Cote d’Ivoire’s crisis paralyses Malian border town

As Cote’d’Ivoire’s crisis spills over into neighbouring countries, the tiny town of Zegoua on the Malian border has seen its economy grind to a halt in just a matter of days, and fears are spreading of a looming humanitarian crisis. Hospitals, services, power and trade have all been hit in the town that straddles the border on Highway 7, located 485 kms south of Bamako on the route linking the Malian capital to Cote d’Ivoire. “If this continues, we will face a humanitarian crisis in Zegoua,” Mayor Fatogoma Ouattara told IRIN. “The Ivorian crisis has really shaken Zegoua.” Business in the frontier town has fizzled since vehicles stopped crossing the border last Thursday when Ivorian government forces began pounding targets in the country’s rebel-held north. The day before the lights suddenly went out in Zegoua, as well as in rebel-held northern Cote d’Ivoire. Mayor Ouattara said that according to enquiries he had made, the problem resulted from sabotage in Abidjan rather than from a technical failure, a claim also made by the Ivorian rebels. This has all but crippled health services in the town. “Without electricity we can’t work properly,” the chief medical officer at Zegoua’s health centre, Dr Yaya Coulibaly, told IRIN. “When there is not enough light, that can affect the quality of work done at night.” No electricity also means no telephones and no radio communications at the health centre, as the system works on electricity. This has major repercussions for Coulibaly and his team. Like other small health centres that have no ambulances, they use the radio to send for one from the nearest referral hospital. For as long as power is not restored, they cannot do that. “If there is a serious complication, a patient could die, because the nearest referral hospital is at Kadiolo,” 15 km away, Coulibaly said. The town’s sole bakery runs on electricity, so it is now closed, meaning bread has to be brought in from the regional capital, Sikasso, 100 km away. By the time transporters and retailers add their mark-ups, a loaf which cost 75 CFA francs just a week ago goes for twice the amount, complained housewife Aminata Dante. The price of ice has increased eight to tenfold, she added. The crisis in Cote d’Ivoire also has economic repercussions for Zegoua and Mali as a whole. The town, which has 22,000 residents, lies on all-important Highway 7, the road truckers use to ferry cotton, Mali’s main export, from Bamako to the Ivorian port of Abidjan, and to bring in a host of imported goods, from fruits and vegetables to cement and other construction material. “When the crisis broke out, the big trucks suddenly stopped coming and, as if by magic, the town emptied,” Ouattara said. “Transit agents and other economic operators simply left town.” On an average day the municipality makes about one million CFA Francs (US $2,000) from the cross border trade, according to its financial officer, Chiaka Sangare. But since last week, that source of income has dried up. “Over the past few days we haven’t received a cent,” Sangare told IRIN. The head of the local customs office, Bakary Coulibaly, was equally worried. “Even if the border is not officially closed, it’s just as if it were,” he said. “Not a truck has passed. There’s been no activity since the crisis broke out.” About 700 trucks use the Zegoua border crossing each day, which earns the Malian state between 180 million and 200 million CFA francs – about US $360,000 to $US 400,000 - per month, Coulibaly said. When Cote d’Ivoire’s rebel war broke out in September 2002, splitting the country into a rebel-held north and a government-held south, waves of refugees crossed the border at Zegoua. Last week, as bombs fell on Bouake and other rebel-held areas to the east and west of it, Zegoua braced itself for another influx. But by Monday, only 28 people had arrived - 26 Malians, including eight injured in Bouake, one Ivorian and a Nigerian - according to the heads of the gendarmerie and the Civil Protection Services in Zegoua.