Sam Moiloa, Johny Mphou and Trevor Ngwane a second look When Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils gave his budget speech on May 15, he dropped a bombshell that few listeners noticed. Kasrils endorsed what many environmentalists say is the single most damaging attack on nature in world history, the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze river in China. The $24-billion project will forcibly displace 1,9-million people and destroy the river’s ecosystem. Moreover, there have already been 140 corruption cases associated with the dam’s early construction. But Kasrils said: “I must state my admiration for the determination and care with which the Chinese government is promoting this vast undertaking.” This is a very frightening development, because it coincides with a refusal by both the World Bank and Kasrils to respond to civil society requests that colossal dams in Lesotho be reconsidered. In spite of an overwhelming body of scientific evidence against big dams, World Bank senior water adviser John Briscoe, a South African, has been lobbying governments to oppose the final report of the World Commission on Dams (WCD) (“World Bank defends its dam policies”, April 27 to May 3), whose guidelines emphasise the rights of people affected by dam building. It is just as troubling to us when Michael Muller, the Director General of Water Affairs, claims that the $1,5-billion (about R12-billion) Mohale dam now under construction in Lesotho “stands up well to scrutiny” (“Flood criticism a one-sided discourse”, March 30 to April 5). According to Muller: “Each society must make its own decisions about the balance between environmental protection and justifiable economic and social development.”
But who is really making the decisions? People of Alexandra and Soweto who have been working on dams and social-environmental justice remain deeply dissatisfied by the South African government’s performance, from building the Lesotho dams all the way to the broken taps and pipes that are still so common in our townships. South African “society” wasn’t involved in the decision to lay out billions of rands for Lesotho dams. Instead, the initial planning and development was undertaken by the World Bank, the PW Botha regime, a pliant Maseru government installed by apartheid, and the corrupt multinational corporations that were implicated in depositing $2-million (about R16-million) in alleged bribes into the Swiss bank account of the main dam manager, Musapha Sole. He is still on trial. In 1998, after having opposed the Lesotho project, then water affairs minister Kader Asmal decided to go ahead with the Mohale dam. Our request as residents of Alexandra to the World Bank inspection panel to investigate whether the new dam was necessary was ignored in Washington. Asmal apparently only learned of Sole’s alleged corruption in mid-1999, and only late in 2000 did he approve the WCD report. The WCD report made sound recommendations that, when applied to the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, makes a mockery of Muller’s claim to balance the needs of environment, displaced people and water consumers. We remain dissatisfied that last November, when numerous groups in South Africa and Lesotho petitioned Kasrils, neither he nor Muller ever addressed our request for a moratorium on the Mohale dam until the WCD recommendations were considered. The WCD says governments should give “social and environmental aspects the same significance as technical, economic and financial factors.” But it was clear from the first dam that Lesotho’s poor people have been the very last to benefit from the money that Gauteng consumers pay to Maseru. Lesotho is one of the world’s most unequal countries, and studies show that household income in the north-eastern mountain area around the Katse dam fell 65% faster than the national average during the 1990s. The Lesotho Highlands Water Revenue Fund has been unveiled as corrupt, with officials allegedly channelling funds meant for resettlement only to supporters of the ruling party. The WCD argued that “special attention is necessary to ensure that compensation and development measures are in place well in advance” of resettlement, and that “a clear agreement with the affected people on the sequence and stages of resettlement will be required before construction on any project preparatory work begins”. In reality, a large proportion of the rural Basotho who were displaced by the dams received no compensation, and many still have no access to safe drinking water because the cliffs are too steep to go down to the dam. In addition, the WCD calls for “an environmental flow release to meet specific downstream ecosystem and livelihood objectives”, and insists that “a basin-wide understanding of the ecosystem’s functions, values and requirements, and how community livelihoods depend on and influence them, is required before decisions on development options are made”.There were never such studies for the Lesotho dams prior to construction. Last year an Instream Flow Requirement study of downstream communities and ecosystems concluded that the entire Lesotho dam project will reduce Lesotho’s river systems to “something akin to wastewater drains”. Phase two of the Lesotho dams project will reduce the flow of water into South Africa by 57%. Instead of building more dams, we should have more conservation by those rich people, big companies and commercial farmers who waste the vast bulk of society’s water. The WCD suggests that “a priority should be to improve existing systems before building new supply, [and] that demand-side options should be given the same significance as supply options”. According to Rand Water experts, we could have waited another 17 years before building the Mohale dam, if proper demand incentives existed. In Alexandra and Soweto, we are still suffering from apartheid-era systems that leak out roughly half the water that goes into the pipes, before they dribble from our communal taps. Society is not making these decisions. And the people who are, whether in Pretoria, Washington or Beijing, simply don’t appear to value social or environmental justice. Sam Moiloa and Johny Mphou are on the executive of the Research, Human Rights, Empowerment and Development Institute, based in Alexandra, and Trevor Ngwane is the chairperson of the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee