Val Payn

Wild Coast communities responded angrily ‘when Minister Sonjica called them ‘impoverished’ at a community meeting at Komkulu on Friday 12 September. Community members considered it an insult to be called ‘impoverished’ by an ‘outsider’. Particularly as DME had justified the highly unpopular Xolobeni Sands mining proposal under the guise that it would bring ‘poverty relief’ and ‘development’.

‘Impoverished’, like ‘development’, is just one of many words that seem to suffer from verbal schizophrenia. Their meaning changes, depending upon who utters them. ‘Sustainable’, ‘economic growth’, ‘poverty relief’, ‘aid’ are a few others that come to mind.
These words represent a host of deep and complex issues but, when used sprinkled about decoratively like cherries on a cake, they give little clarity on the ‘real deal’ behind the matters at stake. Far too often such words are simply used to obfuscate policies and programmes that have questionable benefits for the people they are supposedly helping.

For example, what does ‘poor’ signify? Poor in what? In capital, in human relationships, in health, in intelligence, in natural resources, in appropriate education or skills for the task at hand, in appropriate assistance from government? Unless one understands what it is that people are ‘poor’ in, then how can one hope to ‘alleviate poverty’? ‘Poor’ can be a very subjective statement, often as dependent upon the values of the observer as it is upon the opinions or real experiences of those labeled ‘impoverished’. This is not to say that poverty, of any kind, is not a real and debilitating phenomenon. But if the goal of ‘development’ is to relieve poverty, then any appropriate ‘poverty relief’ policies first require a holistic understanding of the root causes of poverty and should be designed to specifically remedy these.
To therefore talk of ‘development’ as a means of ‘poverty alleviation’ without an appreciation of what, who or to what purpose one is trying to ‘develop’ is hollow.

Far too often, however, in the name of ‘poverty alleviation’, commercial proposals that go under the guise of ‘development’ (or its schizophrenic word substitute ‘economic growth’) are used to impose plans upon communities that are driven by the value systems and the commercial interests of ‘outside’ agenda’s , rather than by the real needs of communities themselves.

This brings to mind another schizophrenic term, namely ‘public–private partnerships’.

In many areas of rural Eastern Cape, a number of development proposals under the guise of ‘poverty alleviation’ are being driven by a neo –liberal rationale of economic growth fuelled by industrial driven development, export trade, and ‘public –private partnerships’.
The Wild Coast mining proposal, as well as the N2 Wild Coast ‘toll road’ proposal, fits snugly within this neo –liberal rationale. Other developments that would see ‘public- private partnerships’ using rural communal land to drive a neo-liberal development agenda include the establishment of commercial timber plantations, maize for bio-fuels, and the intensive mono-cultural cultivation of land for agricultural export crops.
The theoretical rationale behind this is that by partnering with the wealth and skills of the private sector, a capital boost will be created that has positive ‘trickle down’ effects for the so called ‘impoverished’. In real life, because ‘trickle down’ is not generally planned with the needs of the poor foremost in mind but rather with the wants of profiteers, ‘trickle down’ often simply means the majority being left to gather whatever leftover crumbs might fall from the banqueting table.
If ‘public-private partnerships’ are foisted upon communities without the full participation of communities in developing such proposals, these too easily become a vessel in which public money and resources are used for projects that a few elites make a private profit from. Yet rural communities are seldom engaged with at the outset to help outline ‘development proposals’, but rather have already fully proposed plans foisted upon them.

Factions pushing for the industrial or agri-business ‘development’ of communal land often point to an ‘underutilization’ of communal land as a rationale for taking this land over for ‘development’. Yet ‘under utilization’ of land is in itself a value based judgment used to justify a world view that sees land as simply another commodity from which maximum capital gain needs to be squeezed.

It is rare that one finds a questioning of the value systems which lie behind various proposals for land use options, or an interrogation of policies to establish whether these support the optimal utilization of land by communal dwellers, or consider the extent to which so –called ‘under-utilized’ land might already be ‘optimally utilized’ to augment rural livelihoods, albeit under a different socio –cultural system to the dominant commercial model? Far too often the so called ‘under –utilization’ of rural communal land is blamed on ‘peasants ineptitude’, rather than asking whether the economic, political and institutional systems are sensitive to the socio –cultural context of land which many communal land dwellers still value, and work within these paradigms.

For traditional communities, land is not simply a commercial commodity from which to extract as much money as possible from, but is considered a communal resource to be utilized according to common need, and which is closely bound to a communal sense of identity. Seeing land seldom purely as a commodity is to ignore these broader values that land holds for many traditional rural dwellers.

Real ‘development’ is about improving the life quality of human beings. This requires that the conditions are created which allow communities to evolve in a manner that communities deem to be most beneficial to themselves.
The only way to address this is through real ‘grassroots’ consultation and the advancement of ‘development strategies’ that are outlined and directly engaged with by affected communities.
Val Payn, Box 44 Harding 4680, vallieb@gmail.com , cell 083 4416961

Posted on October 7th, 2008
Filed under: Articles