RobertKirby : Loosecannon
I would like to express my gratitude to Kader Asmal for his good-natured response (“Kirby should look before he leaps”, September 11 to 17) to a column of mine in which I suggested he needed a wake-up call on the matter of the Dukuduku forest – or what is left of the Dukuduku forest now that another two weeks have elapsed without anything further having being done.
The reason for my gratitude is that Asmal’s answer was a perfect example of what might be termed “promissory politics”.
I am not saying that Asmal has failed in his other endeavours. The water situation in this country is already much improved as a result of his policy of removing alien vegetation.
What I am saying is that Professor Asmal needs to regard as a little more than mildly urgent the fact that action to save Dukuduku forest must be taken within the next two or three months. Cryptic guarantees are simply no use at this stage.
I quote from Asmal’s response. Having named some of the main activists in KwaZulu- Natal, he says: “They agreed to propose to the provincial government that a task team be set up to resolve the issues.”
As perfect an example of promissory politics as you could wish to find. The same wobbly sidesteps are performed regularly by bureaucrats and politicians all over the world.
If making promises in place of actually doing something is the art of all states, then few can be more eager in the dance than the present South African government.
We have a runaway crime rate in this country, so anarchic it has sent foreign investors running for cover. It has drained the country of its most gifted individuals, has the populace in a state of trembling fear and has reduced city dwellers to a vermin-like existence behind the wainscotting of high-voltage security fencing, guard dogs and panic buttons.
Rampant crime is being countered by a police force that is under-funded, over- wrought and just about as fearful as everybody else.
In reaction to which our minister of justice assures us that any moment now a “human rights culture” will tumble into place and all crime will vanish like the morning dew.
In other forceful tactics against mass rape, robbery, murder, theft, hijacking and generalised brutality, we have a minister of safety and security who seems incapable of doing anything more practical than mounting occasional press briefings where he vents off about “new strategies” and “top-level summits” and all the rest of the turgid pronouncements which stream forth from his office.
Advising him is a glorified barman who at regular intervals belches forth hallucinations about “diagnostic crime modularities” and “administrative tactical conceptualisations”.
Focussing all this laser-like brilliance into reality we have George Fivaz, so indistinct you cannot actually describe him.
It’s all promissory politics, as common as a poacher’s fart. Smug declarations that, given a little time and a little patience, everything is going to heal itself and that we are lax in failing to comprehend how our politicians are “creating climates for crime control” and “putting structures in place which will empower community strategies aimed at the betterment of educative functions” and let’s not forget that favourite, “making proposals about setting up task teams”.
I could go on quoting these tissue platitudes till the cows come home. We know them well. But my gratitude to Asmal for his willing contribution of yet more in the way of promissory politics is tempered with despondency.
In the case of Dukuduku, a priceless and irreplaceable fragment of indigenous forest is being destroyed.
Dukuduku is part of the less than quarter of 1% of natural forest we have left. It is now being sacrificed in the name of internecine political squabbling.
One man – an arrogant Inkatha Freedom Party appointee – has flaunted a High Court injunction and has single-handedly narrowed the purview of the KwaZulu-Natal conservation officials. He has given the finger to everyone, including his own leader.
All this in the name of indeterminable land rights which, in this case, are just another term for the licence to annihilate wantonly what is the property of not only all the people of South Africa but of the greater natural world. Conservation is a global obligation.
So once again, wake up Asmal.
“Proposals” about forming “task teams” will not stop Mr Ngubane’s autocratic destructiveness in time. It is only a matter of a couple of months before Dukuduku forest is lost forever.