Judith Matloff
South African company Mechem can now start clearing 7 000km of landmines in Angola under a lucrative United Nations contract — after negotiations cleared the way for equipment to be offloaded in Luanda harbour.
Political or bureaucratic delays have cost Mechem, a subsidiary of state-owned weapons manufacturer Denel, thousands of rands weekly, if not daily, as company employees waited for more than a month to offload armoured vehicles and other essential equipment.
While it is not clear who blocked the consignment, members of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos’ government have expressed indignation that parties formerly on the side of the Unita rebel movement should be involved in the reconstruction of the country.
Some Mechem officials are thought to have been members of the old South African Defence Force involved in training Unita rebels at their bush headquarters, Jamba, during the war.
Indeed, in terms of the peace agreement with Unita last November, countries involved in the war were not supposed to be actively involved in the peace process – – the reason South Africa has not provided peace troops.
Mechem — responsible for the manufacture of some of the millions of mines that litter the subcontinent as a legacy of apartheid South Africa’s destabilisation war — also came in for heavy criticism for “double dipping” when the UN granted it a similar contract in Mozambique last year.
But Mechem officials say they are puzzled as to why authorities were preventing them from starting their project work, which is crucial for economic reconstruction in the potentially rich country. Besides the issue of Mechem’s past, diplomats have offered hypotheses including Mechem’s refusal to pay bribes and the notorious administrative chaos within the Angolan bureaucracy and that of Unavem II, the UN mission overseeing the peace accord.
Some have gone as far as to speculate that hawks within the government forces feel frustrated at having been denied a victory on the battlefield and are not committed to ending the war.
A Mechem official said this week that more than a week of talks by Mechem head Vernon Joynt, who had flown to Luanda, had yielded assurances from Angolan authorities that the company could offload its equipment.
“The feedback I have received is that the administrative problems have been worked out and they can start offloading the materials,” the official said.
Mechem’s work was due to have started in September under a multi-million-dollar contract with Unavem. Experts believe there are between 10-million and 20- million landmines strewn across Angola, which has one of the highest levels of mine casualties in the world. Mechem’s sophisticated technology, especially its armoured vehicles, enable it to cover more ground than many firms involved in mine clearance.
Meanwhile, Mechem’s Angola mission has suffered a blow with the death of the project’s de-mining director, Hekkies van Heerden. Van Heerden was aboard a small aircraft flown by the South African company Balmoral which crashed a couple of hundred kilometres from Cuito Cuanavale on October 21 en route from Luanda to Lanseria.
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