Aspasia Karras
Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin this week announced that President Nelson Mandela will open an important investor conference in East London on November 7, where two of the eight Spatial Development Initiatives (SDI) in the Eastern Cape will be formally launched. It is clear from the outset that the Wild Coast SDI project is the most challenging one, since it has to juggle two time-bombs in the attempt to get development off the ground: the environment and the community.
The environment accommodates 80% of the remaining indigenous bush in Southern Africa. The Wild Coast is also one of the last remaining global havens for biodiversity, sustaining more than 4 000 different species and plants. To add to the complexities, South Africa has signed international biodiversity treaties, which guarantee the survival of these highly sensitive environments.
The community, on the other hand, is one of the poorest and most disempowered in the country. The government is pressured to fast track delivery and development in the region, but with limited resources, capital has to come from foreign and local investment, hence the conference.
What is missing is time. Eastern Cape nature conservation assistant director Div de Villiers believes that “at the moment the SDI is bulldozing through with a totally unrealistic time-frame, 16 weeks. It is being driven by dates before all the environmental impact assessments are finished.”
Project leader Vuyo Mahlati explains that the SDI project focuses on developing four main nodes, the Dwesa/Cwebe nature reserves, Coffee Bay/Hole in the Wall, Port St Johns and Mkambati. Key projects are tourism, agriculture, forestry and a road.
The Department of Trade and Industry highlights the road as the crucial intervention in the area. “The government is convinced that the road and the associated tourist projects will prove to be a highly innovative investment facilitation strategy to boost growth and job-creation.” Environmentalists and the community are up in arms about the lack of a full-scale environmental impact assessment before the decision was made to build the 120kph national highway between Port Edward and Port St Johns.
Mahlati says the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research is to conduct a scoping exercise, but environmentalists stress that the planning process is happening the wrong way around. Hugh Tyrell of the World Wildlife Fund says: “The environmental and socio-cultural damage that a double-lane 120kph national highway can do to a remote, rural area with outstanding biodiversity and indigenous forests is frightening. One hopes that the consortia now tendering for feasibility studies on the new toll road understand the complexities of the task, and the uniqueness of the context.”
The Bishop and Diocesan Council of Umzimvubu speaks on behalf of his community, which stretches from Port St Johns to Umzimvubu. “We are hearing an increasing number of reports of an N2 motorway, are these true, and if so, which communities have been consulted and who will benefit? There is a desperate need to develop the access roads for the hundreds of thousands of people dotted across the countryside of the former Transkei – but not motorways. Why is the new government of the people pandering to big business [the trucking industry] to the detriment of the impoverished people of the Eastern Cape?”
The concerns about the road, which is apparently to be funded by the US Trade and Development Agency to the tune of R1,6- billion, highlight the fears that communities are not being fully involved. Mahlati attempts to dispel the panic by saying national government will not give the go-ahead until all assessments have been made and communities are on board.
The time frame, however, is tight and the November conference presents a deadline.