Autonomy of rural poor under attack
In the 1950s it was in pursuit of the “bantu authorities” and “rehabilitation” programmes, as the homeland authorities and Pretoria called them. In postapartheid SA, it is packaged as the pursuit of “development” and “investment”.
And so, it seems, the right of refusal is something the rural black poor are not allowed. Not then and, seemingly, not now.
In his book The Peasants’ Revolt, Govan Mbeki recounted an instance where local people told their chief, Botha Sigcau, to publicly declare whether he was “the head of the Pondo tribe or the boot-licker of Verwoerd”.
Mbeki also spoke of the response of the state apparatus to this “direct democracy”. “Africans from a score of kraals had met there to discuss their complaints. Two aircraft and a helicopter dropped tear gas and smoke bombs on the crowd, and police vehicles approached from two directions.”
Writing more than 50 years later, Lulamile Feni of the Daily Dispatch painted a similar image, describing a chaotic meeting in Mbizana involving the mineral resources minister, provincial politicians and proand anti-mining groups: “Police used batons and stun grenades to disperse about 500 pro- and anti-mining demonstrators at a chaotic meeting in Xolobeni.”
The department’s directorgeneral, Thabo Mokoena, suggested in a comment in parliament last week that if the consent of communities were required for mining to occur, there would be no mining.
The department has indicated it will appeal the notion of consent suggested in a recent court judgment and seek clarity on the limitations to it. And when, I suppose, the state can say: “We are not taking no for an answer.”
In this way, “meaningful consultation”, which does not imply consent of affected communities, is all that is needed to pave the way for mining. This in a country where examples of mining-driven community development pale into insignificance compared with the social, environmental and other costs communities have had to endure.
The department has approached this matter in a paternalistic, Leviathan way. Officials suggest the state has the sovereign right over the minerals, on behalf of the people. The real question is under what conditions (if any) that sovereign right should be exercised, particularly if it is contrary to the wishes of the people directly affected.
Moreover, these assumptions represent not the emergence of state-market relationships that are anti-poor, but their continuation.
The late headman and Amadiba Crisis Committee organiser Bhalasheleni Mthwa described in a meeting before the late king of AmaMpondo aseQaukeni, Mpondombini Sigcau, one of the methods used to “fraudulently” document the consent of the community: “We are the Amadiba Crisis Committee, [yet surprisingly] the people who are listed as supporters of the mining project are the same people who elected us. Even our wives are on that list.
“They [MRC black economic empowerment vehicle Xolco] then claim it is us, the committee, who are opposed to mining and not the community.”
Many pro-mining elements assert that those dissatisfied with the consultation process and narrow deals between Australian mining company MRC and connected local elites are an influential minority.
Mokoena suggested the community was being done a favour by even getting an opportunity to be meaningfully consulted: you have a small community within a bigger community that is objecting to mining. You must also remember, in terms of the law the department could have processed the application and granted the mining right
If indeed the Amadiba Crisis Committee was a small coterie of people opposed to mining in principle (or if mining projects were renowned for their ethical nature), the area would already be filled with trucks lifting tons of titanium-laden sand from the shoreline.
However, when there is no longer space for consensus or consent, as Mbeki found, autocratic commercial and local interests “become arrogant in the knowledge that the government’s might [is] behind them”. What else explains the arrogance of MRC, which told its shareholders “the new SA government is pro development of the project”.
In entrenching these shared interests of dislocation, eviction and extraction, the state’s instruments of coercion can in one era be helicopters and tear gas, and in another surveys, referendums and a deep mistrust of the people who should by rights choose for themselves the livelihood strategy suitable to them.