By David Lewis
NIMBA-BUCHANAN RAILWAY, Liberia | Wed Feb 23, 2011 3:36am EST
NIMBA-BUCHANAN RAILWAY, Liberia (Reuters) - In the muggy forest of central Liberia, a gang of workers is inching its way along a railway track, cut long and straight through an otherwise impenetrable mesh of trees and vines. The drone of insects is interrupted by a high-pitched drill and the clang of hammers as workers put the finishing touches to the perfectly aligned steel tracks.
Casting a watchful eye over the crew of workers is Lewis C. Dogar, a veteran of Liberia's railway. Dogar and a handful of colleagues have been brought out of retirement to help reclaim hundreds of kilometers of track from the jungle. The softly spoken 64-year-old remembers Liberia's booming 1960s and 1970s, when trains laden with iron ore wound south from the mine on the mist-shrouded Mount Nimba to the sweaty port town of Buchanan. That finished with the outbreak of fighting, and two back-to-back civil wars that lasted 14 years. The conflict, which finally ended in 2003, left more than 200,000 people dead and Liberia's finances and infrastructure in ruins.
The gang of Liberian railway workers is a small sign things may finally be improving. Some of the men have only recently swapped their weapons for blue overalls and yellow hard hats. "We have a few young boys coming out of high school," Dogar says. "I am happy that I am around to train people."
Hiring locals might seem unremarkable on a continent with an oversupply of cheap labor. But the issue of who works on Africa's big infrastructure projects has come into sharp focus in recent years. At building sites from Angola to Zambia, teams of Chinese workers often do the work instead of Africans. Where locals are employed, their rough treatment by Chinese managers has stirred bitterness. In Zambia last October, the Chinese managers of Collum Mine shot and wounded 11 local coal miners protesting over pay and working conditions.
That growing resentment is one reason why Brazilian engineering group Odebrecht, contracted to get Liberia's railway rolling again, made a conscious decision to employ locals for the job -- and treated them well.
"It worked perfectly," says project manager Pedro Paulo Tosca, who decided to divide the 240 km (149 miles) of track into sections and assign dozens of separate villages along the way to clear them. "The majority of the heavy work was activities that we could perform with local manpower instead of bringing sophisticated equipment to the site."
Odebrecht's initiative is not solely altruistic, of course. The unlisted company sees big profits in Africa. But as it pushes into the continent, Odebrecht and other Brazilian firms are using every chance they have to keep up with their Chinese rivals, who often enjoy a massive financing advantage thanks to the deep pockets of Beijing, and who rarely pay much attention to factors like human rights.
As investment in Africa grows -- foreign direct investment surged to just under $59 billion in 2009 from around $10 billion at the turn of the century, according to UNCTAD, the U.N.'s agency that monitors global trade -- so too do the expectations of host nations, who want not just trade, roads and bridges, but also jobs and training. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, World Bank managing director and a former finance minister in Nigeria, told one of China's biggest mining conferences in November that investors in Africa need to work with local communities to avoid conflicts and start building the real economy rather than just stripping resources. If it can build a reputation for doing just that, Brazil thinks, it might help it stay in the game.
"If (Brazil) wants to distinguish itself from the other emerging powers, it needs to demonstrate what is different about its engagement with Africa based on the principles it espouses as a democratic country," says Sanusha Naidu, research director of the China/Emerging Powers in Africa Program at Fahamu, a Cape Town-based organization that promotes human rights and social justice. "It will also have to reconcile its economic ambitions in Africa with its posture of being a democracy, especially in cases where it does business with essentially corrupt and malevolent regimes in Africa."
"BETTER THAN NOTHING"
Odebrecht's decision to employ people who live along the track is clearly popular. After seven years of peace, Liberia's economy is only slowly getting back on its feet. In Buchanan, the port, small businesses are feeding off the rebirth of the railway, winning contracts to clean offices, transport material or put food on the plates of workers. Though accurate figures are hard to come by, Liberia's unemployment rate is believed to top 80 percent. Such is the hunger for jobs that a number of the new railway workers have come from the capital, Monrovia, hundreds of miles away.
As you head north toward the mines the only real signs of development are the rubber-tapping collection points in the clearings that pepper the thick green forest. President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf may have stabilized the nation but she faces re-election later this year and is struggling to convince people the economy is on the mend. Odebrecht's 2007 decision to employ 3,000 villagers was a significant boost.
"We are happy with what we are earning Something is better than nothing," says Abraham Browne, a village contractor, between scooping mountains of rice into his mouth during a lunch break. Browne has swapped subsistence farming for a daily wage of about $4.50 for hammering nails into the tracks: "It helps us send our brothers and sisters to school because some of our parents are dead, killed in the war. It helps us a lot."
Odebrecht asked each community along the track to select a leader, with whom the Brazilian firm then signed a contract. The company has completed more than 75 percent of the work with Liberian labor, says manager Tosca. It has also trained up teams of engineers, technicians and accountants to help run its offices. The first iron ore, from a mine run by Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal, is due in mid-2011.
In terms of cost, the decision to hire locally "is cheaper because labor here is not expensive," says Tosca. "Of course, you have a learning curve. The risk of accidents is higher -- therefore you have to invest more time in training. (But with machines), if you have a breakdown, to have a part here, to replace it, takes several weeks, if not months."
