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It was a trip to see how far Ghana�s premier waste management company, Zoomlion, was succeeding in its fight to eradicate the obnoxious black fly from the construction area of Ghana�s third hydro-electric dam, but the handful of journalists who arrived at the site last weekend stumbled upon a news within the news as some workers at the Bui Dam Site, besieged the media men with a deluge of complaints about their working conditions. They told The Mail newspaper 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 Mail and five other media houses were at the Bui Dam site over the weekend to access Zoomlion�s Bui Black Flies Nuisance Control Programme. 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 about one hundred 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.� The Mail: Have you sat down and talked to the directors? Worker: No, who are the directors? They won�t even look at your face��wo bu wo se aboa (they see you as an animal). The Mail: So why do you still want to work here, if you are being cheated? Worker: What can we do? But at least we need respect�we are Ghanaians �asem be nti na ye wo ha). 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) of their plight, �but they tell us to be patient�.we pay our dues accordingly� They said they have �collapsed� their own workers union, because of their ineffectiveness in fighting for their rights. There was a hint of child labour as The Mail noticed the presence of some children, who claimed to be 15 and 16 years working at the site. �I have just finished Junior High School,� one of them said. As the interview was going on, one of the Ghanaian supervisors, wearing a red lacoste shirt arrived and questioned the media�s presence at the site and the interview with the workers. His attitude towards the workers betrayed a certain lack of worker-management rapport. Though the workers recounted many of their own problems with their employers, it did not take away from the spraying of the black flies by Zoomlion, which in fact they said was bringing them a lot of relief. The daily spraying which started last year, according to the Head of the Vector Control Unit of Zoomlion, Alhaji Abibu Ziblim, 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.