Sunday, 3 April 2016

Pamol Employees’ Union

                                                                                              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


No comments:

Post a Comment