Vuyo Mhlati
In response to the article “Tempers Flare on the Wild Coast” (Monitor, May 8 to 14), I’d like to make it clear that the call from communities on the Wild Coast is not for more consultation, but for economic development and jobs.
At the launch of investment projects on the Wild Coast, the Mkambati and Coffee Bay communities were among those singing: “We have been over-planned and under- delivered.”
While there are no figures for the Wild Coast, unemployment in rural parts of the Eastern Cape is between 80% and 90%. The infant mortality rate among babies under the age of one was 58,2% per thousand live births in 1991.
The Wild Coast spatial development initiative (SDI) ran a 20-month consultation process before putting a number of tourism and agricultural investment projects on the table.
Calls for further delays of the investment initiative smack of putting narrow agendas before efforts to provide a lifeline to communities in desperate need of jobs. Consultation does not mean catering for every private agenda in a region where political strife has fostered divisions and where illegal land transactions with no community empowerment and environmental considerations flourish.
Rather it means putting together a broad consensus around a strategy that allows economic development to go ahead while communities work through the social and political problems facing them. The problems of conflict, consultation, co-ordination and of competition within communities are the problems of development, and will arise whenever resources are introduced into deprived regions.
Rather than being intimidated and putting initiatives on hold by getting locked into open- ended consultation, the SDI is moving forward with individual projects and dealing with these problems as they come up.
Community consultation and participation are an ongoing programme of the SDI. The Eastern Cape Department of Housing and Local Government, together with NGOs, allocated two facilitators in each community to raise awareness about SDIs and act as a liaison between the various roleplayers and the community. Programmes to give community members management and other skills needed to run the investment projects are in place.
Land facilitation requires mediation in cases of land claims. Field workers from the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies were commissioned as consultants by the Department of Land Affairs (part of the fees were covered by the Department of Trade and Industry) in both Coffee Bay and Mkambati.
The newly arisen dispute over control of the land at Mkambati demonstrates the dynamism of community-centred development, but is not an excuse to again delay.
Those seeing differences between developmental approaches of government departments in the Wild Coast do not understand the way SDIs work.
The Department of Land Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry are operating within the same growth and development strategy, approved by the Cabinet.
Both departments are working together, with many other players, to create sustainable wealth and prosperity in the Wild Coast SDI.
Vuyo Mhlati, project manager of the Wild Coast SDI
Sue Lund and Paul Jourdan
We would like to make it clear that there is no foundation in fact for the insinuation that the Department of Land Affairs and the Department of Trade and Industry are operating under two supposedly different political strategies.
Both departments operate within the same growth and development strategy as concretised in specific action and policies by the Cabinet – in particular, the Cabinet Investment Cluster.
We find the insinuation that the two departments are working under two so-called different “development paradigms” malicious and potentially destructive. Both departments are working together, with many other players to create sustainable wealth and prosperity in the Wild Coast SDI.
Sue Lund is Deputy Director General of Land Affairs and Paul Jourdan is Deputy
Director General of Trade and Industry