Making Friends

Whatever can be said about the work here in Tanzania, repetitive is not an adjective that springs to mind. This past week has been a real insight- not only into parts of my job, but into Tanzania and its people.

One of my roles here is to oversee the work of the community relations coordinator- a very good bloke called Nicodemus. Now in Egypt, community relations meant a few donations here and there in addition to the occasional site visit. Here it’s far more applied. Firstly, the operation itself impacts on a lot of people- the gas comes from a small island which we share with a substantial local community. We then pipe our gas through 250 miles of some of the poorest parts of Tanzania, through villages all of which could use every penny of help we can provide. The experiences of companies in Nigeria, where they take out resources from a region, pay taxes to the people at the top but leave the immediate local community without a sausage is not something we’re keen to repeat. To ignore the impoverished people from whose land you are taking your gas is not only wrong but also something that could turn a peaceful area into another Niger Delta.

On Thursday, we met with representatives of the Songo Songo Island community- their village elders. It was an interesting experience- traditional African villagers coming to Dar to meet with a bunch of youngish British business types! The incongruity was there to be seen. Into our conference room walked two old men in traditional garb- one wore a grey, short sleeved cotton suit, the other was dressed more in the style of an Arab(a long gallabeya and a hashemite style keffiyeh around his shoulders- I’ll get to the bottom of this one day!) They both wore traditional style box hats. They were accompanied by a younger guy dressed in T Shirt, jeans and his box hat (I‘m guessing that the hats denoted membership of the village leadership but who knows- perhaps it’s a local fashion thing) and a smartly dressed, but sadly hatless man who announced himself as their local councillor. I was surprised to find them not entirely effusive in their greeting- there seemed to be an issue somewhere.

We walked through a number of key issues- work to be done on areas such as provision of water (the development of the island has now attracted economic migrants so our originally agreed water provisioning is not enough to go round), improving access to education and health services. However the general feeling seemed to be that things were being done and they were quite satisfied with our help- so why the underlying unhappiness?

I recently read a book about working in Africa- much of which I’ll take with a mountain of salt given the massive generalisation this entails! One thing mentioned was that, in East Africa especially, people are extremely polite and hate getting right to the point of any criticism- a major complaint may in fact come in the guise of an unimportant non issue, in an attempt to ensure the recipient of the complaint does not lose face.

Sure enough, at the end of the meeting, the spokesperson mentioned casually that they felt it was important for us all to share in the successes and good news of the operations- that they felt proud of what was being done on their island. After a bit more digging, it transpired that in fact, there had been some sort of celebration of a technical achievement on the gas field a while ago, and the village elders had not been invited. This appeared to have caused some upset and, combined with a gap in company visits to the island, had given rise to the feeling of not being respected or considered.

Although the meeting dealt with a lot of key issues, focusing on areas where we could spend money to help them, it struck me that, in fact, what these chaps were after was something more fundamental. They were indeed grateful for the investment we’re making and were pleased with the stuff we’ve committed to do next year. However, my sense was that they walked away from the meeting far happier because of the non financial promises we’d made- to visit more often, to make ourselves available to discuss things with them, and to include them in any future events. In the end, the tangible stuff was nice, but the affirmation of our basic respect was far more important.