Oil’s Promise Still a Dream

A pipeline has given Chad hundreds of millions of dollars to fight poverty but critics say corruption and waste have kept the money from those most in need.

Outside the gleaming white fences of a multibillion-dollar American petroleum complex here, a slum dreams of becoming a boom town.

Thousands of people have flocked to this village in southern Chad over the years, hoping their country’s newfound oil wealth would translate into jobs and prosperity. But most remain unemployed, living in huts on garbage-strewn, dirt streets with neither electricity nor running water.

Relations between the village and an ExxonMobil Corp.-led consortium across the street are so strained that oil workers are now banned by their employer from patronizing local bars and other shops in the village. When fire raced through the slum in March, oil company fire trucks watched from the other side of the fence, witnesses said.

“They said our children would get jobs,” said Benoit Djimrane Njarounda, who moved to the area more than a decade ago and now serves as the village’s chief. “There were so many promises. What happened?”

LA Times