anymore if everything is put in place. I have an interest as an individual, as someone from the area, as a chief of a village in that area, as the president of the chiefs conference of Mundemba, as section president of Ndian I CPDM, as a non-negligible economic operator in the area, I have an interest to protect the interest of the people of Ndian. I have an interest to build and boost the economy. It is on us that the population counts. We have to help them come out of hardship. We have to make them feel Cameroonian. We have to show proof of Cameroon’s oneness and indivisibility by making everyone committed towards Cameroon’s economic growth and development. All my businesses are in Ndian, hotels and over 100 hectares of plantation. I employ workers and I imagine what they are going through when the farms are not being harvested and the hotel is not functioning. If I don’t have money, they cannot be paid. I have all the interest to make things move.”