Build and be damned
It is a sad day in our country when eminent persons with an admirable track record in government, such as Mike Muller, feel compelled to rubbish the mandated custodians of South Africa’s rich natural heritage, SANParks, “and their allies”, for objecting to appallingly poor planning decisions (“SANParks retreats to its old ethical swamp”, March 24).
It behoves Muller to recognise that environmental impact assessment (EIA) science is far younger than dam-building, and has arisen precisely because we now know that such destructive, engineered conversion of natural systems causes irreparable harm to these systems upon which we depend for our survival.
One must question whether Muller and the proponents of the Olifants river project have heard of the Millennium Assessment, the United Nations report published last year, which is the most comprehensive report of its kind ever produced.
The report shows that humans have damaged about two-thirds of the planet’s life support systems and that “… the planet’s ability to provide for future generations can no longer be taken for granted”.
The World Commission on Dams, chaired by Professor Kadar Asmal, and to which Muller was party, was convened precisely because we now understand how devastating dams are, and, indeed, there is a growing thrust worldwide to decommission and deconstruct dams.
Muller cites that at the Fourth World Water Forum “it was common cause that the problem is not dams, but bad dams …” Not only do we contend that the proposed De Hoop dam is exactly such a “bad dam”, but Muller cleverly chooses to ignore the UN report, which acknowledges the devastating effect the 45 000 or so large dams constructed worldwide to date have had on the sustainability of our water systems, and that we must put a halt to such destruction.
South Africa’s new Water Act is a far-sighted piece of legislation and the commitment to supply people with water obviously both necessary and admirable. However, if we are truly to take our young democracy forward, with equity and justice for all, the dinosaurs among our development planners need to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. — Dr Nick King, CEO, Endangered Wildlife Trust
I read with interest Muller’s article. I see this as an excellent exercise in misdirection, picking on SANParks to give his pro-dam stance an airing. He makes much of the issue of the poor people in the area, who he says have so little water that they cannot even keep the hospital running.
Why is this when the Department of Water Affairs’s internal strategic perspective for the management of the Olifants river catchment (2004) says: “Overall the available groundwater resources within the catchment are underutilised … Even weaker groundwater occurrence areas can often provide more than the RDP level of 25 litres per head per day”?
Why has water affairs not been drilling boreholes in this area to give that poor hospital more water? Is it not its job?
The De Hoop dam, even fast-tracked, will not provide water to those poor people for many more years. In the time it took to drill those boreholes, water affairs could be more productively looking for a more sustainable way to supply water to the proposed mines that are obviously driving the De Hoop dam development.
The mines will undoubtedly benefit the economy in Limpopo, but there is almost certainly a solution to their water supply problem that does not involve making a species of fish extinct and destroying one of the rarest plant communities on Earth — all for a dam that has a projected lifespan of 50 years.
How is this not a “bad dam”, environmentally speaking? — Melissa Ferguson, Hoedspruit
We’re not to blame for apartheid
One aspect of Chris McGreal’s article — “Jo’burg and Jerusalem: worlds apart?” (March 3), purporting to be a comparison between apartheid South Africa and the modern-day state of Israel — that was not addressed in the subsequent responses was the extent to which McGreal departed from his main thesis to dwell on the response of the South African Jewish community to apartheid.
What this would seem to imply is that there is somehow a link between how Jews in South Africa responded to apartheid and his broader “Israel equals apartheid” thesis. Why else, after all, would he have devoted so much space to something so apparently irrelevant if not to make such a linkage?
The result of McGreal’s disproportionate focus on the behaviour of a small ethnic minority, who never constituted more than 3% of the white population, has the effect of making Jews uniquely guilty of apartheid crimes. Every other white ethnic and faith group of those times seems to have gotten off scot-free.
It also — one hopes unwittingly — serves to reinforce the sinister stereotype of international Jewry as being a single, interconnected entity, so that the actions of Jews in one part of the world are by extension in some way attributed to Jewish people everywhere.
Predictably, McGreal hauls out the much-invoked Percy Yutar example to illustrate the notion of collective Jewish complicity under apartheid. Somehow, the Jewish origins of Yutar, the only Jewish lawyer of any note who supported the apartheid government, have been raised time and again.
By contrast, one never finds mention of the Jewishness of such great anti-apartheid lawyers as Isie Maisels (a former president of both the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and Zionist Federation, by the way), Sydney Kentridge, Arthur Chaskalson and many others.
As is well known, the Jewish minority produced proportionately far more anti-apartheid activists than any other white ethnic group, and as the example of Maisels (and many others) shows, by no means all were anti-Zionist ultra-leftists whom the majority of the community cold-shouldered. As for the established Jewish communal leadership, it is false to claim that it was “silent” during the apartheid era.
The record shows that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies did regularly condemn apartheid, albeit, and by its own later admission, not frequently or strongly enough. — David Saks, SA Jewish Board of Deputies
Uninformed prejudice
Your editorial of March 31 (“The other book”) reeked of uninformed prejudice regarding biblical Christianity, and ignored the number of times the African Christian Democratic Party has spoken out against child/domestic abuse and poverty, along with its companions hunger and disease, not to mention numerous other issues.
But of course those press releases (to which I subscribe) usually end up in our incredibly impartial media’s “File 13” (aka “Deleted items”), so most people do not know that the ACDP is also campaigning and working on behalf of the genuinely oppressed — as distinct from those who hijack the concept of human rights to promote their agenda of forcing their moral depravity down everyone else’s throats.
In fact, you are trying to take the splinter out of the ACDP’s eye before you have removed the plank from your own. — Eleanor Poulter, Durban
Culture clash
Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya (April 7) writes of the difficulties the participants in Jacob Zuma’s rape trial had with the accused’s isiZulu.
Perhaps the answer lies in a greater understanding of languages and their histories. After all, when Zuma calls the judge ‘nkos’yenkantolo he draws not only on the rich repository of the languages of Africa, but on those with their origins in Europe (inkantolo from the Afrikaans, from the French). Similarly so for ijazi ka mkhwenyana (ijazi, also from Afrikaans, in turn from Dutch) and ka Madala ujudeni (from iJuda — Jew).
All of which gives the lie to the terrifyingly ignorant statements that have appeared in the press on the fixed nature and inflexible demands of “culture”, in this case “Zulu culture”.
Language is a vehicle of culture and an examination of these Zulu phrases used by Zuma shows vividly that culture is dynamic, that it is always changing as people respond to changing situations, and that it draws on other cultures, making them its own. This is a historical process, and those who present culture as unchanging and determining, as is being done in this case, deny its essence — and with it the capacity of humans to change, to choose and, by taking responsibility for their actions, to be free. — Jeff Guy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
I would like to agree with the view that Zuma’s misguided testimony on how he minimised the risk of contracting HIV/Aids from his positive accuser took the HIV/Aids awareness campaign “20 steps back” (April 7). Unfortunately, though, I believe his sentiments echoed those of many who preach the gospel of safe sex, only to be found wanting in their practices.
True, Zuma should know better. His simplistic thinking disregards a wealth of scientific knowledge on HIV/Aids and makes a mockery of the National Aids Council that he once headed. But it opens space for further discourse on personal or cultural dissatisfactions with, or scepticism about, condoms, monogamy and abstinence.
We are fighting against an opponent many refuse to acknowledge. Zuma’s assertions didn’t move the fight backward; hopefully they made everyone hear the bell clang for a final round of hard work in the fight against HIV/Aids and the misconceptions people still hold. — Fungai R Machirori, Bulawayo
Nuke whitewash
The Pan-African Power supplement (March 31) provides a perfect expression of what’s wrong with the nuclear/renewable energy debate in this country.
Two of the adverts in the supplement are for the Nuclear Energy Council of South Africa and the PBMR nuclear reactor programme, both state-funded. The latter, under a curiously illiterate banner headline, sports a sub-headline telling readers that South Africa is “leading the nuclear energy race”.
The relatively lavish scale of the advert reminds us that the government continues to put big budgets behind this experimental contribution to the energy race, dwarfing what it puts behind renewable energy research.
We are at a crucial point regarding our choice of energy futures. As a concerned South African, I find myself ill-equipped to judge the technical and economic benefits of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor against — or even alongside — renewable options.
The state-sponsored information is one-sided and suggests a major public investment choice has been made and we must now be persuaded that the decision was a good one. This is an inadequate substitute for a democratic process based on informed and properly resourced public discussion of all options for our future energy security. — Diane Salters, Simon’s Town
Wake up, Pikoli!
Vusi Pikoli should not think the National Prosecuting Authority is his fiefdom, whose resources are at his disposal for personal agendas. It is a state institution aimed at combating serious and organised crime.
It is appalling that Pikoli has decided to prosecute African National Congress Youth League spokesperson Zizi Kodwa for a metaphorical statement (“Hit dogs so hard that their owners come out”) uttered when addressing the masses outside Jacob Zuma’s trial.
Wake up, Pikoli! This is a democracy, not a dictatorship where such censorship of speech would make sense. — Phillip Musekwa, Germiston