The water warriors
SEAN CHRISTIE Oct 04 2010 15:20
The inconvenient truths about our polluted water supplies aren’t going unchallenged - at least not by these activists. Sean Christie meets the environmentalists on the front lines of the battle over our eroding water systems
The principled insider
Carin Bosman worked for the Department of Water Affairs both before and after 1994 and has the unassailable distinction of having off people on both sides of that political divide.
As an independent consultant these days, her technical knowledge, coupled with her managerial ability and first-hand experience of “the politics of pollution”, has seen her drawn into some of the biggest environmental scraps of the day, such as the ongoing Vele Colliery debacle in Limpopo, where she hopes that her evaluation of Coal of Africa’s environmental management programme report will contribute to the closure and rehabilitation of the mine.
“The only change since 1994 in regard to the politics of pollution has been skin colour,” says Bosman. “You may recall we had a racing car in Formula One. That was the politics of pollution at work. Sasol knew that the minister at the time, Gert Kotze, was a big racing car fan and when its environmental impact came under scrutiny my colleagues were told to lay off and the next thing, South Africa had this car.” (Sasol was the title sponsor of the Jordan Grand Prix team during the 1992, 1993 and 1994 Formula One World Championship seasons.)
In 2005, as director of water resource protection and waste management at the department of water affairs, Bosman was instrumental in getting a number of big-name gold mines in the vicinity of Klerksdorp to share the cost of groundwater pumping operations at mines that had been liquidated by DRD Gold to keep the shafts from flooding and creating a massive acid mine drainage problem in the process.
“It was the first time the strength of section 19 of the National Water Act was ever tested and it passed the tests,” says Bosman, adding that South Africa has excellent liability laws. Her wrangles with mining managing directors were nothing compared with the battles fought in the corridors of the department itself, however. “I was under severe pressure to let these guys off the hook — it was very hard,” says Bosman, who was shown the door after butting heads with the director general.
“I used to work for SA.gov but I now work for SA.org through my company, Sustainable Solutions. Sometimes it pays, usually it doesn’t. My focus is still on communipies, and I don’t beat around the bush. We need as many people as possible to keep pointing out that the politics of pollution are actually killing us.”
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The impatient scientist*
Dr Paul Oberholster wants a chair in water quality and food security. It seems a reasonable thing to want. Nobody would deny that South Africa has water quality issues and that they threaten food security. Oberholster is a senior limnologist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), one of only a handful of water quality specialists left in the country. If the likes of him aren’t going to direct research at these critical issues, then who?
The politics of pollution, however, do not answer to reason, neither do the politics of research, for that matter.
Water research in the country is fragmented and often embargoed, as are the mines and industry sponsor reports which never see the light of day.
“As scientists we come to a point where we finish the research and nothing happens afterwards. It’s not the way forward,” says Oberholster, who spends much of his time on the banks of the Olifants River and Loskop Dam, where he is leading a major water quality study. That study, too, is confidential.
So, Oberholster has decided to become more than a scientist, he’s pushing for a CSIR chair that will direct practical research at the gaps in our knowledge about water quality and what it’s doing to our food.
He insists there’s no material motive in all of this, or he would have embraced private sector consultancy work long ago. What motivates him, he says, is the plight of the poorer communities along South Africa’s poisoned rivers.
“For 19 years I was a teacher, so the community is part of my life. Also, I became sick from working with polluted water when I was still studying. I’ve experienced first hand the toll it can have. That’s what keeps me going. We need to do more than just speak about the problem.”
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The unionist*
In May this year Louis Meintjies, on behalf of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), walked into Pretoria’s Brooklyn police station and laid criminal charges against the ministers of water, minerals, and agriculture for neglecting to do anything about the increasingly degenerate state of South Africa’s water systems.
By September the country had seen a flurry of water-conscious interventions from government.
And while it would be misleading to credit Meintjies with the government’s newfound environmental concern, few would argue that of all the water activists who ratcheted up the pressure in 2010, he has been the most strident.
“We need, all of us, to stop having conferences or workshops on water quality. Since the African Water Conference last year there have been 18 nearly identical conferences, where the same people present again and again.
“We need to get beyond stating the problem and focus on finding solutions,” he says.
Meintjies’s approach is given particular coherence and focus by the fact that he is a farmer in a water-strapped part of the country, who happens to represent farmers with myriad water concerns.
It is because of their concerns that he established the National Water Forum, and as chairperson of this vehicle that he suggested to the CSIR’s Paul Oberholster that a chair in water quality and food security was required to direct research on the effects of polluted water on agricultural production.
His particular approach is perhaps best encapsulated by the action of a single minute during the AgriSA water conference in early August. After a day of speeches and presentations Meintjies was the first to put his hand in the air.
“Do we know how much land and water we need in order to be self-sufficient in food?” he asked.
The question caused some uncomfortable shifting in seats. “Let me put it another way,” Meintjies continued: “Do we intend importing our food in future? Do we want to be dependent on our neighbours for food? It must be so, because that can be the only outcome if we continue to do to our rivers and dams what we are doing now.
”
The panellists dodged the question that day, but Meintjies will have his hand up at the next conference, of that you can be sure. And he will keep on asking until someone gives him a straight answer, because, being a farmer, he understands that problems don’t go away until they are solved.
The stubborn farmer
Dr Koos Pretorius doesn’t have a problem with mining, exactly, it’s simply that he’s done the maths on coal mining in his own neck of the woods and discovered that it isn’t sustainable.
“The pollution remediation costs of coal mining endure for hundreds of years. Any economist will immediately point out that this is unsustainable and yet everybody still thinks coal mining is such a profitable business. This is because miners simply don’t pay for the bulk of their costs, they are all externalised to the taxpayer, the environment and the communities that rely on that environment.”
This inconvenient truth, and the fact that there are plans afoot for 4 500 hectares’ worth of open-cast mines near Pretorius’s beloved Belfast, galvanised the veterinarian turned cherry farmer to establish the Escarpment Environmental Protection Group, which promptly began laying criminal charges against some rather large mining houses.
With other NGOs and private appellants, Pretorius has dragged several companies before the water tribunal for mining without a water licence. He’s the big thorn in the side of big coal.
It makes Pretorius particularly mad that deals for coal-bearing land are struck between miners and farmers over the heads of farm workers, who are classically left to make do in reconstruction and development squats in the nearest township or in houses built by the mines in the middle of nowhere at extremely low cost.
To counter this, Pretorius conducts workshops on workers’ rights, which have brought him into conflict with miners and farmers who fail to acknowledge that his campaign to stall unregulated coal mining might just save their livelihood.
Noble as all of this sounds, noblesse oblige is refreshingly absent from Pretorius’s advocacy.
“When this is finished, I’m done. I’m not even on the school council or anything like that. I’d like nothing better right now than to just be sitting on my verandah with a beer in my hand.”
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Our lady of the mines*
In 1996 South African mines approached the government with a major concern. Acid mine drainage (AMD) was due to begin decanting from the western basin of the Witwatersrand in 2002 and they suggested it would be a good idea to come up with a management plan to mitigate its impact. In 1999 the Strategic Waste Water Management Plan (Swamp) was presented to Parliament but the portfolio committee passed it over, a decision that did not stop the 2002 decant from happening on time, with devastating human and environmental consequences. Still the government did nothing.
If ever there was a need for determined individuals and NGOs to step in and hold both the government and the mines to account in terms of the many laws their fence-sitting was in conflict with (the National Water Act, the National Environmental Management Act, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, the National Nuclear Regulator Act and the Constitution), this was it, but that was exactly the problem: any activism would be directed at the most powerful public-private alliance the country has ever seen.
Undeterred, an activist called Mariette Liefferink entered the fray. She was barely noticed at first, but her name gradually became synonymous with AMD and her voice grew louder until it became impossible to ignore. On August 19 Cabinet handed the minister of water affairs a mandate to assemble a team to look into ways of mitigating the country’s AMD problems — a decision which appears to represent a major shift in the government’s approach to AMD. And few would deny that Liefferink played a major role in changing the minds that mattered.
Liefferink lives in a smallish house in Bryanston, in one of the many housing complexes that have proliferated there.
It’s a faux-Tuscan complex, tan and bland, and this makes it all the more interesting to be greeted at the filigree gate by a tall, slender woman in a red Chinese dress, modest in cut if not in colour. She wears band-like black sunglasses to protect her blue eyes from the Highveld UV rays and waves me into a living room dense with porcelain urns, china plates, embossed cushions and elaborate gold-leaf mirrors.
“I was married to a wealthy man,” she says. “We had three houses, so you can imagine, a lot of stuff now has to fit inside a much smaller space.
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It’s immediately clear that the regular comparisons with her American activist counterpart Erin Brockovich are imprecise - where Brockovich in her heyday was all décolletage and west-coast directness, Liefferink is as decorous and prim as only an urbanised plaasmeisie from a notable Eastern Cape legal family could be. She found the movie discouraging, incidentally.
“In the case of her fight the issues were not major ones. Here in South Africa, we are dealing with multinational gold mining companies that created the largest gold-mining basin in the world, with hundred-year impacts, and yet it seems this has not raised the same awareness as her campaign,” she says.
Liefferink traces her activism back to 1995, the year that Royal Dutch Shell began buying up properties in her neck of Bryanston with a view to developing a pilot suburban Ultra City.
“Basically, I was actuated by the Nimby principle - not in my back yard. It was pure narrow self-interest,” she says.
After seven years of unsuccessful attempts to get around Liefferink, Shell backed away from a concept in which they had invested significant funds.
“That gave me a sense of grandiosity. I suddenly felt that one woman could really make a difference. From that followed other, smaller campaigns and then 53 landowners in the vicinity of West Driefontein gold mine approached me, alleging that they could no longer irrigate after the miner had dewatered the aquifer. I accepted their request for help because I was shocked at the injustice of the gold mining - how the richest gold mine in history was externalising all its impacts upon a poor community.
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Liefferink went on to grapple with the heavyweights of the Witwatersrand - Goldfields, AngloGold Ashanti, First Uranium, Harmony Gold - moving from the “narrow self-interest” of the Nimby principle to a life of helping others for no financial reward.
“I come from a very long line of jurists,” Liefferink says when I ask her where the altruism comes from. “I was raised on the court benches and I think that sense of justice was instilled in me at a very young age.
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She took a law diploma but never practised. Instead she became an ordained minister and stuck to her calling for 30 years.
“The denomination was one that required me to walk from house to house every day. We worked out that it would take 1 000 hours to make one disciple and I think that established a very good background for me because now I also go persistently from house to house, or from hut to hut, but instead of preaching religion my advocacy is now environmental matters,” she says.
And so Liefferink has gone about her work, aggregating embargoed research papers and studying environmental management plans (EMPs) and then going out to the goldfields with great regularity to hear for herself how the miners’ deviations from their own EMPs are affecting communities. Wherever she has discovered transgressions she has reported them to the relevant organs of state and simultaneously whistle-blown to the media, despite the fact that she is largely funded by the mines themselves (an uncomfortable strategic frisson that a recent University of Pretoria booklet on AMD identified as a weakness of her activism).
It has never been easy. The university booklet suggests Liefferink “speaks from the point of view of ‘we’ because she needs the legitimacy of public support for her efforts and for her activities and organisation to be noticed and respected. The reality for her is, however, that her activist pursuits are very lonely and that it is she alone who maintains the momentum of raising awareness and exerting pressure on government with regard to AMD and other problems caused by mining companies.”
I ask about loneliness and Liefferink says she has, indeed, been isolated for much of the time. “I have absolutely no social life, but I don’t miss it because I’m constantly interacting with many stimulating people in government and industry,” she says.
She thinks about her answer for a bit and then the instinct for absolute truth and accountability that has carried her activism so far kicks in and she decides to add to it. “Some might call what I do an obsession - it is an obsession - but for me to have a purpose for living, to have a meaning for life, not simply to have a hopeless and helpless and hapless existence, that is also the reason I continue. I hope, without impeachment or forfeiture of modesty, I can say: I think I have made a little difference.”
An Interview with War Veteran Wilfred Mhanda
His fight for the liberation of Zimbabweans continues by lobbying diplomats to push for crucial institutional reforms. His is a view and a position too rarely expressed in a country going nowhere. Sean Christie spoke to him.
Where do you stand on land reform in Zimbabwe?
There was definitely a great land hunger among Zimbabweans, and it is equally undeniable that this was not properly addressed.The communal areas were terribly congested and needed to be decongested. What I am opposed to is the breakdown of orderly, peaceful land reform. When the fast-track land reform programme was initiated, it was said that the whites weren’t making enough farmland available, and that there was not enough land to drive land reform forward.
From my own experience I know this is not true. I was a cattle buyer at that time, in 2000. I was travelling around the commercial agriculture areas and I came to know of several British farms, bought by the Zimbabwean government with British funds, which were lying fallow. Land reform since then has been a huge failure, a disaster. The communal areas are as congested as ever. For years there’s been terrible environmental degradation in these places, but now it’s all over the country. There are now gold panners in all our rivers. Our farms aren’t managed by skilled farmers but in many cases by elite beneficiaries destroying the land. All that the beneficiaries know how to harvest are natural resources like trees, fish, and wildlife. Plus, as everyone knows, land reform has been used as a tool for political control.
What are your views on Ian Scoones’s book Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Myths and Failures, which says land reform in Masvingo has been a partial success?
The book is very misleading. It’s a patriotic account of land reform – whitewash, so to speak. It avoids the uncomfortable fact that new farmers can only get land if they are loyal to the ruling party.
Then, once on the land, they aren’t given any title deeds – not even the elite get any. So when it comes to power struggles they know who to support or risk losing their land. Even the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leaders have farms with no title deeds and are therefore afraid of losing their land if they misbehave. So you can see how far the influence of land reform reaches when it comes to politics.
The MDC faces huge challenges since Wikileaks released classified US embassy documents that describe Mugabe as “a brilliant tactician” and the MDC as “far from ideal”. Do you agree with this assessment? What is the status of the struggle between the MDC and Zanu-PF? And how is this going to play out ahead of the 2011 elections?MDC treasurer-general Roy Bennett gave a speech in Paris recently where he described how Zanu-PF has used violence to secure power in nearly every election since independence. That was no exaggeration.
The only point of Bennett’s that I disagree with is his assertion that Mugabe is merely a symbolic leader, and that others are in fact in charge of Zanu-PF. That couldn’t be further from the truth, the old man is in complete control. The MDC’s biggest weakness at the moment is that they haven’t been categorical about the elections. When, and how do they want them held and who do they want in the country observing them to ensure that they are free and fair? They seem to think this next election won’t be violent like all the others. That is totally naïve. Zanu-PF, on the other hand, isn’t naïve. There is no way they will give up power, cooperate, or desist from violence. I know these guys personally. Before they wouldn’t give up power because they were making money from the parallel economy.
They were printing Zim dollars at the official rate, which bore no resemblance to the black market rate, and with this they would buy forex, which was illegal for anyone else to possess, and which they would then use to buy things. That game finished when the economy “dollarised”, but now they have the diamonds at Marange. Diamonds are the worst thing to happen to this country. Now you have a situation where the Zanu-PF leadership has so much to lose, in the form of all this mineral wealth.So you tell me whether the election is going to be free and fair. No! The only hope of that is if the MDC can get the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene, otherwise Zimbabwe could end up in a worse situation than before.
How does the Zimbabwe War Veteran’s Forum feature in all of this?
My forum doesn’t deal with either of the parties. We focus on the diplomats. We tell them that we want institutional reform and that the election should be seen as the start of institutional reform rather than an end in itself. We need courts that are strong and independent. We need a court in which you can prosecute a sitting president if need be.
Instead we have this government of national unity and a process to develop a new constitution. This constitutional route is just a diversion – after 18 months we still don’t even have a voters’ roll! Everything positive that’s happened in this country since the formation of the government of national unity has been donations. We can’t even pay our own civil service without aid, and we can’t audit these payments without aid. What we need more than anything are genuine civil society groups, not just civil society which is an appendage of the MDC. We’re talking to the diplomats about that and they’re noticing, because it’s their resources that are being abused.
Being so outspoken, do you not fear for your safety?
I fought side-by-side with many of the men in power, they know me, they respect me. If something happens to me the order must come from them, and that will not be an easy thing for them to do.
Just as it was during the war, none of our members are concerned about our safety. You must remember that Mugabe didn’t fight in the war. He is just a beneficiary.
Spurred on by success stories in glossy magazines, many people dream of retiring to the country and setting up their own businesses – preferably something “arty” that will let them exercise their creativity and make a comfortable living to boot.
But the reality is very different. Sad as they might be, cautionary tales of magnificent failures can be enlightening. Sean Christie shares the story of Rainer Rochel’s (left) papier-mâché frogs, and a doomed attempt to revitalise the Western Cape town of Ladismith.
It was Hettie Weymar who first told me about Ladismith’s “frog man”, sitting at her desk in the deconsecrated and very empty-feeling Otto Hager church, surrounded by tourist brochures. It was my first time in the picturesque Klein Karoo dorp, and I was curious about some frogs I’d seen scattered around – big psychedelically-coloured things, each about the size of an Alsatian. “Agh,” she said, “it was Rainer Rochel’s idea. He wanted to put the town on the map, so he did some research and found there’s a rare frog species that only lives in the kloofs near here.
“He already had a small workshop for making papier-mâché objects, and that led to him wanting to turn Ladismith into the ‘frog town’, much the same way that Nieu-Bethesda is the ‘owl town’. “All the business owners were expected to buy a frog, and at one point there were 35 of them, but most of the frogs started falling to bits.” Intrigued, I asked after Rainer and his frogs at other places. “Ja, we had one for many years,” said the owner of Route 62 café. “It sat right outside the door, but we realised it was scaring little kids, and they were refusing to come in, so we moved it.” But it wasn’t a topic many people were comfortable with, and I understood why when another townsman told me Rainer had committed suicide not long ago. “There are a lot of rumours about it, but it seems the main reason was financial,” he said. I’ve visited Ladismith many times since, and although all the frogs have disappeared, with the exception of one on the wall outside Vinknes café on the main road, the gossip about Rainer still crops up.
“Why would a person with medical training come here?” some asked with raised eyebrows. Others cruelly insinuated that his widow Trudie might have contributed to his state of mind, as she was divorcing him at the time. Spuriously, a newspaper article attempted to group Rochel with the Seweweekspoort spook and the Uniondale hitchhiker, by claiming that his ghost had been seen wandering around a property he’d owned, known to locals as “Die Kat Hotel”. When I expressed an interest in setting the record straight, many suggested it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie. But I believed then, and still believe now, that Rainer’s story, tragic as it is, has an instructive value nearing that of a parable.
Idealism and papier-mâché
In the glossy magazines and the government-propaganda publications, we often read about the couple who quit the big city to run an aromatherapy oils still, or to dedicate themselves to a skills-outreach programme. Rarely do we read about the failed rural enterprise – the divorce that followed the still’s closing, the depression that followed the outreach programme’s bankruptcy. Projects in rural areas fail with greater regularity than they succeed. By always focusing on the successes, a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land vision of the countryside is established. This isn’t only unhelpful to those who dream of “going rural”, it’s positively dangerous, especially with the rural development department getting ready to pump easy money into the countryside, almost certainly with the usual lack of post-transfer support.
Trudie Rochel, who now lives in Swellendam, agrees that life in the country can be harder than expected. “In Ladismith, people used to say you need three jobs just to survive,” she says. She also wanted to “set the record straight”. “I’m sad because I think the idea was sound. If anything, the problem was that it came 10 years too early for the town. Rainer deserves to be remembered for his vision, and maybe someone will pick up his work and get the project going again.” Her family settled in Ladismith when she was 13, though she met Rainer while working in Windhoek, Namibia.
“Rainer, who was from Velbert in Germany, was on holiday after studying medicine and art,” says Trudie. “He never did his internship because, as he always said, he hated varicose veins and haemorrhoids. “His ultimate dream was to do malaria research in Africa like Dr Albert Schweitzer. I can’t say why he chose art above medicine, because we weren’t well-off. Sometimes I thought he was a bit mad. But he was popular.” They had a son Max, and moved to Ladismith from Muizenberg in 2000, because they felt it was a safer environment for “an energetic young boy”. But as a foreigner without papers, Rainer couldn’t easily get a job, so he started giving weekly papier-mâché lessons. The Rochels had learnt the art in Namibia from Kenfe Michael Bethe Selassie, the world-famous French papier-mâché artist of Ethiopian extraction, who had given workshops at the Franco Namibian Cultural Centre in the early 1990s. Appalled by the area’s poverty and hoping to gain the ear of the local council, Rainer enlisted the help of a well-connected local hardware-store owner, Hennie Smit. “Rainier’s single greatest aim was to create jobs,” Hennie tells me. “He was even prepared to use his own money to do this. Government took notice and awarded us a R300 000 grant, which we used to commission the design and manufacture of a massive press, and a pulping machine.” Then they had to figure out what to do with the all the pulp. “We thought about ceiling boards and insulation boards, but the amount of waste in Ladismith was too little for a viable business,” says Hennie. “Also, the town is too isolated to get a usable manufactured product to the market profitably.”
Inspiration and deterioration
Inspiration struck in 2001, when Trudie and Rainer were invited to join a work group at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn. “We met a lady from Nieu-Bethesda, who told Rainer that thousands of people visit the town each year just to see the owls, and that many businesses had started just for that reason,” recalls Trudie. “After that Rainer had the idea of doing the same thing for Ladismith.” But despite being coddled by mountains and orchards, Ladismith lacks a distinct character trait with which to lure tourists. Wonderful things have happened here, though. Poet CJ Langenhoven was surely thinking of the steep cliffs and deep kloofs of the Klein Swartberge that overshadowed his farm on the outskirts of Ladismith, when he wrote the lines “Oor ons ewige gebergtes / waar die kranse antwoord gee”. Then there’s Oom Stanley de Wit, who still lives just off Ladismith’s Main Road.
In 1963 he set up a tiny hydro-electric unit beside a river on the face of the Swartberge, which powered a small bicycle lamp that could be seen, like a pin , from the town at night. He maintained the light for 30 years, and when his body could no longer manage the arduous hike, volunteers took over. The reassuring light still shines in the mountains to this day. But for all of this, the Swartberge aren’t the Drakensberg. Barrydale to the west is fast becoming known for its wines and brandies, while arty Calitzdorp to the east attracts more tourists. Then Rainer met some researchers who told him that Ladismith is one of the last places left where you’ll find Hewitt’s ghost frog, says Trudie. “After that, the frog thing became an obsession with him. Rainer really enjoyed the croaking of Ladismith’s frogs and wanted to make the locals aware of how precious they were. He gathered information about them and started combining the art and recycling theme with the frog thing.” For a while things went well. According to Trudie, Rainer was the environmental affairs department’s “blue-eyed boy”, as he was the only person who received a grant and could still show something for it.
He was nominated for the department’s Impumelelo Award in 2003 and 2005. “He liked to be in the limelight,” says Trudie. But with the thrill of Morning Live appearances and Radio Sonder Grense interviews, Rainer was starting to neglect reality. “Big frogs started appearing all over town and it was really worthwhile to see,” says Trudie. “I suggested he use part of his first grant to impregnate the pulp with something to make it totally waterproof, but he never listened to me. The paint would crack and the statues would deteriorate.” Even as the project was garnering more publicity for the town, Rainer’s local supporters began to worry. Not only did the business owners who had bought frogs feel hard done by when the statues began to fall apart, but the project remained dependent on grant money. This meant Rainer constantly had to let his staff go and then rehire them when he could.
When a second grant was awarded, the municipality suddenly decided they wanted to be part of the fanfare. “The mayor at the time took credit for getting that second grant, and demanded that his own people be involved as a result,” says Hennie. “I pulled out at this point, and later heard the money was gone before anything useful had been done with it.” To make matters worse, Trudie filed for divorce. “Rainer had his head in the clouds. He’d spend all his resources getting ready for the next arts festival, leaving another six months to survive on almost nothing. “He was the visionary, the artist, but in retrospect, it would’ve been good if he’d had a financial manager. He became obsessed with ideas, and they were often very good, but implementation was a problem as the funds would run out. “The last straw was when the municipality hijacked his second grant. In anticipation of that grant, he had ordered R30 000 worth of moulds from a man in Wellington. When it became clear that there would be no money, he had to return the already-used moulds. That broke him.” |fw
The water warriors
SEAN CHRISTIE Oct 04 2010 15:20
The inconvenient truths about our polluted water supplies aren’t going unchallenged - at least not by these activists. Sean Christie meets the environmentalists on the front lines of the battle over our eroding water systems
The principled insider
Carin Bosman worked for the Department of Water Affairs both before and after 1994 and has the unassailable distinction of having off people on both sides of that political divide.
As an independent consultant these days, her technical knowledge, coupled with her managerial ability and first-hand experience of “the politics of pollution”, has seen her drawn into some of the biggest environmental scraps of the day, such as the ongoing Vele Colliery debacle in Limpopo, where she hopes that her evaluation of Coal of Africa’s environmental management programme report will contribute to the closure and rehabilitation of the mine.
“The only change since 1994 in regard to the politics of pollution has been skin colour,” says Bosman. “You may recall we had a racing car in Formula One. That was the politics of pollution at work. Sasol knew that the minister at the time, Gert Kotze, was a big racing car fan and when its environmental impact came under scrutiny my colleagues were told to lay off and the next thing, South Africa had this car.” (Sasol was the title sponsor of the Jordan Grand Prix team during the 1992, 1993 and 1994 Formula One World Championship seasons.)
In 2005, as director of water resource protection and waste management at the department of water affairs, Bosman was instrumental in getting a number of big-name gold mines in the vicinity of Klerksdorp to share the cost of groundwater pumping operations at mines that had been liquidated by DRD Gold to keep the shafts from flooding and creating a massive acid mine drainage problem in the process.
“It was the first time the strength of section 19 of the National Water Act was ever tested and it passed the tests,” says Bosman, adding that South Africa has excellent liability laws. Her wrangles with mining managing directors were nothing compared with the battles fought in the corridors of the department itself, however. “I was under severe pressure to let these guys off the hook — it was very hard,” says Bosman, who was shown the door after butting heads with the director general.
“I used to work for SA.gov but I now work for SA.org through my company, Sustainable Solutions. Sometimes it pays, usually it doesn’t. My focus is still on communipies, and I don’t beat around the bush. We need as many people as possible to keep pointing out that the politics of pollution are actually killing us.”
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The impatient scientist*
Dr Paul Oberholster wants a chair in water quality and food security. It seems a reasonable thing to want. Nobody would deny that South Africa has water quality issues and that they threaten food security. Oberholster is a senior limnologist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), one of only a handful of water quality specialists left in the country. If the likes of him aren’t going to direct research at these critical issues, then who?
The politics of pollution, however, do not answer to reason, neither do the politics of research, for that matter.
Water research in the country is fragmented and often embargoed, as are the mines and industry sponsor reports which never see the light of day.
“As scientists we come to a point where we finish the research and nothing happens afterwards. It’s not the way forward,” says Oberholster, who spends much of his time on the banks of the Olifants River and Loskop Dam, where he is leading a major water quality study. That study, too, is confidential.
So, Oberholster has decided to become more than a scientist, he’s pushing for a CSIR chair that will direct practical research at the gaps in our knowledge about water quality and what it’s doing to our food.
He insists there’s no material motive in all of this, or he would have embraced private sector consultancy work long ago. What motivates him, he says, is the plight of the poorer communities along South Africa’s poisoned rivers.
“For 19 years I was a teacher, so the community is part of my life. Also, I became sick from working with polluted water when I was still studying. I’ve experienced first hand the toll it can have. That’s what keeps me going. We need to do more than just speak about the problem.”
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The unionist*
In May this year Louis Meintjies, on behalf of the Transvaal Agricultural Union (TAU), walked into Pretoria’s Brooklyn police station and laid criminal charges against the ministers of water, minerals, and agriculture for neglecting to do anything about the increasingly degenerate state of South Africa’s water systems.
By September the country had seen a flurry of water-conscious interventions from government.
And while it would be misleading to credit Meintjies with the government’s newfound environmental concern, few would argue that of all the water activists who ratcheted up the pressure in 2010, he has been the most strident.
“We need, all of us, to stop having conferences or workshops on water quality. Since the African Water Conference last year there have been 18 nearly identical conferences, where the same people present again and again.
“We need to get beyond stating the problem and focus on finding solutions,” he says.
Meintjies’s approach is given particular coherence and focus by the fact that he is a farmer in a water-strapped part of the country, who happens to represent farmers with myriad water concerns.
It is because of their concerns that he established the National Water Forum, and as chairperson of this vehicle that he suggested to the CSIR’s Paul Oberholster that a chair in water quality and food security was required to direct research on the effects of polluted water on agricultural production.
His particular approach is perhaps best encapsulated by the action of a single minute during the AgriSA water conference in early August. After a day of speeches and presentations Meintjies was the first to put his hand in the air.
“Do we know how much land and water we need in order to be self-sufficient in food?” he asked.
The question caused some uncomfortable shifting in seats. “Let me put it another way,” Meintjies continued: “Do we intend importing our food in future? Do we want to be dependent on our neighbours for food? It must be so, because that can be the only outcome if we continue to do to our rivers and dams what we are doing now.
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The panellists dodged the question that day, but Meintjies will have his hand up at the next conference, of that you can be sure. And he will keep on asking until someone gives him a straight answer, because, being a farmer, he understands that problems don’t go away until they are solved.
The stubborn farmer
Dr Koos Pretorius doesn’t have a problem with mining, exactly, it’s simply that he’s done the maths on coal mining in his own neck of the woods and discovered that it isn’t sustainable.
“The pollution remediation costs of coal mining endure for hundreds of years. Any economist will immediately point out that this is unsustainable and yet everybody still thinks coal mining is such a profitable business. This is because miners simply don’t pay for the bulk of their costs, they are all externalised to the taxpayer, the environment and the communities that rely on that environment.”
This inconvenient truth, and the fact that there are plans afoot for 4 500 hectares’ worth of open-cast mines near Pretorius’s beloved Belfast, galvanised the veterinarian turned cherry farmer to establish the Escarpment Environmental Protection Group, which promptly began laying criminal charges against some rather large mining houses.
With other NGOs and private appellants, Pretorius has dragged several companies before the water tribunal for mining without a water licence. He’s the big thorn in the side of big coal.
It makes Pretorius particularly mad that deals for coal-bearing land are struck between miners and farmers over the heads of farm workers, who are classically left to make do in reconstruction and development squats in the nearest township or in houses built by the mines in the middle of nowhere at extremely low cost.
To counter this, Pretorius conducts workshops on workers’ rights, which have brought him into conflict with miners and farmers who fail to acknowledge that his campaign to stall unregulated coal mining might just save their livelihood.
Noble as all of this sounds, noblesse oblige is refreshingly absent from Pretorius’s advocacy.
“When this is finished, I’m done. I’m not even on the school council or anything like that. I’d like nothing better right now than to just be sitting on my verandah with a beer in my hand.”
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Our lady of the mines*
In 1996 South African mines approached the government with a major concern. Acid mine drainage (AMD) was due to begin decanting from the western basin of the Witwatersrand in 2002 and they suggested it would be a good idea to come up with a management plan to mitigate its impact. In 1999 the Strategic Waste Water Management Plan (Swamp) was presented to Parliament but the portfolio committee passed it over, a decision that did not stop the 2002 decant from happening on time, with devastating human and environmental consequences. Still the government did nothing.
If ever there was a need for determined individuals and NGOs to step in and hold both the government and the mines to account in terms of the many laws their fence-sitting was in conflict with (the National Water Act, the National Environmental Management Act, the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, the National Nuclear Regulator Act and the Constitution), this was it, but that was exactly the problem: any activism would be directed at the most powerful public-private alliance the country has ever seen.
Undeterred, an activist called Mariette Liefferink entered the fray. She was barely noticed at first, but her name gradually became synonymous with AMD and her voice grew louder until it became impossible to ignore. On August 19 Cabinet handed the minister of water affairs a mandate to assemble a team to look into ways of mitigating the country’s AMD problems — a decision which appears to represent a major shift in the government’s approach to AMD. And few would deny that Liefferink played a major role in changing the minds that mattered.
Liefferink lives in a smallish house in Bryanston, in one of the many housing complexes that have proliferated there.
It’s a faux-Tuscan complex, tan and bland, and this makes it all the more interesting to be greeted at the filigree gate by a tall, slender woman in a red Chinese dress, modest in cut if not in colour. She wears band-like black sunglasses to protect her blue eyes from the Highveld UV rays and waves me into a living room dense with porcelain urns, china plates, embossed cushions and elaborate gold-leaf mirrors.
“I was married to a wealthy man,” she says. “We had three houses, so you can imagine, a lot of stuff now has to fit inside a much smaller space.
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It’s immediately clear that the regular comparisons with her American activist counterpart Erin Brockovich are imprecise - where Brockovich in her heyday was all décolletage and west-coast directness, Liefferink is as decorous and prim as only an urbanised plaasmeisie from a notable Eastern Cape legal family could be. She found the movie discouraging, incidentally.
“In the case of her fight the issues were not major ones. Here in South Africa, we are dealing with multinational gold mining companies that created the largest gold-mining basin in the world, with hundred-year impacts, and yet it seems this has not raised the same awareness as her campaign,” she says.
Liefferink traces her activism back to 1995, the year that Royal Dutch Shell began buying up properties in her neck of Bryanston with a view to developing a pilot suburban Ultra City.
“Basically, I was actuated by the Nimby principle - not in my back yard. It was pure narrow self-interest,” she says.
After seven years of unsuccessful attempts to get around Liefferink, Shell backed away from a concept in which they had invested significant funds.
“That gave me a sense of grandiosity. I suddenly felt that one woman could really make a difference. From that followed other, smaller campaigns and then 53 landowners in the vicinity of West Driefontein gold mine approached me, alleging that they could no longer irrigate after the miner had dewatered the aquifer. I accepted their request for help because I was shocked at the injustice of the gold mining - how the richest gold mine in history was externalising all its impacts upon a poor community.
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Liefferink went on to grapple with the heavyweights of the Witwatersrand - Goldfields, AngloGold Ashanti, First Uranium, Harmony Gold - moving from the “narrow self-interest” of the Nimby principle to a life of helping others for no financial reward.
“I come from a very long line of jurists,” Liefferink says when I ask her where the altruism comes from. “I was raised on the court benches and I think that sense of justice was instilled in me at a very young age.
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She took a law diploma but never practised. Instead she became an ordained minister and stuck to her calling for 30 years.
“The denomination was one that required me to walk from house to house every day. We worked out that it would take 1 000 hours to make one disciple and I think that established a very good background for me because now I also go persistently from house to house, or from hut to hut, but instead of preaching religion my advocacy is now environmental matters,” she says.
And so Liefferink has gone about her work, aggregating embargoed research papers and studying environmental management plans (EMPs) and then going out to the goldfields with great regularity to hear for herself how the miners’ deviations from their own EMPs are affecting communities. Wherever she has discovered transgressions she has reported them to the relevant organs of state and simultaneously whistle-blown to the media, despite the fact that she is largely funded by the mines themselves (an uncomfortable strategic frisson that a recent University of Pretoria booklet on AMD identified as a weakness of her activism).
It has never been easy. The university booklet suggests Liefferink “speaks from the point of view of ‘we’ because she needs the legitimacy of public support for her efforts and for her activities and organisation to be noticed and respected. The reality for her is, however, that her activist pursuits are very lonely and that it is she alone who maintains the momentum of raising awareness and exerting pressure on government with regard to AMD and other problems caused by mining companies.”
I ask about loneliness and Liefferink says she has, indeed, been isolated for much of the time. “I have absolutely no social life, but I don’t miss it because I’m constantly interacting with many stimulating people in government and industry,” she says.
She thinks about her answer for a bit and then the instinct for absolute truth and accountability that has carried her activism so far kicks in and she decides to add to it. “Some might call what I do an obsession - it is an obsession - but for me to have a purpose for living, to have a meaning for life, not simply to have a hopeless and helpless and hapless existence, that is also the reason I continue. I hope, without impeachment or forfeiture of modesty, I can say: I think I have made a little difference.”
An Interview with War Veteran Wilfred Mhanda
His fight for the liberation of Zimbabweans continues by lobbying diplomats to push for crucial institutional reforms. His is a view and a position too rarely expressed in a country going nowhere. Sean Christie spoke to him.
Where do you stand on land reform in Zimbabwe?
There was definitely a great land hunger among Zimbabweans, and it is equally undeniable that this was not properly addressed.The communal areas were terribly congested and needed to be decongested. What I am opposed to is the breakdown of orderly, peaceful land reform. When the fast-track land reform programme was initiated, it was said that the whites weren’t making enough farmland available, and that there was not enough land to drive land reform forward.
From my own experience I know this is not true. I was a cattle buyer at that time, in 2000. I was travelling around the commercial agriculture areas and I came to know of several British farms, bought by the Zimbabwean government with British funds, which were lying fallow. Land reform since then has been a huge failure, a disaster. The communal areas are as congested as ever. For years there’s been terrible environmental degradation in these places, but now it’s all over the country. There are now gold panners in all our rivers. Our farms aren’t managed by skilled farmers but in many cases by elite beneficiaries destroying the land. All that the beneficiaries know how to harvest are natural resources like trees, fish, and wildlife. Plus, as everyone knows, land reform has been used as a tool for political control.
What are your views on Ian Scoones’s book Land Reform in Zimbabwe: Myths and Failures, which says land reform in Masvingo has been a partial success?
The book is very misleading. It’s a patriotic account of land reform – whitewash, so to speak. It avoids the uncomfortable fact that new farmers can only get land if they are loyal to the ruling party.
Then, once on the land, they aren’t given any title deeds – not even the elite get any. So when it comes to power struggles they know who to support or risk losing their land. Even the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leaders have farms with no title deeds and are therefore afraid of losing their land if they misbehave. So you can see how far the influence of land reform reaches when it comes to politics.
The MDC faces huge challenges since Wikileaks released classified US embassy documents that describe Mugabe as “a brilliant tactician” and the MDC as “far from ideal”. Do you agree with this assessment? What is the status of the struggle between the MDC and Zanu-PF? And how is this going to play out ahead of the 2011 elections?MDC treasurer-general Roy Bennett gave a speech in Paris recently where he described how Zanu-PF has used violence to secure power in nearly every election since independence. That was no exaggeration.
The only point of Bennett’s that I disagree with is his assertion that Mugabe is merely a symbolic leader, and that others are in fact in charge of Zanu-PF. That couldn’t be further from the truth, the old man is in complete control. The MDC’s biggest weakness at the moment is that they haven’t been categorical about the elections. When, and how do they want them held and who do they want in the country observing them to ensure that they are free and fair? They seem to think this next election won’t be violent like all the others. That is totally naïve. Zanu-PF, on the other hand, isn’t naïve. There is no way they will give up power, cooperate, or desist from violence. I know these guys personally. Before they wouldn’t give up power because they were making money from the parallel economy.
They were printing Zim dollars at the official rate, which bore no resemblance to the black market rate, and with this they would buy forex, which was illegal for anyone else to possess, and which they would then use to buy things. That game finished when the economy “dollarised”, but now they have the diamonds at Marange. Diamonds are the worst thing to happen to this country. Now you have a situation where the Zanu-PF leadership has so much to lose, in the form of all this mineral wealth.So you tell me whether the election is going to be free and fair. No! The only hope of that is if the MDC can get the Southern African Development Community (SADC) to intervene, otherwise Zimbabwe could end up in a worse situation than before.
How does the Zimbabwe War Veteran’s Forum feature in all of this?
My forum doesn’t deal with either of the parties. We focus on the diplomats. We tell them that we want institutional reform and that the election should be seen as the start of institutional reform rather than an end in itself. We need courts that are strong and independent. We need a court in which you can prosecute a sitting president if need be.
Instead we have this government of national unity and a process to develop a new constitution. This constitutional route is just a diversion – after 18 months we still don’t even have a voters’ roll! Everything positive that’s happened in this country since the formation of the government of national unity has been donations. We can’t even pay our own civil service without aid, and we can’t audit these payments without aid. What we need more than anything are genuine civil society groups, not just civil society which is an appendage of the MDC. We’re talking to the diplomats about that and they’re noticing, because it’s their resources that are being abused.
Being so outspoken, do you not fear for your safety?
I fought side-by-side with many of the men in power, they know me, they respect me. If something happens to me the order must come from them, and that will not be an easy thing for them to do.
Just as it was during the war, none of our members are concerned about our safety. You must remember that Mugabe didn’t fight in the war. He is just a beneficiary.
Spurred on by success stories in glossy magazines, many people dream of retiring to the country and setting up their own businesses – preferably something “arty” that will let them exercise their creativity and make a comfortable living to boot.
But the reality is very different. Sad as they might be, cautionary tales of magnificent failures can be enlightening. Sean Christie shares the story of Rainer Rochel’s (left) papier-mâché frogs, and a doomed attempt to revitalise the Western Cape town of Ladismith.
It was Hettie Weymar who first told me about Ladismith’s “frog man”, sitting at her desk in the deconsecrated and very empty-feeling Otto Hager church, surrounded by tourist brochures. It was my first time in the picturesque Klein Karoo dorp, and I was curious about some frogs I’d seen scattered around – big psychedelically-coloured things, each about the size of an Alsatian. “Agh,” she said, “it was Rainer Rochel’s idea. He wanted to put the town on the map, so he did some research and found there’s a rare frog species that only lives in the kloofs near here.
“He already had a small workshop for making papier-mâché objects, and that led to him wanting to turn Ladismith into the ‘frog town’, much the same way that Nieu-Bethesda is the ‘owl town’. “All the business owners were expected to buy a frog, and at one point there were 35 of them, but most of the frogs started falling to bits.” Intrigued, I asked after Rainer and his frogs at other places. “Ja, we had one for many years,” said the owner of Route 62 café. “It sat right outside the door, but we realised it was scaring little kids, and they were refusing to come in, so we moved it.” But it wasn’t a topic many people were comfortable with, and I understood why when another townsman told me Rainer had committed suicide not long ago. “There are a lot of rumours about it, but it seems the main reason was financial,” he said. I’ve visited Ladismith many times since, and although all the frogs have disappeared, with the exception of one on the wall outside Vinknes café on the main road, the gossip about Rainer still crops up.
“Why would a person with medical training come here?” some asked with raised eyebrows. Others cruelly insinuated that his widow Trudie might have contributed to his state of mind, as she was divorcing him at the time. Spuriously, a newspaper article attempted to group Rochel with the Seweweekspoort spook and the Uniondale hitchhiker, by claiming that his ghost had been seen wandering around a property he’d owned, known to locals as “Die Kat Hotel”. When I expressed an interest in setting the record straight, many suggested it might be better to let sleeping dogs lie. But I believed then, and still believe now, that Rainer’s story, tragic as it is, has an instructive value nearing that of a parable.
Idealism and papier-mâché
In the glossy magazines and the government-propaganda publications, we often read about the couple who quit the big city to run an aromatherapy oils still, or to dedicate themselves to a skills-outreach programme. Rarely do we read about the failed rural enterprise – the divorce that followed the still’s closing, the depression that followed the outreach programme’s bankruptcy. Projects in rural areas fail with greater regularity than they succeed. By always focusing on the successes, a kind of cloud-cuckoo-land vision of the countryside is established. This isn’t only unhelpful to those who dream of “going rural”, it’s positively dangerous, especially with the rural development department getting ready to pump easy money into the countryside, almost certainly with the usual lack of post-transfer support.
Trudie Rochel, who now lives in Swellendam, agrees that life in the country can be harder than expected. “In Ladismith, people used to say you need three jobs just to survive,” she says. She also wanted to “set the record straight”. “I’m sad because I think the idea was sound. If anything, the problem was that it came 10 years too early for the town. Rainer deserves to be remembered for his vision, and maybe someone will pick up his work and get the project going again.” Her family settled in Ladismith when she was 13, though she met Rainer while working in Windhoek, Namibia.
“Rainer, who was from Velbert in Germany, was on holiday after studying medicine and art,” says Trudie. “He never did his internship because, as he always said, he hated varicose veins and haemorrhoids. “His ultimate dream was to do malaria research in Africa like Dr Albert Schweitzer. I can’t say why he chose art above medicine, because we weren’t well-off. Sometimes I thought he was a bit mad. But he was popular.” They had a son Max, and moved to Ladismith from Muizenberg in 2000, because they felt it was a safer environment for “an energetic young boy”. But as a foreigner without papers, Rainer couldn’t easily get a job, so he started giving weekly papier-mâché lessons. The Rochels had learnt the art in Namibia from Kenfe Michael Bethe Selassie, the world-famous French papier-mâché artist of Ethiopian extraction, who had given workshops at the Franco Namibian Cultural Centre in the early 1990s. Appalled by the area’s poverty and hoping to gain the ear of the local council, Rainer enlisted the help of a well-connected local hardware-store owner, Hennie Smit. “Rainier’s single greatest aim was to create jobs,” Hennie tells me. “He was even prepared to use his own money to do this. Government took notice and awarded us a R300 000 grant, which we used to commission the design and manufacture of a massive press, and a pulping machine.” Then they had to figure out what to do with the all the pulp. “We thought about ceiling boards and insulation boards, but the amount of waste in Ladismith was too little for a viable business,” says Hennie. “Also, the town is too isolated to get a usable manufactured product to the market profitably.”
Inspiration and deterioration
Inspiration struck in 2001, when Trudie and Rainer were invited to join a work group at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees in Oudtshoorn. “We met a lady from Nieu-Bethesda, who told Rainer that thousands of people visit the town each year just to see the owls, and that many businesses had started just for that reason,” recalls Trudie. “After that Rainer had the idea of doing the same thing for Ladismith.” But despite being coddled by mountains and orchards, Ladismith lacks a distinct character trait with which to lure tourists. Wonderful things have happened here, though. Poet CJ Langenhoven was surely thinking of the steep cliffs and deep kloofs of the Klein Swartberge that overshadowed his farm on the outskirts of Ladismith, when he wrote the lines “Oor ons ewige gebergtes / waar die kranse antwoord gee”. Then there’s Oom Stanley de Wit, who still lives just off Ladismith’s Main Road.
In 1963 he set up a tiny hydro-electric unit beside a river on the face of the Swartberge, which powered a small bicycle lamp that could be seen, like a pin , from the town at night. He maintained the light for 30 years, and when his body could no longer manage the arduous hike, volunteers took over. The reassuring light still shines in the mountains to this day. But for all of this, the Swartberge aren’t the Drakensberg. Barrydale to the west is fast becoming known for its wines and brandies, while arty Calitzdorp to the east attracts more tourists. Then Rainer met some researchers who told him that Ladismith is one of the last places left where you’ll find Hewitt’s ghost frog, says Trudie. “After that, the frog thing became an obsession with him. Rainer really enjoyed the croaking of Ladismith’s frogs and wanted to make the locals aware of how precious they were. He gathered information about them and started combining the art and recycling theme with the frog thing.” For a while things went well. According to Trudie, Rainer was the environmental affairs department’s “blue-eyed boy”, as he was the only person who received a grant and could still show something for it.
He was nominated for the department’s Impumelelo Award in 2003 and 2005. “He liked to be in the limelight,” says Trudie. But with the thrill of Morning Live appearances and Radio Sonder Grense interviews, Rainer was starting to neglect reality. “Big frogs started appearing all over town and it was really worthwhile to see,” says Trudie. “I suggested he use part of his first grant to impregnate the pulp with something to make it totally waterproof, but he never listened to me. The paint would crack and the statues would deteriorate.” Even as the project was garnering more publicity for the town, Rainer’s local supporters began to worry. Not only did the business owners who had bought frogs feel hard done by when the statues began to fall apart, but the project remained dependent on grant money. This meant Rainer constantly had to let his staff go and then rehire them when he could.
When a second grant was awarded, the municipality suddenly decided they wanted to be part of the fanfare. “The mayor at the time took credit for getting that second grant, and demanded that his own people be involved as a result,” says Hennie. “I pulled out at this point, and later heard the money was gone before anything useful had been done with it.” To make matters worse, Trudie filed for divorce. “Rainer had his head in the clouds. He’d spend all his resources getting ready for the next arts festival, leaving another six months to survive on almost nothing. “He was the visionary, the artist, but in retrospect, it would’ve been good if he’d had a financial manager. He became obsessed with ideas, and they were often very good, but implementation was a problem as the funds would run out. “The last straw was when the municipality hijacked his second grant. In anticipation of that grant, he had ordered R30 000 worth of moulds from a man in Wellington. When it became clear that there would be no money, he had to return the already-used moulds. That broke him.” |fw