Guy Preston
Right of Reply
In your end-of-year assessment of the performance of Cabinet ministers during 1998, you referred to Kader Asmal’s Working for Water programme as being “on track”. However, you add the programme “is criticised for providing short-term, not enduring, solutions”.
This comment indicates a fairly common failure to understand the developmental nature of this special employment programme.
Working for Water clears invading alien plants such as wattles, pines and gums. It does so for six reasons: water security; productivity of land; environmental benefits; reduction of the intensity of fires and floods; the development of secondary industries; and community empowerment through employment.
We have to do this work. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) recently estimated these unwanted plants are using 7% of the country’s mean annual run-off of water (and additional valuable water), that the impact could double within 15 years, and that it will continue to grow exponentially if the Working for Water programme fails.
In a water-stressed country like ours, we have no option but to clear these weeds. However, we do have an option as to how we clear them.
This is where Working for Water’s developmental nature evolves. We have a combination of funding, regulations, education and biological control agents with which to win this war against weeds.
Our approach has been to use “carrots” (including assisting private landowners to clear their land) and perhaps not enough “sticks” (developing and enforcing regulations; bringing in biological control agents to limit the impact of commercially important species such as black wattles). Within this package, we have chosen to take a labour-intensive approach, using the Reconstruction and Development Programme as a point of departure.
The programme had more than 42 000 people employed by the end of the last financial year, more than half of them women. It successfully targeted rural people, youths and disabled people.
The programme has some very encouraging empowerment initiatives: caring for the children of workers in crches; reproductive health partnerships; the development of secondary industries (crafts, furniture, charcoal, firewood); and dealing with sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV, the virus that causes Aids.
We are also making progress in using Working for Water to promote the Masakhane campaign. The community- building focus includes promoting local governance by working through locally elected structures and is extending to insisting that those benefiting from the programme (for example, taxis) prove they are paying income tax.
Similarly, we are encouraging local authorities to move to socially just water tariffs, after which we will insist workers pay for their municipal water. We are also forging links with successful empowerment groups, such as the Homeless People’s Federation, to boost the prospects of our workers.
Huge challenges remain, such as the impacts of alcohol abuse, the ubiquitous loan sharks, the poor financial management skills of some workers and vested interests that can lead to the disintegration of communities. But these should not detract from the genuine attempts within the programme to be true to the developmental goals of the government.
Obviously, those who are clearing the plants will not have this as a long- term employment opportunity. There will always be some work, as the seeds of these plants will haunt us for decades to come, but the employment opportunities drop dramatically as we take control of the plants.
In the wake of our labour many other work opportunities will arise. For example, we will be able to plant forests in areas where currently we cannot issue permits to do so because alien plants are wasting the available water. The ability to use “wasteland” for agriculture, the development of cut-flower, herbal, traditional medicine and thatching industries, the conservation of biological diversity and the greater stability of our ecological systems will all be job opportunities arising from the programme.
On top of all this, there is the training of people. There is the dignity of doing valuable and valued work, and the certification that allows our workers a far greater chance of securing future work. And Working for Water is part of the process where the broader land care and community-based public works opportunities will continue to offer special employment for the most marginalised.
Working for Water is part of the public works initiatives that we agreed to specify as special employment programmes at the recent Jobs Summit. Criticising it for providing “short-term, not enduring, solutions” is inaccurate.
We have developed models in Hermanus and elsewhere that indicate the potential sustainability of this approach. Water use has decreased by 20%, while revenue from the sale of water has increased by 20%, thereby helping to fund the Working for Water project in the area. It has also meant that Hermanus can delay the need to build an expensive additional water-supply capacity.
Tourism, particularly “ecotourism”, is seen as the most likely source of economic growth in our country. There is no initiative that is doing more to protect the ecological base for this ecotourism drive than the Working for Water programme.
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Some of the projects run by our conservation agencies have been exceptional in bringing together parks and people. Given the influence of crime on ecotourism, it is pertinent to say, too, that police have confirmed that certain of our projects have been associated with a decrease in levels of crime.
Perversely, given the above, I do not agree that we are yet fully “on track”. Our current budget and approach will not allow us to take control of invading alien plants over what we agreed as an optimal 20-year period. There are a number of our 250 projects where we certainly do need to improve on aspects of productivity, safety, training and genuine empowerment.
We also need to be far more creative in taking advantage of the secondary- industry possibilities of the cleared wood. But only those who have tried will know how difficult it is to make such programmes work.
I am not asking for a re-mark for Asmal. Rather, I need to make the point that this special employment programme offers very real long-term benefits. It takes an enormous amount of passion, skill and endurance by a large number of people – and real courage and vision on the part of Asmal and his Cabinet colleagues – to get a programme to the level that Working for Water has now reached.
Guy Preston is the national programme leader of Working for Water