Rufiji: what do they know about SEKAB?
These videoclips are work in progress. They are from a collection of six hours of video interviews recorded by Kassim Mustafa, Maweni Farm, and Joseph Shayo, JET, in Rufiji and Kisarawe districts in Tanzania in November 2008. The material shows very clearly that the people who have agreed to give out their land for free to SEKAB have been mislead by unrealistic promises of investment in social services and infrastructure that would follow from the project.
These two clips also suggest that:
1) there is no signed agreement with the villages, SEKAB’s commitments to social infrastructure are just talk
2) At least some villagers believe that each of them will formally own 5 ha of sugarcane plantation that the company will clear, manage and harvest for them, so that they will come to earn a land rent or a labour free income. This is of course entirely unrealistic.
3) it seems the village chairman anticipates that lots of money will be made from the timber when the land is cleared, and it is our impression from watching dozens of long interviews that such expectations of benefiting from timber trade has made the local elite more favourable to the project.
Ordinary villagers knew very little about what is being planned and many were suspicious.
Ibrahim Saidi Mboweto, Village Chairman
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We received a request… that they wanted land to grow sugarcane. The village council discussed it, and presented its proposal to the village assembly. The village decided, with one voice, that we should agree to this project being established in our village, and that we will give them the land.
(not in clip: they didn’t say how much land they needed, and we didn’t know hob much land we have in the village, so we had to survey the land first…. there is at least 28,000 ha, we set aside about 2400 for sugarcane… and about 800 ha for “outgrowers”)
Question: Have you signed any contract with the company?
Mboweto: Actually as a village… we haven’t signed any contract. Except that when we agreed, we explained what we wanted to be done for us . For example… we requested a secondary school… and other projects too such as a water project… and we put other projects aimed at developing the community there. Also, employment… that the villagers are given priority when the company employs people. These things were in the document we submitted
(No people living in the area, it now has trees, wild trees, “pori”, he explains that the village asked the company not to burn the trees when clearning, and he hopes to benefit from timber business… so this is not barren land, but forest land that has valuable timber)
Mboweto: Our main livelihood is agriculture. In the past, before the forest was protected, we had good income from harvesting timber. But the way forest management is going now, with the government prohibiting harvesting, we are left with farming only.
