The government’s Wild Coast initiative is being criticised as a new form of imperialism, writes Craig Bishop Wild Coast communities and environmental experts are up in arms over an investment conference to be opened by President Nelson Mandela in East London on November 7. The conference is being hailed as the first of its kind in South Africa since it will showcase more than 150 real investment opportunities for the private sector.
But critics allege that deals have already been struck to fund the R3-billion Wild Coast Spatial Development Initiative (SDI) without community consultation or the completion of the necessary environmental impact studies.
This emerged from a workshop organised by the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism’s coastal management project, CoastCare, in East London this week.
Khulile Radu, a representative for Eastern Cape Economic Affairs, Environment and Tourism MEC, Enoch Godongwana, said that while he was unwilling to pre-empt the investors’ conference, he could confirm that “major investment activity by the Asians will be announced in November”.
Speaking from Japan, where he is accompanying Minister of Trade and Industry Alec Erwin on a trade mission to East Asia, Godongwana said that Korean and Japanese investors are interested in seeing what investment opportunities will be unveiled at the conference.
“In Korea and Japan there is an unprecedented interest in investing in South Africa. Most companies want to ease their entry into a new country through forming partnerships with local companies.
“Our investors’ conference is, therefore, an ideal occasion for local companies to put on show these project opportunities that are available for foreign investors to buy into.”
CoastCare’s Hugh Tyrrell is concerned that the government may already have cut deals with the Malaysians. “If this is the case, the Wild Coast initiative is the newest form of colonialism and economic imperialism.” Named potential investors include the United States Trade and Development Agency, Sappi, the German company Gre-Con, Eastern Cape Black Consortium, and a Malaysian consortium.
Grahamstown Foundation’s director and workshop co-ordinator, Chris Mann, pointed out that a major concern was the strings attached to foreign investment, which meant the Malaysians would be dictating the terms of their investment. “The problem comes when the grant is tied to the implementation of government foreign policy.”
Senior specialist at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, Jurgen van Zyl, who is contracted to work on the initiative task team, warned that in the absence of environmental data, “policy will be dictated by investment.
“We wish all the environmental impact studies were already in place, but we cannot wait for all this to happen. Existing legislation is investor-unfriendly – there are something like 35 different departments to go through, making policy frameworking an incredibly arduous and inefficient task.”
But representative for Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s office, Ricky Naidoo, said that while the 1999 elections made it imperative to see quick development come to the Wild Coast, it was “highly unlikely” that deals had already been struck, due to the African National Congress mandate to show transparency at all levels of government. We are not talking development at any cost. I am confident that the people coming in November all have good intentions.”
CoastCare’s Tyrrell is not convinced. He warned that market-driven development “has no inherent social ethic to monitor or safeguard social or environmental concerns. It favours those who are already rich because it is about maximising profits. The Malaysians have a particularly poor record of environmental management. It’s coming home to them now, but those are the ones who are seen to be making the deals. Do we want them at our table?”
Rhodes University research fellow, Leslie Banks, says SDIs are “imported, pie-in-the- sky solutions imposed on the Eastern Cape”. He argues that the fixation with “miracle solutions” should be replaced with local economic development.
“Eastern Cape towns are isolated economic units, which attract migration from a small local area. People become trapped in stagnant pools on the fringes of depressed towns.
“There is thus less movement between towns compared with other provinces. This has profound consequences for economic policy in the province – it makes the need for local economic development all the more necessary. The cult of relying on foreign investment to solve all the problems undermines this by giving false hope to the hopeless. Instead of imposing millenarian models on the depressed economy of the Eastern Cape, it is time the government started paying attention to what is actually happening on the ground.”
Van Zyl counters this by saying that a budget has been allocated for local communities to appoint legal, economic and environmental advisers to test policy proposals. He admitted that in the past the SDI team had been seen as secretive, but denied that this was at the expense of communities and the environment.
“In the past the key skill was the need to learn how to mumble incoherently at the right times. Now the question is, can we manage to leverage successful investment in tune with the impact studies being carried out at the moment?
“We will not be selling off the family silver at the November meeting.”
But according to Rhodes University’s Professor Hugo Nel, the key principle of any SDI is the leverage of investment into identified regions as a precursor to sustainable social and economic development, and community empowerment. “It is not intended to be an all-encompassing integrated development approach, but will stimulate and spur on integrated development activities.”
Banks disagrees: “SDIs – like the search for the head of the slain Hintsa – might amount to nothing more than an elaborate hoax.”