Eddie Koch
Revelations that South Africa continues to import hazardous chemical material — even though the Cabinet has assured the public it will ban such consignme
nts — appears to have thrown government policy on the international toxic w aste trade into confusion.
Green Party politicians in the European Parliament this week informed local en vironmentalists that Pretoria’s embassy in Brussels had acknowledged South Afr ica still imports “hazardous waste for recycling from a number of countries in the region” and that its government was reluctant to endorse clauses in the L
ome Convention that would outlaw this.
If true, this would fly in the face of repeated commitments by former environm ent minister Dawie de Villiers that the government would not allow industrial waste from other countries into this country. The African National Congress, a long with its labour allies in the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cos atu), have also adopted official policy against the import of industrial waste .
Yet officials in the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) were this week una ble to supply the Mail & Guardian with a coherent explanation for their recent reluctance to accept a ban on movement of wastes between African, Caribbean a
nd Pacific (ACP) countries. Nor were they willing to provide details about the trade in industrial waste that appears to be continuing in Southern Africa.
A South African negotiating team has recently been in Brussels to negotiate th e terms of this country’s access to the Lome Convention, which governs trade a nd development relations between European states and ACP countries, and the Gr een Party politicians say it was these talks that revealed South Africa is inv olved in an ongoing trade in industrial poisons.
Diplomats from the South African embassy in Brussels reportedly told European officials they were disturbed by sections of Article 39 of the Lome Convention , which stipulates “the ACP states shall prohibit the direct or indirect impo rt into their territory of such waste … from any other country”.
They added that South Africa currently imports waste for recycling from a numb er of countries in Africa and that a viable industry would be destroyed if Pre toria endorsed this article of the Lome Convention.
John Mare, counsellor at the South African embassy in Brussels, told the M&G t he negotiating team had, indeed, been reluctant to endorse the anti-toxic trad e clauses of Lome but that this was not a final position. “We are still negoti ating the terms of South Africa’s entry into the convention and this stance co uld change. It is a negotiating position and not fixed policy.”
But the Environmental Justice Networking Forum (EJNF) — made up of civic, trade union and green organisations in South Africa — is outraged by the re velations made during the trade talks. The organisation is especially angry be cause a recent commission of inquiry into the activities of British-owned mul tinational Thor Chemicals has revealed shipments of overseas toxins into South Africa ha
ve caused massive environmental and health damage to the country.
“The South African officials are arguing that we have the facilities here to r ecycle and handle hazardous wastes in a responsible manner,” said Shirley Mill er from the Chemical Workers’ Industrial Union. “If that is true, then they mu st show us where that facility exists because we have been looking for some wa y of dealing with all the toxins that are still stored at Thor.”
The EJNF has approached Cosatu’s executive to take up the issue in a move that could further complicate relations between the labour federation and its old
allies now in government — including Trade and Industry Minister Alec Irwin — over the Cabinet’s new liberal economic policies.
Officials in Irwin’s ministry and the DTI showed signs of confusion over the i ssue of importing hazardous materials this week. Repeated requests from the M& G for clarity on the revelations that trade in industrial poisons was still ta king place were left unanswered during the last two weeks.
DTI officials were also unable to say what kinds of dangerous materials were c oming into the country or where they were being recycled or disposed of. The d epartment appears to have inherited the previous government’s insistence on br inging dangerous materials into the country while stating publicly it is oppos ed in principle to these measures.
South Africa has signed the Basel Convention, which will ban all movements of toxic waste from industrial to developing countries from January 1998 but this international agreement does not prohibit trade in toxins between countries i
n Southern Africa.
EJNF officials fear overseas waste is being routed into South Africa via neigh bouring states and that DTI officials are reluctant to accept the Lome clauses because they would close this backdoor route for bringing in the lucrative ma
terials.
Meanwhile the Green Party in the European Parliament is preparing a resolution that will demand Spanish and British firms who exported tons of mercury toxin
s still stockpiled at the Thor Chemicals plant in KwaZulu-Natal take the mater ial back and dispose of them in their own country.
Contamination from this waste is suspected to have killed three workers and se riously damaged the health of at least 20 others. Soil covering the entire hil l where the drums of mercury have been stored is now permeated, to a depth of some 50m, with mercury and underground aquifers show toxic readings that oscil late between 200 and 1700 times the safety levels laid down by the World Healt h Organisa tion.
EJNF co-ordinator Chris Albertyn said: “The Thor tragedy shows that government officials never checked their facts and allowed such material into the countr
y simply because industrialists told them that it would be safely recycled and disposed of. It appears that government officials are still simply the ventri
loquist voices of big business.”
@ Frank Mdlalose, KwaZulu-Natal premier, in
The Mark Gevisser Profile
The peace-making premier
Zulu dawn. Ulundi. Spry and ebullient despite corpulence and a bad knee, Dr Fr ank Mdlalose leads us up the slopes of Mkhazane Hill. He describes how, more t han a century ago, his grandfather would rise before dawn with his battalion, in King Mpande’s army, to run over the hill to the king’s palace: “They could have run round the hill, but no! They ran over it, dashed down to the king, di d their ex ercises, and then ran back over the hill to their quarters. To go round would be too much of a sissy thing. They had to go over it, like men!”
Today is the second time in his life Frank Mdlalose is climbing Mkhazane Hill, to see the whole of Zulu history spread out before him. The first time was in
1961 when, a young physician just setting up practice in Pretoria, he brought
his wife down to meet his old classmate Mangosuthu Buthelezi. “That time,” he
says, reliving the epiphany, “was the first time I came to this area [He was
born, a di stance away, at Nqutu]. Dr Buthelezi took me round, and he showed me everythin g. Before then, all these places were just words I heard from my grandfather’s mouth as a child. Now they were alive. They were no longer a fable. They were
reality.”
Together, Buthelezi and Mdlalose, with a few others, transmogrified the fables of disembodied names into a reality they called KwaZulu. They revived Inkatha
, they rebuilt Ulundi — arcane, thudding Bantustan architecture replacing t he Ondinis and Nodwengos of yore — and they restored the monarchy. It was o ne of the most successful feats of historical reclamations in modern times.
Now, from the slopes of Mkhazane, an old country doctor with a walking-stick l ooks down over the kingdom he governs. He is the premier, but he knows, as doe s everyone else, that he doesn’t really run things. Ulundi still belongs very much to its primary inventor, Chief Buthelezi. Its two main streets are named after him and his mother, Princess Magogo. The chief minister’s luxurious suit e is still occupied by the man everyone still calls the chief minister, even though he i
s now the minister of home affairs based in Cape Town; his successor, Mdlalose , has been relegated to an unrenovated corner that used to belong to the KwaZu lu commissioner of police.
There are photographs of Buthelezi everywhere. When we try to park our car, an anxious security guard wanders over to us: “You cannot park here. The ministe
r of home affairs will be arriving any minute.” That the chief is not expected in Ulundi is immaterial: even when he is not around, his spirit hovers, impla
cable and capricious.
The kingdom is in trouble. Now, from the slopes of Mkhazane, an old country do ctor with a walking-stick looks down over the kingdom he governs, down across the valley to the empty palace he built for a king who will not even speak to him. The last time he tried was in May: “I tried to get an appointment with hi m, but when I called him, I had to communicate with him through his driver. I talk to th e driver, the driver tells the king, the king answers me through his driver! A nd I am the prime minister! It was humiliating.”
Frank Mdlalose evades any frank discussion about politics. Except this: “I res pect the monarchy. My grandfather fought for it. When I see it breaking down d uring my reign — my time — as prime minister, it causes me intense perso nal pain. I keep asking myself, why must this happen? What harm have I done? M any things come through my mind, and I have sleepless nights about it.”
He loves to play the guileless yokel, the patronising elder, the indulgent sto ryteller. His favourite conversational mode is the gentle ribbing: “There was this tribe from the West,” he likes to tell British visitors, “I am afraid I d o not quite remember its name, you see I’m not a student of history. But anywa y, we Zulus, even though we love peace, we hit back hard when provoked, and wh en the tri be got over here, we met them at Isandlhwana, and they’re not likely to forget us to this day. of course,” he concludes, ribbing himself now, “they did conq
uer us at Ulundi, you know …”
Do not be fooled. This man has had a life in politics: he joined the ANC Youth League at Fort Hare in 1950; he was mayor of Madadeni (Newcastle’s township)
through the 1970s; he has been national chairman of Inkatha since 1977 and a m ember of the KwaZulu Cabinet since 1978. His personal assistant, a delightful man named Eric Ngubane who served Buthelezi previously, describes his first bo ss as a “g o-getter” who doesn’t like to lose and his second as a “negotiator”. Mdlalose, he says, “is the butter between two dry slices of bread.”
Mdlalose was, say Inkatha insiders, seen by Buthelezi to be a solid and depend able workhorse, but was never really taken seriously. The man who saw his tal ent, and pushed him into leadership positions, was former secretary general Os car Dhlomo. Together, they became the moderate peace-seeking wing of the movem ent. Dhlomo’s departure in 1990 was appararently a shock for him: although he denies tha t he has ever considered leaving the fold, insiders say he thought of followin g his mentor, but was bullied into staying by Buthelezi.
This was not the first time Mdlalose took the path of least resistance. In the 1950s, he was among those ANC members who disparaged communism and he became
a follower of Robert Sobukwe. Unlike his comrades, though, he decided to remai n with the ANC in 1959: “I thought the PAC was correct, but I stayed with the ANC on the basis that it would be better to work with it and bring it back.”
Take that, if you like, as a model for how this conservative man has survived two difficult and often humiliating years as Buthelezi’s puppet-president — only once, last year, did he offer to resign (again, he denies this). Many th
ink Buthelezi chose Mdlalose to lead the province because he feared the threat that a younger, more ambitious (and, some say, more competent) man might pose
. Even tho ugh he denies it strenuously, the KwaZulu-Natal premier has found himself perp etually hamstrung.
The most glaring example: once it was decided, by Buthelezi and his hawkish bo okends, Mario Ambrosini and Walter Felgate, that Mdlalose and his provincial t eam were not fighting the federalist battle hard enough, the IFP set up a nati onal body, chaired by hardliner Sipo Mzimela, to co-ordinate all constitutiona l policy-making. And then, having emasculated Mdlalose, Buthelezi derided him publicly,
in his own legislature, as a “castrated” man.
Is Frank Mdlalose “spineless”? He answers, by telling about his role as perpet ual peacemaker in his own family, and about how, when his daughter’s marriage broke down, “I was the last one to accept what became an inevitable divorce. H e was hitting her, thrashing her, doing all sorts of abuses, but I tried my be st to put in reconciliation. If you call that spinelessness, let it be so! Tha t’s my nat ure.”
Another father might have taken a gun and shot the abusive son-in-law, or at t he very least hounded him out of town. In telling me this story, Mdlalose is c onscious, I am sure, that he is letting me know the limitations of his accommo dative, conciliatory nature. The subtextual message is that, even if it is som etimes cowardly, it is nonetheless precisely this quality that KwaZulu-Natal — and th e IFP — need at this moment.
He has shown minor moments of statesmanship. Although, to a journalist, he der ides any talk of moving the capital from Ulundi as “proof that colonialists ar e still alive and kicking in this province”, he managed to persuade his caucus that a referendum would be the best approach, because it would set the capita
l permanently even if the IFP lost future elections.
But despite his moderation, there is that curious disjuncture present in all I FP politicians when it comes to matters of ethnicity. He resists, stridently, the notion that the IFP is a Zulu ethnicist party. Yet, when asked why he feel s so strongly that Ulundi should be the capital, he responds: “This is where t he British defeated us. We are rising from the ashes of our nation. We can’t b e thrashed here and start rising elsewhere!” Later, he tempers this by saying: “I’m not
just some Zulu sentimentalist … It’s also because I want economic developmen t up here.” But the question remains: who is the “we” who will rise at Ulundi?
Like all his colleagues, he must be aware that the hard line is not working; o f the dismal performance of the IFP in last month’s local elections; and of th e drubbing the province’s constitution is about to receive in the Constitution al Court. if the province’s secessionist constitution is chucked out, Mdlalose will be, says a supporter in the IFP, “the happiest man in this province, bec
ause his a pproach will have been proven right, and his opponents will finally be silence d”.
Certainly, there is evidence that he has done time as an Inkatha heavy: there were allegations, for example, that as KwaZulu minister of health, he refused to employ doctors that were not Inkatha loyalists, and that in 1986 he was inv olved in the harassment and handing over to the police of Cosatu activists in Newcastle. But his ANC counterparts in the province describe him, in the words of one se
nior source, as “a true man of peace; someone with integrity whose word we can trust”.
>From the moment Jacob Zuma, ANC Natal leader, returned to the province, the t wo struck up a close relationship: they found common ground, rooted in a share d Africanism. Finally, this year, it began to produce a solution: in a series of secret talks, the province’s cabinet began the laborious process, according to Mdlalose who chaired the sessions, “of going back into the past and findin
g out wher e we went wrong. We presented our version, they presented their version and ye s, we have come to some sort of agreement.”
The result, presented to President Nelson Mandela and Buthelezi last week, is the blueprint for an entirely new political discourse in the divided province. IFP members watch their chief the way miners do their canary: at a press conf
erence last week, Buthelezi was, says one, “more conciliatory than ever before . I haven’t seen such relief on old Frank’s face for months. So different from the tight
-lipped man who kept his head down while people walked all over him last year. “
At the time the ANC said publicly, one provincial leader notes, “that we would welcome Buthelezi coming back, as we would rather fight him than his shadow”.
Mdlalose might not be the most charismatic leader in the province, but he is
“the best possible man to be premier”.
Perhaps that explains why there’s a sprightly step in the old country doctor’s ascent of Mzakhane Hill: the sun is about to rise on the kingdom. He probably
knows, better than most, how quickly the weather can change in a place like U
lundi. Don’t park in this space: the minister of home affairs could be arrivin g any minute now.