George Monbiot , the widely respected British environmental journalist and social commentator, recently announced that he was putting up a prize for the writer of ‘best climate change fiction’ of the year. This would be awarded to that person who “manages, in the course of 2009, to cram as many misrepresentations, distortions and falsehoods into a single article, statement, lecture, film or interview about climate change.”
Following on Monbiot’s footsteps, we suggest that SANRAL’s Mr. Fanie Van Aardt deserves a ‘Wild Coast Mallet Award for Fiction’ for his statements about the impacts of the N2 Wild Coast Toll road which recently appeared in The Herald article ‘Wild Coast does not need Toll road’.
Mr. van Aardt’s dismisses SWC’s concerns that negative environmental and social impacts of the road will lead to increased poverty, unless the road is accompanied by a regional development plan, as being unfounded and ‘speculative’. As these are the same concerns that are raised in detail in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) specialist reports about social development and environmental impacts, does this mean Mr. Van Aardt also considers the EIA findings to be purely ‘speculative’?
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(1) Whether her department is investigating the incident that occurred on 17 September 2008 at Xolobeni Junior Secondary School where members of the SA Police Service are alleged to have administered corporal punishment to learners; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details,

(2) whether the principal of the school will be removed if he/she is found to have been complicit in the incident; if not, why not; if so, what are relevant details;

(3) whether her department will offer counselling services to the affected learners, if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details;

(4) whether she will visit the school to assure learners that the matter is being dealt with and it will not recur; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details? NW2638E

REPLY:

(1) The Eastern Cape Education Department’s preliminary report indicates that there are differences of fact and opinion in the statements made by the members of SAPS and the principal of the school. SAPS members say they searched for dangerous weapons and in the process forced those who resisted against the wall. The principal says the learners were beaten because they were violent and did not take instructions from him. The provincial authorities are conducting further investigations.

(2) The principal will be removed if he is found to be in contravention of the relevant legislation governing educators and schools.

(3) The Department will offer counselling services if there is a need to do so. However, a circuit manager visited the school on 24 October 2008 where she had an open session with the learners. There were no indications of traumatized learners unless they were absent from school on that day.

(4) I have delegated officials to visit the school.

Dear Editor

The N2 ‘Wild Coast’ Toll Rd EIA appears to have resurrected a widespread and extremely short-sighted myth which is common in economic circles. This myth is that ecological losses are justified if they result in economic gains.
The N2 Toll Road EIA points out that the proposed highway will result in substantial damage to the environment, particularly the extension through the ‘Greenfields’ section which traverses the Pondoland Centre of Plant Endemism. It defends these negative environmental impacts by claiming that economic benefits will outweigh ecological losses. This myth has been widely perpetuated by a number of local media reports concerning the N2 project.

It is beyond belief how such an outdated notion continues to be perpetuated in the twenty first century, when one considers the perilous state of the planet and incontrovertible evidence to the contrary by significant numbers of internationally accepted studies that show that environmental degradation invariably leads to decreasing social well-being and is economically costly.
In 1997 the United Nations, in its Human Development Report, said that poverty relief measures went hand in hand with reversing ‘environmental degradation’, securing ‘sustainable livelihoods’, improving employment prospects and creating ‘an enabling environment for small scale agriculture, microenterprises and the informal sector’.
In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development here in South Africa, Kofi Annan, then UN Secretary General, stated ‘…a path to prosperity that ravages the environment and leaves a majority of humankind behind in squalor will soon prove to be a dead-end road for everyone.”
The Millennium Assessment of 2005 showed that ‘the degradation of ecosystem services represents loss of a capital asset’ and furthermore that ‘loss of eco-systems services are seldom, if ever, brought into the balance sheet of GDP. When loss through unsustainable use is factored into GDP, many of the developing countries that show positive GDP growth are actually experiencing net loss of capital, with dire consequences for future growth.’
The UNEP 4th Global Environmental Outlook report of 2007 states, ‘development strategies often ignore the need to maintain the very ecosystem services on which long-term development goals depend…’. Both the UNDP and GEO4 state that poverty relief in many instances is interdependent upon reversing environmental degradation and nurturing sustainable livelihoods.
The 2007 South African National Framework on Sustainable Development argued for recognition of ‘non-negotiable ecological thresholds’ (NFSD, DEAT, 2007:21) that need to be reserved in order to maintain natural capital stocks over time. This ‘integrated approach’ emphasizes that the sustainable functioning of social and economic structures are dependent upon maintaining and working within the capacity of the environment to maintain and regenerate itself.
And most recently, WWF International’s 2008 Living Planet report states…..’Devastating though the financial credit crunch has been, it’s nothing as compared to the ecological recession that we are facing…. The more than $2 trillion lost on stocks and shares is dwarfed by the up to $4.5 trillion worth of natural resources destroyed forever each year.’
Given our considerable and irrefutable scientific proof of the current parlous state of our planet it is difficult to know how the myth that supposed economic gains can supplement for lost ecosystem functioning keep being perpetuated. Our own South African Environmental Outlook report, published in 2007 by the DEAT, makes it abundantly clear that South Africa cannot be at all complacent when it comes to the state of our environment, if we are to have any hope of pursuing a sustainable path.
Here are perhaps a few reasons that this myth is still so widespread:
First, it serves the short term interests of business and political leaders who stand to gain short term private profits or ‘kudos’ from maintaining this illusion.
Second, it comes about because of a reductionist approach to development which divides social, economic and ecological functions into separate, unrelated ‘boxes’, instead of seeing that these are all completely inter-dependent with each other.
Third, it comes out of a widely-held belief that humans and human society are somehow ‘separate’ from nature and from natural systems, with no understanding that whatever happens to natural systems will ultimately affect what happens to humans.

Belief in this myth is leading us to the brink of catastrophic ecological collapse which threatens the foundations of modern civilization. Climate change, the collapse of vast sea fisheries, doubling of reactive nitrogen and tripling of phosphorous since 1960, mass conversion of biomes – primarily to agriculture, a 6th great extinction of species due to habitat loss, and declining genetic diversity are all symptoms of a belief in this myth. And now it is being used as justification to put the Pondoland Centre of Plant Endemism at risk by ill-conceived corporate driven infrastructure proposals in the form of the N2 Toll road ‘Wild Coast’ extension and the mining venture.

Surely it is time to debunk this myth once and for all for the unmitigated rubbish that it is, and advance development proposals that improve the capacity of our natural systems to deliver ‘natural capital’ in support of human society, and thus enhance benefits to society as a whole, rather than insisting on development strategies that degrade our life-supporting systems?

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We know that SANRAL is committed to trying to improve South Africa’s road network. We know too that of the R44 billion the government received in 2006 from road users, only R10.6 billion was spent by the state in 2004/05 on building and maintaining national and provincial roads.

SANRAL’s budget allocation for 2004 was R1.4 billion, hardly adequate to maintain, never mind improve the national road network. SANRAL therefore proposes to overcome its shortages of income through tolling.
Has the time not come for the government to revise its policy and provide funding for roads that the communities prioritize, so that we don’t get roads built because they can be profitable, often through the policy of “unsolicited bids”?

We now have the draft environmental impact report available for the controversial Wild Coast N2 toll road. Quite apart from the highly debatable merits and demerits of the SANRAL Greenfields route between Mthatha and Port Edward (more specifically, between Lusikisiki and Port Edward), the probable tolls listed in the report are as follows:

This means that in this highly impoverished area, a road which is meant to benefit the local people is going to cost at least R70 between Ntafufu and Port Edward. This road will further isolate the present commercial centres of Bizana, Flagstaff and Kokstad and will hardly benefit the people of that region. This is quite apart from the fact that the report concludes “the proposed new road is considered not ecologically sustainable”.
Surely it is time for the treasury to revise its position, communicating with local communities so that SA develops a road structure that not only takes in the needs of local communities, but recognises the constraints imposed by oil peak and climate change, all of which indicate the need for futuristic planning?
Yours sincerely,

Bishop Geoff Davies Executive Director (SAFCEI)

Alyn Adams

Dear Minister Sonjica,

Just a note of support from a poorish white person, to remind you to keep your chins up in this time of tribulation. I say “poorish” because I know that, democratically speaking, I qualify as a prima facie elitest.

I was raised in an enclave of social and educational privilege, so my background could be characterised as previously advantaged, if you disregard disadvantages such as homophobia and religious brainwashing and the universal commercial disregard for the arty academic, not to mention the general plebeian distrust of intellectualism.

But, by the same token, as the sole breadwinner for an elective family of traditionally pigmented Africans of Malawian, Swazi and Diepslootian heritage, my colonialist leg-up hardly catapults me into the oligarchy. Yes, I have a job, but that’s about as far as my present-day advantage extends. I certainly don’t earn ministerial millions, or have the chance to vote myself a fat inflation-busting increase every year.

So, as I said, poorish. The family dogs have had to switch from Pedigree to Alpo, but the kids still get genuine tuna, at least.

Nevertheless, I can appreciate how hard it must be for one who has dedicated herself to saintly works uplifting the poor, to have her plans bedevilled by rich white people.

It’s even more annoying when the rich white people disguise themselves as poor black people about to be deprived of their very subsistence, just to thwart your plan to transform that ugly wasteland known as the Wild Coast into a pristine tourist attraction with beaches that rival Clifton. (At least, that’s how your mining partners are promising to leave it.)

And as for those rich white people hiring a lawyer with pro-poor struggle credentials as long as his arm – well, that just shows the dastardly deviousness to which those reactionaries are prepared to stoop.

And it’s all so harmful to international relationships, isn’t it? I mean, what are we to say to those nice Australian mining fellows, when these ingrates rebuff their philanthropic offer to tear all that nasty black goo out of our sand and rebuild our dunes to world-class, blue flag standards, practically free of charge?

By the way, congratulations on finding an Australian mining conglomerate that isn’t designed to channel most of its profits to rich white people – that must have been a pleasant, albeit unexpected, surprise.

What a burden they must be to you, all those rich white people who infest the Wild Coast – and you mustn’t be taken in by the way they’ve adopted ethnic surnames and live in overcrowded villages without electricity and running water, the cunning counter-revolutionaries – they’re obviously rich white people who pooh-pooh the 80 jobs this massive development promises to create.

I wouldn’t blame you if you got so irritated by this ungrateful bunch that you scrapped the whole deal. Let ‘em keep their dirty beaches and their unemployment levels, I say. What business have rich white people got being employed, anyway – even the really tanned, malnourished ones who speak nothing but Xhosa?

As a fearless legislator who has done so much for the arts, water affairs and the regular supply of Eskom electricity in her various portfolios, I reckon you’re well within your rights to cut them off from this splendid opportunity and shift it elsewhere.

So why not get your earnest Aussie do-gooders to move their dune-mining to Durban, instead? It’s one of our supposed tourism jewels, and for way too long we’ve had to apologise to visitors and explain, “No, it’s not an oil slick, it’s the titanium in the sand”.

I’m sure most Durbanites would rather say, “Take our titanium . . . please!”

And the Aussie mining company won’t even get flak from bunny huggers and troublemaking lawyers. After all, nobody’s going to complain that mining will screw up Durban’s beachfront, because Mike Sutcliffe and his posse have done such a good job of screwing it up already.

There’s pooh in the water, stompies in the sand, piers disrupting the natural flow of the current, and the next big storm could wash all our valuable titanium down to Plett. Compared to problems like that, a massive dredger off the Bay of Plenty sucking up the muck and spewing out the gorgeous golden sands that the Wild Coast is so short-sightedly rejecting may actually be an improvement.

And even if it isn’t, it will generate lots of gravy for you and Mike to split between you. The last thing on your mind, I’m sure, but after all the hassle you’ve been put through by those rich white people, it’s the least you deserve.

Dear Minister,

Congratulations on your decision to allow the Australians to strip-mine the Wild Coast. As a child, my parents would force me to accompany them on camping trips to Mtentu estuary. I look back on those times with hatred in my heart. I always seemed to have sand up my nose and a bluebottle down my costume. The sun was too hot and the water was too cold. Once a crab almost took my foot off and I remember looking at the estuary and thinking, one day someone will come along and destroy you. And I will laugh.

Now, after all these years, I finally get to have my laugh. Thank you for that. You are a magnificent woman and I wouldn’t hesitate to marry you if we weren’t both married already. I see in the papers that the bunny-hugging lentil-munchers are after your blood. How dare they? This country has more nature than it knows what to do with and I, for one, would far rather visit a titanium strip mine than a stupid lagoon and a bunch of dumb trees. After being forced to waste two years of your life as minister of water affairs and forestry, I am not surprised that you feel the same as I do.

I understand that for the Australians to get to the titanium, they are going to have to flatten the coastal dunes. This is wonderful news. In my opinion, there is nothing more useless than a sand dune. It just sits there, year after year, contributing nothing to the national economy. A bit like the local people, I suppose.

The Xolobeni Mineral Sands Project (which should win you a Nobel Prize) will offer the natives the opportunity to earn an honest living. They cannot spend their entire lives lolling about on the beach smoking drugs and making more babies than they can afford to maintain.

Being a sensitive nation keenly aware of their social responsibilities, the Australians will doubtlessly reward the indigenous tribes by providing them with all the benefits that an international mining company brings to an area. Obviously there will be free programmes to deal with alcohol abuse and penicillin jabs for those who contract syphilis, but there will also be schools, hospitals, gymnasiums, sports fields, golf estates, equestrian centres, bottle stores, brothels and theme parks for the kids to enjoy when dad takes his annual day off from the mine.

I was relieved to hear that you granted the licence to our antipodean comrades without consulting the people who live along this unproductive stretch of coastline. You are clearly aware of the futility of engaging illiterates in debate. Peasants will talk until the cows come home, but it all falls apart once you bring out the paperwork. Twenty years ago, my father asked a local headman if we could camp on his land and the village elders are still considering his request.

You are a Cabinet Minister and you do not need anyone’s permission to do anything. Don’t worry about that meddling lawyer, Richard Spoor, and his spurious claims that the mining licence is illegal. You have already pointed out at a public meeting that he is a white man and nothing more needs to be said. His credibility is in tatters.

South Africa would not be where it is today without people who understand the value of exploitation.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Trovato.

The Wild Coast is littered with the wrecks of grandiose development plans that have come to grief in one of the most inaccessible and beautiful parts of the country.

The Xolobeni sand mining plan is just the latest. At the turn of the twentieth century, the march of colonialism faltered against the Pondo uprising. In mid-century, the ‘betterment’ schemes were a half-hearted state attempt resented by the people to shift them from their fertile valleys to the hilltops.

In the new dispensation, the government’s Wild Coast SDI or Spacial Development Initiative ran itself into the ground with little benefit to show for ordinary folk for all the millions that was spent on it.

So it may be with the mining project. The unforgiving land and its hardy people have a way of resisting top-down schemes dreamed up in boardrooms and approved in committee chambers, when their own needs such as clinics, schools, and well-kept roads remain unmet.

One of the local sayings is “Outsiders come in, throw bones and then watch as the dogs fight over them.” This is not said in jest.

The assault on one of the chiefs who sided with the mining company after the day-long event hosted by the department of mineral and energy affairs recently may just be the first in a long battle over rights and uses to the land, some of which is sacred to the coastal communities and justly so.

The Pondo King Mpondombini Sigcau has now warned that forcing it through without the consent of his local people will be ‘nothing less than invasion’ of their land.

Million dollar machinery in a remote area is an easy target too and must be seen as high-risk assets. The mining company itself is already in the red and its share price has not risen since the granting of the licence. Maybe investors are canny to the old Scots proverb, “the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley’”

Hugh Tyrrell
Cape Town

To whom it may concern

Objection to Amendment Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Amendment Bill ( section 4 of Act 28 of 2002)

Please note the extreme concern, and objection, with which Sustaining the Wild Coast (SWC) view the following amendment to section 4 of the Mineral Petroleum and Resources Development Amendment Bill (B10 -2007) namely;

“3) the provisions of the National Environment Act, 1998 (Act No 107 of 1998) relating to environmental authorizations and any other related matters, shall not apply to activities of holders regulated in terms of this act.”

SWC objection is based upon the following:

• That the amendment was not included, nor canvassed, in the draft Amendment Bill presented to portfolio committee hearings in May.

• That is it doubtful whether the consultation process adequately involved people who will be affected by its inclusion.

• That the proposed amendment may seriously undermine the requirements of NEMA relating to the mining industry, to the greater detriment of the South African public and general mining industry standards.

• That the amendment will lead to conflict of interests within DME’s mandate, namely that DME cannot objectively serve both the needs of the mining industry while simultaneously adjudicating the best needs of the environment.

• That the amendment may infringe on the executive powers of Provinces as far as mining related issues are concerned.

• That the amendment is legally ambiguous as it does not specify which requirements of NEMA are excluded.

• That the amendment could lead to a dangerous precedent if other government departments follow this lead, which event could possibly undermine the requirements of NEMA to the extent that South Africa’s international environmental prestige could suffer.

SWC therefore request that the aforementioned amendment be withheld until all due and proper public consultation has been undertaken.

Val Payn
Communications
Sustaining the Wild Coast
P.O Box 44 Harding 4680
Tel 083 4416961
valpayn@gmail.com

Nomangesi Malunga, chairman of Xolco’s, concerns about people along the Wild Coast having a right to decent jobs and a basic standard of living are highly commendable. However, it would do well for Directors of Xolco to take a hard streetwise look at the supposed benefits Australian exploration mining company MRC will deliver to Wild Coast communities, least they end up manipulated into an exploitative deal that will not deliver on all it promises. For MRC publicity blurbs do not entirely line up with information on MRC’s Xolobeni website, nor with information revealed during close questioning in the public participation process.

The mining operation itself will not create 575 direct jobs, as stated, but only in the region of 250 jobs maximum. This, over a period of 25 years, can hardly be considered excessive. The remainder of the jobs will come from possible secondary related industries, most notably a proposed smelter. However, the smelter is not being considered as part of the current mining application process and will only be considered as a possibility once the mining process is given approval, and this under a separate feasibility study and EIA process. Moreover, under the admission of Mr John Barnes (the general manager of Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources, the South African subsidiary of MRC) considerations are also being looked at to put the smelter at Coega or to ship mined ore to Durban for export. There is therefore no guarantee whatsoever that the promised 575 jobs will be forthcoming for communities of the Wild Coast region. Besides which, where will the ore to keep the smelter going be mined from once the 25 year Wild Coast operation is over?

Nor is there yet any guarantee whatsoever that rehabilitation of the area is possible, a study of this being part of the EIA process currently underway. There is every likelihood that the region will have even less potable water available once the large amounts needed for the tailings operation have been extracted from estuaries and MRC, on their Xolobeni website, have made no guarantees about improving road infrastructure other than, one assumes, what is necessary for the extraction of minerals. Nor do MRC make any mention of the possibility that homesteads might have to be re-located from mining area’s.

The EU programme indeed invested heavily in eco-tourism projects in the region, but the sum mentioned was for projects that ran along the whole of the Wild Coast, not only in the proposed mining area. The reason that communities in the mining area have felt little or no benefit are numerous, including mismanagement, misappropriation of funds, and a rumoured conflict of interests and interference in ACCODA ( the community trust set up by the EU), by certain previous Directors of Xolco who also sat on the board of ACCODA and supposedly deliberately scuppered promising eco -tourist initiatives to make the mining seem more enticing.

Xolco would do very well to remember that all that glitters is not gold, and take a hard look at the financial implications of the deal that give Xolco 26% shareholding in TEM. This has been brokered under a loan agreement through which Xolco has been given a shareholder loan from MRC of US$ 18 million to finance its shares, but the total value of MRC consolidated book value as listed on 31 Dec is only $19 million. How much return on its investment will Xolco receive in real terms out of the investment once the loan, plus interest, has been repaid and over what period, considering the short lifespan of the mine?

And would this deal provide more opportunities and benefits for communities than well managed eco -tourism projects, the development and implementation of which are being smothered by the spectre of mining?

Val Payn
Communications
Sustaining the Wild Coast
Harding