The Eastern Cape may have a lot of natural riches, but maladministration makes it a holiday in hell, writes Aspasia Karras
The minutes of a staff meeting at the Dwesa nature reserve provide ample proof of the extent of the Eastern Cape’s shambolic state. The final meeting of 1996, which began at 8.30 on a Friday morning, started by asking all drunk members of staff to leave.
A task team appointed last year by Minister of Public Service and Administration Dr Zola Skweyiya to identify management failures in provincial administrations has yet to report its findings, but if the Eastern Cape is any measure, the problems are indeed huge.
Dwesa, situated in some of the most sublime forest and coast land south of Port St Johns, and administered by the Eastern Cape Department of Conservation, confirms the impression of a province in chaos. Not only has it inherited the critical weaknesses of the homeland administrations, but it has failed to recognise its greatest economic potential, tourism.
There is no denying that physical beauty is the Eastern Cape’s most viable asset. If one is prepared to disregard the potential attacks on tourists, the most recent example leaving two British daredevils liberated from both their motor vehicle and their clothes, the province is indeed a world in one oyster, as the recent media campaigns of the provincial government claim. The administration seems to have faith in the potential of its natural resources, but apart from slick campaigning to lure the tourists, it is doing very little to ensure it can actually deliver on its promises.
In fact, the concept became an executive political priority only in April last year when tourism was added to the portfolio of the MEC for Economic Affairs and Environment, Smuts Ngonyama. But neither the MEC, nor his representative, was available for comment at the time of publication.
My particular experience is enlightening. In February last year, I was told by the Eastern Cape Department of Conservation, which co-ordinates bookings in the reserves along the Wild Coast, that all the facilities were already booked up for December. An unlikely story. I found an ex- civil servant who had gone private, forming Wild Coast Reservations to bridge the gap, doing what she used to do for the Transkei administration. She repeated the fully- booked line, but after insistent requests booked me two cottages at Dwesa.
We set out in December, making a stop in Umtata to pick up the permit. Not surprisingly, the person with whom we had made an appointment to collect the permits had arrived at work that morning, and promptly left for the day, destination unknown. In the gloom of the Umtata offices (half the lighting was out of order) we battled for assistance. A chance encounter with the reserve manager, stationed in Umtata, saw us finally on our way, permits in hand. As an aside we were informed that the Umtata office could not communicate with Dwesa as the radio connection had broken years ago, and had never been repaired.
After a harrowing drive on a bad dirt road, and confusion at dissembling signposts, we finally arrived at the gate only to have the guard disappear without explanation, but with our permits, for half-an-hour.
The first thing we noticed was that all the cottages bar two were empty; four of the eight remained empty for the 10 days of our stay, despite their fully-booked status.
A hike in the reserve proved another headache. The rules and regulations (which were all-pervasive and obscure) demand that a guide accompany all hikers, and we naturally attempted to engage the services of one. The office was a model of administrative incompetence. The guide was unavailable the next day as a result of the end-of-year staff meeting, the following day because it was raining, and the day after he had to physically collect his pay cheque from Umtata – a full four hours away. He was never seen again.
Our travails did not end there. Laundry came back dirtier than before, gas stoves regularly started small domestic fires, and a board in the rickety balcony broke. All encounters with the 200-odd staff (half of whom are a model of labour-intensive grass- cutting projects) at Dwesa were frustrating in the extreme. The rules and regulations prevented anyone from making any decisions of any magnitude whatever. Even the positioning of the firebreaks had to be decided at head office.
As a case study of bureaucratic incompetence, the Eastern Cape tourism fiasco is a useful starting-point for debates about rule-driven organisations, weak administrations, demotivation, lack of training and human resources, and poor service delivery, which characterise weak governance.
It could even be argued that there is a causal link between the quality of an administration and political stability. But the bottom line is that it is a tragic case of the emperor’s new clothes, as the British tourists so obviously discovered.