Pamol
Employees Union
CCFTU
Ndian,
South
West Region,
18th
March, 2016.
Through:
The Governor, SW Region,
To:
The Prime Minister, Head of Government,
Yaounde,
Cameroon.
Subject: Impersonation, Campaign of
Blackmail and Calumny against the Pamol IGM, the Ndian Administration and the
Entire Pamol Workforce
Mr. Prime Minister, Head of Government, we
have the honour most respectfully to come before your very high office to
distance ourselves from and to condemn in the strongest terms a campaign of
blackmail and calumny ignited by some unknown persons against our Interim
General Manager, the top management of Pamol Plantations, the entire workforce,
the administration of Ndian and the Judiciary with the sole objective of
bringing about social unrest and destabilizing our buoyant company along, in a way
as to undermine the progress currently being made to fully rehabilitate Pamol.
On
the 4th of March, 2016, a certain NjibiliMolimoMokanya, whose name has never
been known at our corporation at any time, and who purports to be a member of
the Pamol Employees Union, right to the point of laying claims to the post of
delegated secretary, took upon himself to address a petition to your very high
office, making extremely misleading allegations meant to bring about mutual
mistrust and total chaos for reasons we are still to understand.
By
this correspondence, we want to state categorically that the so-called
NjibiliMolimoMokanya is neither a worker at Pamol Plantations nor a member of
our union. He therefore does not speak for us and we do not share his diatribe
against our IGM, the SDO of Ndian, the State Counsel of Ndian and other friends
of the company mentioned in the said petition. The numerous allegations made in
that document have nothing to do with reality; a visit to the company shall
portray a pleasant break from the personal frustrations he expressed in his
piece. That is a clear indication that he is one of the enemies of progress,
created out of the return of discipline and the notion that you must work in
order to earn your pay.
Before
we touch on some of the points he raised, permit us, Mr. Prime Minister, to
inform you and public opinion that at the end of the year 2012 when our former
General Manager passed on to glory and Chief MekanyaOkon Charles took over as
Interim, Pamol had an outstanding deficit of over 2.5 billion CFA F. Today,
that deficit has been completely wiped out and the company has now returned to
profitability with figures that would have surprised everyone, particularly in
2015 if the palm oil crisis did not put speed breaks. Again, since the year
2013, production levels have been on the rise peaking up to over 15.000 tons of
crude palm oil produced in 2015; a record level if one were to look at the
situation over ten years back. These are unquestionable indicators that Pamol is
not in decay as the so-called NjibiliMolimoMokanya wants to make believe.
NjibiliMolimoMokanya
claims that the Interim GM had rendered ‘our trade union powerless by co-opting
our trade union executive into Pamol Board of Directors and now treats us
anyhow since our union president prefer huge Pamol Board allowances than
workers rights’. This allegation points to the ignorance this man has of Pamol
operations; Mr. Bongo Jonas Eboka, the current union President, is not the
first ever union President to sit on the Board of Directors of Pamol
Plantations. Late Tangye who was union president under Chief ObenOfunde Moses
and he was co-opted to the Board by the said GM at the time. This is not
therefore a Chief Mekanya creation as the petition writer wants to make
believe. The presence of employee union representatives at boards of directors’
meetings is a statutory practice in all government owned companies in Cameroon.
Talking
about discipline, we are aware that we must work in order to earn our salaries;
in fact, there is a labour slogan which states that ‘No work, no pay’ and we
adhere to it strictly. Since the advent of the Interim Management, so much has
been done to ensure assiduity at work. Staff who were used to loitering and
going to work and returning the way they wanted, have faced serious
difficulties since Chief Mekanya and his team introduced the management by
objective approach. Fruit theft has reduced sensitively, misappropriation of
company resources is under check and a thorough cleaning of the staff payroll
still frightens many who used fake certificates to be recruited and
reclassified. This is what has led to most of the sackings; in fact some
workers simply escaped as soon as they learnt that the authenticity of their
certificates was under verification.
It
is also quite embarrassing to note that some individual has arrogated to
himself the power to determine which project is needed at the company or not.
He purports that plantation software meant to enhance our operations was
unnecessary by his own standards because an obsolete and out-dated instrument
that Pamol had been barely managing over the years should have stayed in place.
Shocking to realize that in a digital era like this one with state-of-the art
technology coming out daily someone thinks our company should lack behind
always, so that he should not claim that there is embezzlement of funds. As concerns the projects mentioned
with fabulous amounts spent, it is not our position to say what happened, but
during a crisis meeting chaired by the SDO in Lobe on Wednesday the 16th of
March, 2016, all the stakeholders exposed the falsehood, noting that the
archive building in Lobe cost 30 million CFA F and not 50 million CFA F as he
said; same thing with the grandstand in Ndian which cost 11 million CFA F
instead of the 22 million CFA F he alleged and much more.
With
regard to the palm oil plantation extension project in the Bakassi Peninsular,
the information given in that petition is also grossly false and intended to
mislead. Our colleagues on the ground in Mosongisele and Isangele have pointed
out clearly that serious work is going on using acceptable planting techniques
that should guarantee results. In Isangele for example, over 100 hectares of land
have already been prepared and planting is going on, with numerous employee
settlement camps being constructed. Work is even much more advanced at the
level of Mosongisele where about 300 hectares are reported already to have been
planted using under planting techniques.
NjibiliMolimoMokanya
makes a lame claim that the main cause of his memo is the ‘non implementation
of the last salary increase from the government for over 01 year today’.
Interestingly enough, he goes further to claim that as a result of a failed
strike action he and his accomplices tried to organize to paralyze Pamol, ‘…our
Interim GM has now implemented the new salary scheme this month (February) end
but without payment of our arrears’.
The
Pamol Employee Union Executive negotiated with this outcome with management way
back in 2015 and it was mutually agreed upon that given the crisis being faced
by companies producing crude palm oil in Cameroon, the implantation of the new
salary scale shall be effective from February 2016 and the arrears shall be
paid progressively, beginning with those in the lower categories. This has been
done; everyone is now receiving pay on the new salary scale, while workers up
to category 2 have received their arrears and the trend shall continue this way
in this month of March, 2016.
Mr.
Prime Minister, Head of Government, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to
you and your government for the attention you have been paying to our company.
We wish also to reiterate that Pamol is currently well managed, reason we have
gone from a huge deficit back to the positive column in only three years.
Conventional wisdom requires that when a man does a good job, he should be
hailed, not insulted right into his very private life; and we think management
rather deserves appreciation at this point in time.
We
are seizing this opportunity to call on the management of Pamol not to relent
in its current efforts to make the company the pride of not only Ndian
Division, but of Cameroon as a whole. We are also urging management to initiate
and ensure that a thorough investigation is conducted to expose the
perpetrators of these malicious acts and bring them to book so that peace and
serenity would return to the camps. These are clearly enemies of progress,
enemies of our dear company and of course enemies of the New Deal who are doing
all it takes to ensure they frustrate President Paul Biya’s Vision 2035 for the
emergence of Cameroon that borders on structures like Pamol Plantations.
Done in Lobe, this 23rd Day of March, 2016
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