/ 24 July 2009

Choked up

Yunus Carrim, the deputy minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, has a sharp diagnostic eye.

This week when he alluded to links between declining environmental conditions and service delivery protests he may well have been on to something.

We report this week on the Clayville community in Olifantsfontein, Gauteng, which is battling a company residents believe is poisoning them.

It is in many ways the classic confrontation: poor people put at risk by the activities of a corporation — what once upon a time we called environmental racism – but in this case those who should be championing the community seem to be actively working against it.

The company, toxic waste disposal firm Thermopower, has dismissed complaints that local residents are being made ill by emissions from its plant, telling them to talk to the ANC — a party the company has assiduously courted at top level (Smuts Ngonyama was a likely BEE partner until his move to Cope rendered him politically unpalatable). Lower down the pecking order, local councillors are now in line for shares.

It is not terribly surprising, then, that those same councillors back Thermopower, claiming the opponents of the plant do not represent the true community.

All across South Africa we are now learning what happens when councillors serve their own interests at the expense of the voters who put them there.

In Balfour and Thokoza, amid the shanties of Diepsloot and beyond, there have been violent protests. While the Clayville community has not resorted to violence, it has organised marches and warns that its patience is wearing thin. Its forbearance is no excuse for the company not listening to them.

South Africa has some of the most advanced environmental laws, but they aren’t helping the residents of Clayville. Instead, Thermopower is able to hide behind complex legislative language while a struggling community chokes on pollution.

Carrim pointed out that South Africa’s Air Quality Act was so complicated that he had trouble understanding it. Air quality is at the heart of the Clayville community’s complaints and, for its members, complicated charts on emissions are meaningless.

If companies truly want to engage with communities they should start speaking to them in a language understood by all and they should show that when they promise to clean up their act they mean it.

That is unlikely to happen soon, so the government, and the ANC, which purport to stand up for the poor and marginalised, must intervene.

The party must make it clear to local councillors that they can either join Thermopower as shareholders or lose their jobs. And it must tell Allan Norman, the dealmaker who has tried to get the party into bed with the company, that it will have no truck with businesses that seek to buy influence and avoid regulatory scrutiny.

This case goes to the heart of the greed, neglect and the failure of accountability that is sparking uprisings across the country. If the ANC and the government can’t show us the right way to handle such a crisp case, they have little hope of resolving the messier systemic issues we see in places such as Diepsloot, Samora Machel and Thokoza.

Losing the plot
It’s a pity that this week’s sitting of the newly constituted Judicial Service Commission wasn’t broadcast live on television.

What riveting TV the strange, shallow and downright absurd questioning of aspirant judges would have made.

Advocate Hennie de Vos, a senior counsel from Pretoria, was, for most of his interview, not questioned about his performance as a jurist, but about his race and former membership of the Conservative Party.

Of course, race is still a relevant factor in our country, specifically in the legal profession, which is struggling to transform, but what purpose does it serve to keep on badgering De Vos about whether his appointment would contribute to the transformation of the Pretoria Bench when the answer is obvious?

Justice Minister Jeff Radebe also had a rocky start as a panellist and his knowledge of the Constitution seemed fragile on at least two occasions.

The first was when Radebe called a decision by the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to refuse an employee who wanted to act as a judge paid leave “mumbo-jumbo”. It would be wise for Radebe to acquaint himself with the clear separation of powers between prosecutors and judges.

Surely the NPA can’t be blamed for refusing to pay the salary of an acting judge who will, in all likelihood, be required to rule on matters to which the NPA is a party.

Then came Radebe’s strange amazement at advocate Torquil Paterson, who told the JSC he left priesthood for law because he concluded that there is no God.

“So what you read in the Bible about the beginning does not exist? You do not believe that we were created in the image of God?” a stunned Radebe asked an equally surprised Paterson. Yes, Minister Radebe, there are indeed thousands of South Africans who don’t believe in a God. It is even allowed by the Constitution.

So much for comedy. The commission’s final decision of the week, to appoint a three-person team to decide secretly whether embattled Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe has a case to answer, is tragedy congealing into farce.

We will throw everything at the battle to open up the Hlophe hearings for public scrutiny — and are talking to our lawyers even as we draft this.