***When Mary Lyongaabe left jail she started a tea plantation and employed other women ex-convicts. It has been a great success and today she is selling over 1,000 tons of tea a year. Gemini News Service reports on a development story with a difference from Cameroon. Peter N Efande writes from Yaounde***
AN unexpected twist came in the life of 25-year-old Ebenye Angeline when her fiance, a top civil servant in the Ministry of National Education, accused her of stealing his salary.
Despite repeated pleas of innocence. he bundled her off to the police station. Without any money to hire a defence attorney. she was found guilty and jailed for a year. That was in 1995.
Two months after serving her sentence she met the ex-fi-ance in a bus. He apologised and revealed that he faked the charges because he suspected she was unfaithful.
The case of 23-year-old Pamela Doutous is more dramatic. She lost her father and three brothers in a car accident in 1996. Her mother became mentally ill.
Left without anyone in the family to sponsor her. Doutou dropped out of college and, curiously, fell in love with an armed robber. The man was killed a shoot-out with the police and she was jailed for "being in love with a dangerous man".
She was freed last April after two years in a woman's prison in Buea. capital of Cameroon’s South west province.
When Gemini News visited the prison, the 21 inmates had doleful stories like these to tell. But one former inmate. Mary Lyongaabe. has had a different experience. She has made life after jail exciting and rewarding for some of the women exconvicts. She now runs a tea plantation of 700 hectares in the village of Soppo. 15 kilometres away.
After two years in Jail for misappropriating public funds, she invested part of the funds in the tea business.
She said : "I bought land in 1980s for two million CFA francs from the villagers and used three million CFA francs to buy seedlings, pay planters and clearers.
Initially I wanted to trade in second-hand clothes, but my husband convinced me to go into the tea business."
Lyongaabe refuses to reveal how much she misappropriated while she was a cashier in the Defunct Produce Marketing Board, but is quick to say she sells an annua) production of 1,100 tons of tea to the Cameroon Development Corporation.
Women ex-convicts make up 80 per cent of the 25 permanent workforce. They are Involved in all stages of production — as tea pluckers. section heads, supervisors. weeders. Lyongaabe finds the women "wonderful, with an Inherent sense of responsibility. receptivity to training and endurance."
She explains how she handles the women ex-convicts: "Life does not end when you are a convict. Life starts when you are out of prison. I've been with some of them and fully understand the mental torments they've gone through.”
"My success story is a poignant reminder to women who have been Justly or unjustly convicted that they can make ends meet and live comfortable lives out of crime. It just needs a bit of money and serious planning."
Most of the women are unmarried and aged between 25 and 55. Life on the plantation is not easy for Lyongaabe and her workers. She says : The women are often pregnant. After they give birth, they are off-duty for three months. This is unprofitable because during this period I’m short of labour and the tealeaves rot. I also have to put up the fluctuating prices of tea in the world market".
Gloria Ladifatu. aged 35 and mother of four, is elated, but she says she is "a contract worker and I don't benefit from things like cooking oil or soap which are distributed to permanent workers. And at times our salaries come late."
Mercy Ndatlk, 29 and
mother of five, has been plucking tea for five years and finds the job rewarding: "I get up al 5am each day. lake my bath and breakfast, then set off for the plantation with my basket and knife. 1 spend eight hours in the fields and pluck about 50 kilograms each day. I receive 25 CFA francs a kilogram."
Like most of her colleagues, she takes home about 37.000 CFA francs a month — "just enough to keep body and soul together and send my children to school."
Yongaabe remains tight-lipped about her annual. She laconically says that "after paying my workers. I have just enough left to keep my business moving."
The quality of her tea is evaluated by Florence Ngayi. professional tea-taster with the Agro-Industrial Cameroon Dc-
velopment Corporation, who was trained by tea brokers in London. In world terms. Cameroon is a small tea grower, being mostly a coffee producer.
Ngayi holds a first schoolleaving certificate. She is the first female tea taster in Cameroon and one of the few in Africa.
Lyongaabe's tea is grade one quality, says Ngayi. She admires her courage and conscientiousness. Ngayi says : "She's strict without being hard and motherly without being weak. I'll like to be a business magnate like her."
This is wishful thinking, for Ngayi has one great handicap: her insatiable appetite for beer and peppered barbecue.
The writer is the copy editor of Cameroon Tribune, the only bilingual daily in Cameroon.