Journalists have embarked on a trip to Bui in the Tain District to  access Zoomlion’s Bui Black Flies Nuisance Control Programme.

Zoomlion embarked on a programme to fight  and eradicate the obnoxious black fly from the construction area of Ghana’s third hydro-electric dam some months ago.

Upon arrival at the site some workers at the Bui Dam Site, besieged the media men with a deluge of complaints about their working conditions.

They told The Mail and five other media houses who were at the Bui Dam site that they are being treated like slaves by their Chinese and some Ghanaian supervisors.

According to them, they are not accorded courtesies that are due them as human beings.

The Bui Dam is a 400 megawatt hydro-electric project currently being built at the Bui gorge at the southern end of Bui National Park in the Brong Ahafo Region. the project is a collaboration between the Government of Ghana and Sino Hydro, a Chinese construction company.

The workers who spoke the The Mail said, “Our pay is bad, we are paid ¢3.5p as against the ¢7 we signed with them. We come to work 7am and close at 6pm…when we are ill, the company does not take care of us and when they hear you have been released from the hospital, they send for you to report to work…they don’t even pay us our daily allowance when we get ill.”


As if on cue, all the workers stopped their work and showed the media men around the rooms they have been given to sleep in.

The beds in the room had no mattresses. “We sleep on the iron”, one of the workers said.

The workers said they had notified the Trades Union Congress (TUC) about their plight, however representatives have urged them to remain patient.

Though the workers recounted many of their own problems with their employers, they lauded Zoomlion for their effort for making the place habitable adding that the spraying of the black flies by Zoomlion had brought great relief.

According to the Head of the Vector Control Unit of Zoomlion, Alhaji Abibu Ziblim, said the daily spraying which started last year, has improved the working conditions of the people at the site. Since time immemorial, he said, the people in the community have suffered from the nuisance of the black fly, the bite of which can lead to the disease of a kind of blindness called onchocerciasis.

“This has improved the health conditions of the residents around the Bui Dam and also created a conducive atmosphere for the contractors of the Bui Hydro Electric Project,” he said.

Though, Alhaji Abibu Ziblim could not immediately disclose the amount involved in the spraying, he said talks are underway with the management of Zoomlion to recruit more people. He said the spraying exercise takes the form of “caraciding” and currently the 205 workers Zoomlion employs are scattered in the eight communities along the Bui Dam construction area.

He promised the company’s preparedness to support government efforts at making the Bui Hydro Project a reality.

The Chief of Bungase, Nana Kwabena Alaben, commended Zoomlion for the exercise and said “it has brought relief to us.” He said though the spraying has helped the community a lot, “there are many things the government must do for us” and mentioned, rather modestly toilet facilities as some of the essential conveniences that the community needs urgently.”We don’t have a toilet in the whole community”, he said.
  
The Mail
AA