Civil servants begin second week of general strike

State school students and retired civil servants demanding public funds held angry protests in the Chadian capital, N’djamena, on Monday, as government workers moved into the second week of a general strike. “We have warned the government we would strike for months, but we have had no response,” Michel Barka, president of Chad’s largest labour union coalition (UST), told IRIN from N’djamena. Top among civil servants' demands are: at least four months in unpaid salaries, the payment of government pensions and a five percent raise that UST says Chad’s President Idriss Deby promised in 2004. Some state school students whose teachers are on strike poured onto the campus of a private school in N’djamena, shouting and throwing stones to support their teachers and to denounce disadvantages in the strike-prone state education system, sources in N’djamena said. Also on Monday, at least 100 government workers demonstrated near the presidential palace, blocking a main road with bricks and large rocks. Retirees carried banners that read “Congratulations to the president and the prime minister - In 2005 not a single pension was paid” and “From 1990 to 2005, 36 billion francs (US $66.5 million) embezzled”. Government officials could not be reached for comment on the strike. The stoppage comes as Chad faces lingering fiscal problems, compounded by security threats from a rebel movement in the east of the country. Labour union official Barka said that the strike has been widely observed in a country where the failure to pay government workers is common. The UN ranks the vast arid nation as the world’s fifth poorest country. The union was keeping some medical workers in place to provide “a minimum of services,” Barka said. But one city resident, who gave his name only as Mohamed, expressed concern about a relative due to have been operated on four days ago. “We fear the worst,” he said, standing at the gates of a government hospital. The current strike comes on the heels of a government decision to renege on international accords by tapping into oil revenues set aside for future generations and funnelling ‘poverty reduction’ revenues to state security and other sectors. The government says it needs funds now to tackle the fiscal crisis and instability. But Barka, who serves on a civil society panel overseeing the use of oil money, said Chad’s problem is not a lack of funds but corruption and bad governance. “Already the situation is very difficult, especially for government workers,” Barka told IRIN. Once the government has more leeway in how it spends oil money, “the situation will be far worse.” For now Chad’s petrodollars are frozen in a London bank after the World Bank suspended loans to the country last week following Ndjamena’s decision to revise its oil revenue management law in defiance of warnings from the lender.