Zanele

I am a tourism lecturer and this topic was discussed with my second year students. It is amazing how much our students are aware of the need to sustain our environment. What is not clear here is how strong is the power of the community? Does the community really have the last say? Those who support the mining should understand that jobs come and go, but once the environment has been destroyed , there is no second chance.

This is a very difficult question with many political and legal levels,and
part of the reason why the mining rights application has caused such
controversy.

Legally, the land in question is not owned by the communities who live
on the land, although they have lived there for many, many generations. It
is communal land held in trust by the Department of Land Affairs on behalf
of the communities and technically therefore, the Department of Land
Affairs (State) holds the ‘custodinainship/ title’ of the land. >
Any decision that the Dept Land Affairs makes about the land is
supposed to be made only after full consultation of the communities who reside upon
the land.

The area falls under the municipal jurisdiction of the OR Tambo
Municipality, which holds the ‘economic power’ of the area, in that
state funds for regional development are directed through local
municipalities, and ‘development’ projects such as road infrastructure/ provision of
electricity etc are controlled from municipal level. Some areas inland
in the municipal area are thought to be in favour of the mining, because
it will obviously not directly affect them ( they do not live on the land
to be mined) and they see benefits in terms of mining revenue’s/ job
opportunities for themselves, but of course mining will mean that those communities living on the mined land will loose many of the benefits they currently get from the land so it will have huge negative impacts on those communities who live on area earmarked for mining.

Although OR Tambo municipality is the means through which state
development is driven, many of the local rural communties still feel more
comfortable with, and have a allegiance to, traditional methods of consultation
where the local chiefs are seen to be the custodonians of communal and
tribal authority. However, in Eastern Cape, unlike Kwazulu Natal, the local
chiefs have no legal title or custodonianship over communal land. ( In KZN
the local chiefs have legal power as custodonians of communal land and
therefore no decisions can be taken about land use without local chiefs
permission). One therefore has a situtation in E Cape where the preferred
historical method of decision making of many traditional rural communities ( ie
by traditional tribal council) is undermined by provincial and state
ordance that gives no recognition to the preferred communal decision making
processes, but gives these powers to municipal and goverment officials
who often do not even come from the local area.

This means that the system becomes highly open to abuse. Although in
theory decisions about land use are meant to be made with the full
consultation and approval of communities, in reality this does not always happen in an unbiased, totally open manner conducive to free public participation
and democratic decision making processes. Part of the reason being that
communities are not always given unbiased/ objective information about
various projects from which they can make an informed, educated
decision. A controversy about the EIA public participation process is that project
proposers ( eg mining company) are required to hire and pay for the
EIA consultants, so, although EIA consultants are meant to be objective,
the fact that they are employed/ paid for by project proposers raises
questions about the extent to which EIA consultants are able to operate in a
totally neutral, objective manner. ( If EIA consultants gave results that
conflicted with too many project proposals they would probably soon find
themselves unemployed!)

The system leaves all sorts of leeway for various parties to manipulate
the situation in various ways, or for correct processes not to happen due
to incompetent/ inefficeient public servants tasked with overseeing the
process. Alleged contraventions and neglect of various of these is why
the HRCommission is now being called to adjudicate the matter. The issue
opens up many questions about human rights and environmental rights as
enshrined in the constitution, state interventions, and the way public processes
of decision making are conducted and organised, and the rights of communal
land dwellers.

It would seem that the current political setup and land rights issue
undermines the ability of communal land dwellers to determine the
future of the land that they have been occupying for centuries, this in
contravention of constitutional rights to self detemination, free information and
expression, education, and other basic human and environmental rights.
Because communities lives are closely intertwined with land use, a
change in land use will have profound impacts on the social
co-hesion, traditions, economies and cultures of Wild Coast
Communities.

Hopes this gives some understanding of the complexity of the
situation. From SWC side, it would be very interesting for SWC if tourism
students could be set a project/ assigment to suggest ways to ‘kick start’
tourism in the Wild Coast region in a way that was conducive to promoting local
communal land rights, local social upliftment and participation, and
conservation. We would be very interested to hear any idea’s along
these lines.

Posted on April 30th, 2008
Filed under: SWC Comments