Phillip Nkosi and Justin Arenstein
Mozambican authorities are investigating whether thousands of villagers in Gaza province are being poisoned by their drinking water because inefficient provincial officials in South Africa have failed to protect rivers.
A farmer in South Africa’s Northern Province has already taken fertiliser company Sedmis and chemical manufacturer Foskor to the Pretoria Hight Court for allegedly poisoning the Selati river as well as ground water in the region.
Both companies confirmed the case, which resumes on February 20, but declined to comment, saying the matter was sub judice.
Gerrie Marais, who owns Schalk Plots in Phalaborwa, is demanding R28,3-million from both companies after tests proved that heavily polluted water from the Selati river that runs through his farm is causing birth defects and hip problems in pigs. He said he can’t plant crops because of radiation in the ground water.
Animals in the Phalaborwa, Garamakgale, Namakgale and Lulekhani areas have also developed serious physical defects while crops and other vegetation near the rivers have simply been killed.
Northern Province Auditor General Steve Lekutle warned in his most recent report ending March 1999 that water from the Selati river was officially declared unfit for human or animal consumption in November 1998.
Marais said that samples taken from the Oliphants river on the Mozambican side of the border also indicated that the river was polluted.
The Mozambicans have already appointed a team of experts led by a Dr Padrosini to verify the extent and source of the pollution, he said.
One of Mozambique’s most important agricultural dams, Massingir, lies on the Oliphants river. The Oliphants is also a major water source for the Kruger National Park.
“I will be travelling to Mozambique next week to meet with Dr Padrosini,” Marais said.
Lekutle warned that major rivers such as the Selati and Limpopo are so polluted that villagers who rely on them for drinking water suffer from kidney and stomach problems and have open sores in their mouths.
Lekutle’s scathing 29-page environmental audit notes that pigs on commercial farms in the area are being born with hip problems, while chickens suffer from a range of diseases due to high levels of hazardous chemical waste in the Selati.
Provincial environmental officials concede in the report that the extent of illegal and life-threatening pollution was “cause for concern” but fail to propose ways for tackling the pollution and instead complain about staff shortages, budget constraints and capacity problems.
Lekutle adds that the Selati and Limpopo are not the only natural resources under threat in Northern Province as a result of government inefficiency and mismanagement, and warns that the province faces an unprecedented ecological disaster unless urgent remedial steps are taken.
Southern Africa’s holiest lake and home to the VhaVenda’s most sacred ancestral spirits, Lake Fundudzi, may, he said, run dry because environmental officials have failed to manage the area properly.
The degradation of water resources forms part of a broader rapid deterioration in Northern Province’s capacity to manage its rich natural resources and its 54 public game reserves.
Management has slipped so much, Lekutle said, that income from the Letaba Ranch game reserve had plummeted from R980 000 in 1997 to only R4 000 in 1998.
Manyeleti, considered one of the last untapped Big Five reserves in Africa, managed to attract only 20 people a day over the Christmas period while a private reserve operating in the same park was full to capacity and generated roughly R4,2-million a year.
The private reserve, which enjoys the full run of Manyeleti, pays only R32?000 rent a year regardless of now much profit it makes at state expense.
The government’s explanation for its repeated failures was, Lekutle said, that it is forced to spend 90% of its budget on staff salaries and did not have enough money to send staff into the field to actually do their jobs.
The Northern Province’s Department of Environmental Affairs admitted that it had not allocated funds for maintenance or marketing at any of its reserves for “several years” and conceded that valuable tourism infrastructure was therefore crumbling away.
It was, however, unable to explain the surge in poaching that had driven the region’s indigenous parrots to the verge of extinction and was also threatening local vultures and trees such as the Transvaal Teak in the Bushbuckridge, Mangwasi, Witvinger and Thabina reserves.
Lekutle dismisses budget constraints as a cause for problems such as a lack of transport, and notes that the province was given R2,9-million for conservation department vehicles between 1996 and 1998 but only bothered buying one car with the money.
Officials then used a shortage of transport as an excuse for not maintaining reserve fences, combating poaching, inspecting reserves or meeting communities.
The threats to Lake Fundudzi were caused, Lekutle said, because the province failed to allocate enough staff to its environmental impact assessment division and expected two staff to process 15 environmental impact assessments, 35 mining applications and roughly 15 other large development applications a month.
The department therefore simply allowed subsistence farmers to invade and begin ploughing the steep hills above Lake Fundudzi on poorly constructed terraces without conducting environmental impact assessments or obeying other land use laws.
Department representative Thembi Makhuvhele initially tried to insist that the department had no power to stop the farming, before insisting that the problem had been rectified by the creation of a community forum where villagers were educated about erosion and other environmental problems.
He said that the government was pushing to declare the whole Fundudzi area a protected area. The province’s environmental impact assessment division had also, he said, been allocated two additional staff.
Makhuvhele conceded, however, that the section was still understaffed and still did not have adequate resources to ensure that environmental impact assessments were submitted or scrutinised timeously.
Lekutle’s report has been tabled before Northern Province’s legislature for debate later this year. African Eye News Service