Promises to Gas Victims Only ‘Hot Air’

By an IPS Correspondent Reprint | | Print |

MENCHUM DIVISION, Cameroon, Jul 17 2013 (IPS) - Ismaela Muhamadu was six years old when he lost his parents and siblings in a poisonous gas explosion at northern Cameroon’s Lake Nyos. The blast killed more than 1,800 people, and 3,000 cattle and wildlife over a 25-km radius.

The victims of the Lake Nyos poisonous gas explosion and their descendants have been living in seven resettlement camps near the area. These children live in the Upkwa camp in Menchum Division, North West Region, Cameroon. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

But now, 27 years later, the 33-year-old, who has two wives and eight children, is still living in the Upkwa resettlement camp in Menchum Division, North West Region. For almost three decades, the victims of the gas explosion and their descendants, who now number 12,000, have been living in mud huts in seven camps that lack basic health, education and other facilities.

In 1986, Lake Nyos released poisonous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that scientists believe was a result of volcanic activity in the lake. Adolphe Lele Lafrique, governor of the North West Region and head of Lake Nyos Disaster Local Management Committee, assured state media Cameroon Radio and Television last month that the Lake Nyos victims would soon be returning to the area, but many are sceptical of this promise.

“I don’t trust these promises to relocate. I’ve been 27 years in this camp and we still lack basic necessities such as hospitals, water and sustainable livelihood support. I don’t think life there will be any better,” Muhamadu told IPS.

Many struggle to survive in these camps. People of these traditionally pastoral communities have been forced to take up farming on small plots of land in order to earn a living.

“As the Boboro people, all we know is cattle grazing. But when we came to the camp we had no other choice than to become farmers, but many cannot survive on farming because Bororo people dislike farming,” Salifu Buba, 57, who lives in the Kumfutu camp in Menchum Division told IPS. But he does not want to return to what was once his home.

“I would rather suffer here than die in Nyos. What we need is support, not relocation. We don’t have rights to grazing land, the 30 to 50 square metres allotted to each household is not even enough for farming, not to mention grazing,” Buba said.

Buba explained that when the community from Lake Nyos was relocated in 1986, the government gave the traditional pastoralists tools and oxen for farming – something they knew very little about. He thinks the government should have given them a more sustainable solution to their problems by giving each family one or two cows to raise.

At the Ipalim refugee camp opinion differs. Some of the local Bantu community, who are subsistence farmers and depend on the sales of cash crops such as maize, beans, cocoyam and plantains for their livelihoods, are keen to return to Nyos.

Stephen Nju, 47, told IPS: “I would like to go back to the land of abundance, because with the few square metres of land that each family was allotted in the camps, it is difficult to practise farming. We do beg farmland from the community that accepted us here, but we are always regarded as strangers and we have several incidents of farmer-grazer conflicts.”

Lydia Nzeh, 55, who is also from Ipalim camp, told IPS that she did not want to remain in the camp as it was very isolated and did not have basic services.

“We learnt that so much work is going on in Nyos to degas the lake and fortify the dam and that the surrounding areas now look so beautiful. But we are still waiting for the promises of returning to Nyos to be realised. This camp site is so isolated, we don’t have access roads and health centres.”

Many say the announcement to relocate about 80 percent of the 12,000 victims is delusive, that the site is not prepared, nor will it be ready to accommodate victims anytime soon.

David Neng of Environment Watch, a local NGO in Menchum Division, told IPS that the announcement to resettle victims in Nyos is questionable. “A lot more needs to be done on the infrastructure side such as building infrastructures and public utilities that will accommodate people. Problems related to land rights and the distribution of natural resources to victims and those that rush to settle in Nyos some years after the tragedy need to be solved,” Neng said. Engineers have reduced the gas emanating from this lake to a safe level.