This year, the Environmental Justice Networking Forum has come into its own, r eports Eddie Koch
When Chris Albertyn was travelling around the country with a team of environme ntalists to research a new policy paper last year, he met Kraai van Niekerk, f ormer minister of agriculture, in Cape Town.
Said Kraai: “You people are just like unripe tomatoes, green and bitter.”
Retorted Albertyn: “You should look out because when tomatoes mature they go r ed.”
The flippant prophecy has, to a large extent, been fulfilled. This was the yea r the green organisation that Albertyn helped establish, the Environmental Jus tice Networking Forum (EJNF), sprouted into one of the country’s most robust f orces for social democracy.
Albertyn is best known – and feared – for his fiery confrontations with govern ment ministers over the import of toxic waste into this country. Last year his organisation announced, on the very day that former environment minister Dawi
e de Villiers was due to open a major national conference, that a ship laden w ith Finish toxic waste was on the high seas and headed for our shores.
The ship was forced to turn around, De Villiers retired into relative obscurit y after his party left the government, and the EJNF went from strength to stre ngth.
And when the organisation found that the Government of National Unity, minus t he National Party, was still sneaking toxic waste into the country from neighb ouring African states, Albertyn and his cohorts went back into the fray.
They challenged Trade and Industry Minister Alec Irwin, responsible for allowi ng the hazardous materials in, to provide details about the shipments. The EJN F also insisted he give a detailed account of what was in them and to say why the policy of his government and the African National Congress was apparently being flouted.
“Alec Irwin has just run away. He has promised to meet us with the Parliament’ s Environment Portfolio Committee twice but has cancelled the promised meeting s. Now his department has invited us to sit on an advisory committee to deal w ith trade and the environment. They’ve tried to make a small concession but th ey haven’t really addressed the issue. We’ll just have to press ahead and try and get th e information out of them.”
Although these high-profile encounters with people in power – regardless of th eir political affiliations – have established a reputation for the EJNF as bei ng one of the most vibrant “watchdog” organisations in the country, Albertyn p oints out the EJNF’s real achievement lies elsewhere: in creating a movement t hat allows ordinary men and women to realise that their struggle for a better life is in extricably linked to the environmental abuse they experience.
“People tend to see us as a fiery opposition organisation but, in fact, that’s only about 10% of what we do. The most remarkable successes are the ones that
go unnoticed, getting people and organisations to work within the network, wh
ich provides the foundation for a show of strength when it’s needed,” says Alb ertyn.
“You know after we set up, we set ourselves the target of having 180 member or ganisations this year. In fact we now have more than 330 in the network [inclu ding the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communis t Party].
“In my opinion, over the last year there has been a massive increase in the nu mber of people who are questioning what is happening to their environment and integrating it into their broader social struggles.”
Albertyn can rattle off numerous examples: a rural community near Brits in the North-West province leased some land to Union Carbide for a vanadium mine in
the 1960s. In return, they got R1 000 a month and a poisoned supply of undergr ound water. Today mine tailings blow into their homes and lungs. Many of the m en complain of bleeding from their penises, a sign of kidney disorders. A rang e of chest diseases affect them and their families.
“They were dispossessed and that dispossession has resulted in degradation of their environment,” says Albertyn. “As green issues like this have come to our attention it has become clear that they are deeply linked to social, politica
l and economic matters.
“The EJNF is firmly of the belief that it is only if workers and poor people w ho are the majority of the electorate push for an end to environmental abuse t hat it will happen. And the only way for that to happen is to highlight the wa y social and economic issues affect the environment. That is why you can say o ur green movement now has a tint of red in it.”
And this does not mean that the EJNF is simply a confrontational pressure grou p. “We walk a tightrope between being independent and opposing government and co-operating. But the network has another important role and that is to enable civil society to have coherent access to government. We exhaust all avenues f
or co-operation and it’s only when these fail that we throw the etiquette book out of th
e window and go for confrontation.”
Another example: a small home for the disabled in Mpumalanga established a thr iving vegetable garden until the nearby mine diverted the water. The staff had to carry water in buckets to wash the patients and keep the garden going. “No
w it looks like a desert. We took it up through the network with the governmen t and within six days engineers were there to sort out the problem. They did i t themselv es but through the solidarity that the EJNF offers.”
Although he would rather give the credit to his EJNF colleagues, it is clear t hat much of the organisation’s success is linked to Albertyn’s personal skill and style. Fierce independence stems from the fact that he has “no aspiration s of becoming an elected politician or getting a good job in government” at a time when others may compromise for this possibility.
“I have always been someone who if I see something is unfair, then I say it is unfair,” says Albertyn.
While it was dealing with local struggles around unfairness in various parts o f the countryside, this year the EJNF concentrated mainly on developing good e nvironmental policy. It played a major role in formulating the Green Paper for the environment that is currently being discussed by a number of organisation
s and government departments before being drafted into a White Paper and a new set of en
vironmental laws.
‘Next year we expect to see unprecedented action on the ground. The foundation s are there. This year we worked with only 11 staff members and 90 volunteers, and really ran ourselves into the ground.”
In 1997 there will be a toll-free hotline into EJNF’s national office, and the organisation is recruiting new staffers to manage an “information clearing ho
use” and requests for help from the burgeoning number of member organisations and unorganised communities around the country.
Does this mean the EJNF has become the Greenpeace of South Africa? “Not at all ,” retorts Albertyn. “They have become much like a corporate organisation, whi le we are a network owned and directed by its participants, which is much more than Greenpeace ever will be.”