Reportage
Gagnoa, August 2022 (AIP) – The college students, who really should be in the classroom for the full school 12 months, are, partly or always, in unlawful gold mines in the office of Oumé in the Gôh area. 3 of them performing on the Dougbafla and Doka web sites opened the AIP. Shedding light on a scourge that is gaining floor.
It is five o’clock in the afternoon of August 2022, when we honor an appointment, in a espresso kiosk, not far from a lodge in Oumé. Urbain (not his real identify), a third quality student in a secondary college in Oumé, is waiting for us there. A quarter of an hour of waiting around. No miner. “Everybody right here is suspicious,” points out our guidebook as a warning and consolation. Even so. A number of minutes afterwards. We see across the road, an elegant younger male, dressed in a clear shirt more than new denims, beckoning us to be a part of him. The foreigner speaks in appropriate French. He will come from the big village of Dougbafla, found 5 kilometers from the city of Oumé. He clarifies extremely immediately how he and his mates reached a gold mining web page positioned two kilometers from Dougbafla.
According to the youthful gentleman, his father could no extended afford to pay for to invest in faculty provides and outfits. Just about every working day, he walked 5km to go and 5km to come back. To consume at midday, everyone from the same village as Dougbafla would combat with each other. “I have frequently eaten without the need of contributing and this bothered me”, confesses the young male, with his head down. A agonizing earlier that he no extended needs to relive. “The good news is,” he suggests, his daily life will take another transform, when he is inevitably found, “courier” of situation.
In point, a gold washer, an adult that, was courting his cousin and was in charge of transmitting the messages to the young girl. “She gave me some income for commissions,” Urbain observes. This is how one particular factor potential customers to a different, the latter presents him to come and perform on the web page, as he can read and write. It ought to be remembered from KB’s confession that his work, in the commencing, was to publish down in a notebook the names of anyone who came to the web site, and each and every night, with each other, they “checked in”, as they say in the their jargon. As profits, KB factors out that he gained a thousand francs for lunch and two thousand francs in the evening when he went down, apart from on Fridays when there was no work.
“I most well-liked to keep for gold, mainly because it was challenging for me at home and at university,” he notes. And it is really been two many years given that this career with no long term, if not unemployment at the conclusion or prison, lasts. Perhaps he’s having lucid. Urbain is self-confident that his father has managed to recover his plantation that he experienced mortgaged a handful of years earlier. Objectively, he really should hence resume classes in 2022-2023. He implies that his mates, about 10, all from the exact same village, work on gold-mining web sites to get income.
Urbain does not cease there in his testimony. “Believe me, the second component is obtaining the cash to confront the opposition that is potent at the amount of ladies,” added the now previous pupil. Right after all, the young man’s regrets are already pointing. “Today the craze has not only declined because of to the existence of gendarmes-commandos who burn every little thing, but also, to have gold, it is a lot much more sophisticated now, given that far more usually means are necessary. Evidently men and women say you will need to dig further. So, we locate much more as just before. “The commencing of the new school yr, which does not assure him a place in college, confirms the educator, who confirms that City is now on the listing of pupils excluded from this general public establishment,
A group from the village of Doka, two kilometers from Dougbafla
Subsequent our information, equally dressed in faded clothes, we go to Dougbafla’s web site. Endlessly. A landscape denatured by wells and crimson earth mounds. In the midst of all this, figures, which include modest kids, smeared with mud. Coming from Doka, one more close by village, Jean-Jacques, a fourth grade pupil, is sitting on a piece of cardboard on the flooring. “Fake you are not conversing to me and look away,” he advises us. We rapidly have an understanding of that he will not want to be discovered. JJ, as his close friends call him, describes that at very first he went to take a look at the web site and was fascinated by the get the job done individuals ended up performing: “We could not see them, for the reason that they have been digging. “
“Usually it is really the Burkinabés who perform below. They came with the bus entire, ”she clarifies. According to JJ, “it is our parents who supply the gold miners their plots and sometimes their plantations of cocoa trees in manufacturing. As for the women, mostly Malinké, they prepare dinner on the location and sell foodstuff. “
“Us. Learners. We begun doing work with them when they necessary water to drink,” reveals the youthful person. The 25-liter drinking water can, which beforehand charge five hundred francs, is becoming sold by the pupils for a thousand francs. He provides that he and his pals do this occupation to earn some revenue for outings in Oumé on Saturday evenings, but also to obtain “great laptops”, like “our close friends who mess around town. “
Not significantly from us, a frail young male is awkwardly sifting the earth. “He arrived not prolonged in the past,” notes the information. Slash precision, his pals, a dozen, and him, who claim not to have wholly dropped out of school at the price of gold panning, even if the incessant obtaining is that university absenteeism has grow to be the rule and for that reason the dismissal at the conclusion of the yr.
“If you do gold panning, it can be tricky to get a good faculty”
“When the miners arrived in the village of Doka, they gave revenue to the leader and the presidents of the youth. In trade for the use of the land, the village authorities demanded that the younger folks of the village be recruited. Below are how several younger people ended up on development internet sites ”, an additional college student tells us with no difficulty. A tiny older and stouter, this other young male also claims to be a college student, but refuses to reveal his identification. “Below is the law of silence,” he observes, before pointing out that gold miners and villagers strictly forbid them from talking to reporters.
The a person we’ll simply call Oscar has the job of becoming protection guards. “We notice all those who dig and in the evening we lookup them,” he observes. In addition, he qualified prospects a team dependable for stopping web site visits. And, if there are visitors, prevent them from acquiring speak to with the “diggers”. The do the job is carried out in groups. Given that he and his mates go to school during the working day, they are transferred to the night time team. All the faculty yr, it was like this and it will be the very same at the beginning of the faculty calendar year, Oscar assures.
The web site, according to these younger men and women, is actually dangerous, and whoever digs the holes could drop their life. “I witnessed it when. It was frightening, “explained our very last interlocutor, Oscar. In addition, he admits,” if you do gold panning, it really is tricky to get a good schooling. “
He points out that early departures for the Christmas or Easter vacations have lengthy been a genuine moreover for quite a few of them, as there are a lot of illegal gold mines all over the Oumé and Hiré place. “Sad to say for them, what they imagine to be a way out is dangerously mortgaging their foreseeable future, as there is no way out,” regrets the regional director of national training for Gagnoa, Dame Amonkou Valentine.
(AIP)
dd / tm
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