Firefighter heroes showcased real value of Public Works plan
AMID the tragedy and devastation of the fires in Cape Town last week, inspiring human stories came through.
On the front line, 160 citizens from the Volunteer Wildfire Service battled flames alongside professional teams from SANParks, municipal fire brigades and 650 Working on Fire (WoF), Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) firefighters.
They battled day and night in some exceedingly difficult terrains. Four helicopters, two fixed-wing waterbombers and a spotter plane – all from the national EPWP WoF programme – were joined by an air force Oryx helicopter in providing aerial support.
The danger of flying these missions was tragically underlined with the death of veteran WoF helicopter pilot Hendrik “Bees” Marais. Meanwhile, thousands of local citizens came out to donate refreshments and food to the weary firefighters.
For me, among the most inspiring accounts are the largely untold stories from the WoF firefighters themselves. It was they who constituted the majority of those on the front line.
About 250 were deployed in Cape Town from other provinces. Fusi Mokoena, for instance, is from the Senekal WoF base in the Free State. He joined the programme in 2007 and has fought fires in Cape Town before, but these were the worst he’d encountered.
For Lubabalo Kondlo, from the Dwesa team in Eastern Cape, this was his first experience of fighting a wildfire.
Despite all his training, it was way beyond his expectations, but the experience has left him with a sense of personal achievement. It was also his first time in Cape Town.
Songezo Fobosi, from the Helderberg WoF base in the Western Cape, was an overnight social media hero for saving a tortoise while working on the fire line while up in the Silver Mine area.
“The tortoise was going to burn. It was determined to go in the direction of the fire. I couldn’t bear to watch. So I quickly took it to the safety zone.”
Nearly a third of WoF firefighters are young women. Lebogang Moatshe is one. A qualified crew leader, the North West Highveld team was dispatched into Cape Town under her leadership. This was her second time in the city, attending a prescribed training course in 2013. Lebogang was also impressed with the reception she and her team received from Capetonians.
Launched in September 2003, the WoF programme under the national Environment Department is one of the most successful of the EPWP. It employs 5 000 veld and forest firefighters at 200 bases nationwide.
Together with WoF’s aerial support, South Africa is the only country in the world with a national full-time, veld and forest firefighting service. The 5 000 firefighters are recruited from youth from marginalised communities. Many come from informal settlements. There is no limit to the duration of their participation in the programme, but there’s a cut-off at age 35. Participants, after all, have to be extremely fit, training on a daily basis.
Although the EPWP wage rate is relatively modest, few drop out of the programme. Participants tend to stay for many years, enjoying the team spirit and advancing their skills. Because of their training and experience, they have excellent pathways into other careers – either as full-time staff, for instance, within WoF itself or in municipal fire brigades and other professions.
But the EPWP story in relation to last week’s fires doesn’t end there. Without years of systematic invasive alien vegetation clearing, the fires last week would certainly have been catastrophic.
Guy Preston, the inspiring deputy director-general in the national Environment Department tells me, with bureaucratic exactness, that since 2003 on the Table Mountain chain alone the Working for Water programme has involved 5 820 people, working 464 810 person days and participating in 38 538 training days.
Fires germinate the seeds of invasives, and so there will now be a massive regrowth in burnt areas. It’s imperative that in the coming period clearing is undertaken again to prevent worse fires in future.
The government’s EPWP programmes are sometimes treated patronisingly in certain quarters, as if they were not “real work”, as if they were, at best, a charitable welfare grant “draining” the fiscus with little added social or economic value. I hope many Capetonians will now appreciate just how valuable these programmes can be.
While saving property, lives, and the environment, they also help to build selfesteem and teamwork among young South Africans, many from distressed communities afflicted by mass unemployment and social marginalisation.
Cronin is Deputy Minister for Public Works and SACP deputy general secretary