by Leon Marshall. The Star. Edition 1 p.18. 31 July 2007

Environment minister’s portfolio needs to fight mineral and energies for place in government hierarchy

Environmentalists moved to the edge of their chairs and bit their fingernails when Marthinus van Schalkwyk succeeded Valli Moosa as minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism.

Everybody knew the new minister was a political opportunist. His appointment was reward for marching his motley band of Nationalists into the ANC camp. But did he have it in his broek, to paraphrase an Afrikaans saying, to stand up for nature when it came to the crunch in the cabinet?It is now three years on and still his position makes lively dinner-table conversation. A popular theory in his favour is that the fact that he is well outside the ANC’s leadership struggle allows him to get on quietly with his job. Against him is the view that he is so much in the cold that it leaves him with hardly any clout at all.

Just how, then, does one assess Van Schalkwyk’s performance?

Environmentalism is a cuddly issue. Everybody wants to save the plants, animals and Earth. It lends itself to resounding speeches and in that the man has excelled.

He is clever and he is an orator, which combine to make his parliamentary deliveries impressive, I am told. He certainly makes good public speeches, hardly needing to refer to his well-prepared written notes.

I have seen him in action in United Nations climate-change forums in Montreal, Brussels and Nairobi, and invariably he has done credit to South Africa’s growing international standing as an environmental player and as one of the world’s most biodiverse countries.

He has been as enthusiastic a proponent as his predecessor, now president of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), of protected area expansion and consolidation, and of transfrontier parks. He has piloted an impressive array of conservation laws through parliament, and now he is preparing to launch the National Framework for Sustainable Development (NFSD), which will circumscribe conservation’s position within the country’s overall development strategy.

He has skilfully worked the highly controversial culling option into an elaborate elephant-management plan. And he has shaken his fist at air polluters and at the canned-lion industry.

But does he ever slam his hand on the cabinet table to protest against what his colleagues, notably in the Department of Minerals and Energy (DME), are doing? I doubt it.

He has turned down a proposed new road along the Wild Coast, but that was on a technicality, which can be rectified for the application to be relaunched. For the rest, he and his department have been no more than hand-wringing observers of the damage inflicted on nature particularly by the rush for coal and the demand for construction sand.

Mining falls under the aegis of the DME, which is a law unto itself - literally. It is not governed by the normal conservation laws. It has its own set of environmental legislation to comply with, practically turning it into its own police. Its priority is mining, not conservation.

The result is to be found in what is happening in the Mpumalanga Lakes District, a precious ecological phenomenon, which will, economically, be far more sustainable as a tourist destination than as a temporary mine camp that leaves lasting scars.

It is to be seen, also, in what is happening in the Seringveld north-east of Pretoria where sand mining is fouling up river systems and defacing large tracts of land which were, until recently, intended for inclusion in an imaginative tourist-driven protected area.

There is the deadly acid water seeping from old coal mines near Witbank, killing river systems, including the Wilge that runs through the Ezemvelo Reserve, the Olifants that flows into the Loskop Dam and onwards to Kruger National Park, and Mozambique’s Massinger Dam.

There is a heap of applications for mining, many in environmentally sensitive areas. Some mining is claimed to be happening illegally, without DME’s approval. If this is so, then surely it becomes the Environmental Affairs Department’s duty to step in.

There is, if course, still the big question of whether mining is going to be allowed on the Wild Coast, an area of no less beauty and ecological importance than the old St Lucia, which the ANC government saved from mining when it first took over power.

The curious aspect is that in all these situations, Van Schalkwyk and his department have been standing aside, leaving the battle for precious parts of the South African environment to be fought by concerned individuals .

An excuse offered is that such regional issues are the domain of the environmental departments of the provinces. But which of these is going to take on central government’s mighty DME? This is besides the bureaucratic difficulty of who takes charge when a problem like acid water spills across provincial boundaries.

Van Schalkwyk and his department are in overall charge of environmental protection. Those individuals fighting the good fight for them may have the passion but they lack the influence and the wherewithal.

Even so, they are prepared to carry on their battle in the courts if necessary.

It may be argued that the fault lies not with Van Schalkwyk or his department but with a government hierarchy that gives mining and development precedence over environmental considerations.

The answer then is to move the portfolio up the cabinet status scale. It has been happening in countries, notably in Europe, where the environment has risen to the top public concern. But whether Van Schalkwyk will be the minister entrusted with such political clout, I doubt.

Posted on July 31st, 2007
Filed under: Newspaper and Media