Insult that facts on fighting city fires ignored to take full credit for missions
PREMIER Helen Zille’s remarks on the recent fires (“Fighting fires takes a lot of planning and a lot of heart”, March 8, 2014, DA’s SA Today) are both divisive and inaccurate.
Considering all that has been done by the national-led agencies in addressing the risks of fire in greater Cape Town, press statements released by the City of Cape Town, giving little, if any credit to the national agencies, have been unfortunate.
The Department of Environmental Affairs has consistently recognised the role played by local, provincial and national authorities. Co-operation around fire management has yielded great success in both previous and recent fires.
The premier’s analysis manipulates facts to serve a narrow political agenda, doing little to support the long-standing partnerships between the City of Cape Town, the provincial government, national government, the South African National Parks (SANParks) the Fire Protection Association (FPA), and volunteers linked to SANParks.
These are long-standing partnerships that have their origins in the establishment of the Santam/Cape Argus Ukuvuka Campaign, by the City of Cape Town and SANParks within days of the Cape Town fires of January 2000. It is worth noting that this campaign was established under an ANCled council.
This campaign was in fact the precursor to the Working on Fire (WoF) programme initiated in 2003, whose teams played such a prominent role in fighting the recent fires.
The campaign was spearheaded by the Department of Environmental Affairs’ Working for Water programme (WfW) to supplement existing capacities to combat dangerous wildfires, and to bolster the considerable resources WfW has consistently invested in controlling invasive alien plants along the mountain chain.
The reality is that “fireproofing” the Table Mountain chain and its urban edge is the most important measure that can be taken – preventing catastrophic fires before trying to cure them.
Without investments by the likes of the WfW programme led by the department, no firefighting capacity would be able to cope with a wildfire in gale-force winds.
Much of the glory of what we have witnessed in containing the fires of last week, lies in the painstaking work to rid our mountains and urban edges of invasive alien plants. Invasive alien plants burn at an intensity that is ten-fold or more than that of the indigenous vegetation that they displace. Although we started the work in 1995 and the figure is then much larger, the WfW programme’s records since 2003/4 indicate that R67 million has been spent on clearing invasives along the Table Mountain chain.
A total of 3 273 hectares have been cleared of invasives, and a massive 59 360ha was treated in the critical followup clearing over the years. We have provided employment for 5 820 people.
These figures exclude the work done by the Ukuvuka Campaign (about R35m) and funding from the Global Environmental Facility (R46m overall, a portion of which was spent on clearing invasives), and indeed the recent fellow Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) work through the city’s Kader Asmal Project.
Had we not done this work, the areas invaded would at least have doubled by now, and the risk of catastrophic fires increased exponentially.
Premier Zille conveniently fails to locate her analysis within this context, ignoring the extensive planning done by WoF and SANParks, which includes firebreaks and controlled burns.
On the issue of firefighting capacities, Premier Zille describes the situation in the city as “shambolic” in 2000. If one considers the many changes in power in the City of Cape Town over the years, she should extend the same criticism to the successive DA-led administrations under then-mayors Pieter Marais and Gerald Morkel (inherited by the ANC).
The fact is that the capacity to fight wildfires has been primarily built on the planning work and national capacity of the WfW programme, as well as WoF.
Another fact, for Premier Zille’s attention, is that, based on an analysis of actual person-days spent fighting wildfires in the Western Cape in the previous fire season, as much as 80 percent of the ground forces, and 95 percent of the aerial capacity was provided through WoF, or partnerships funded by it.
Once again, this excludes the preventative work done through WfW. If this is taken into account, it would take the figure well into the 90 percent level, provided by this national capacity, and at a cost of well over R100m per year for the Western Cape.
Knowing that partnerships are crucial to governance, and that no sphere of government can address such challenges independently, the department has never sought to take full credit. However, given Premier Zille’s factually incorrect assertions in the public space, it is necessary to correct her.
The analysis contains other similarly incorrect assertions. For example, she writes that “Six years ago, the service had eight aircraft. Today it has 24. This includes helicopters, fixed-wing bombers and spotters”.
The facts are that the vast majority of these aircraft are brought down to the Western Cape by WoF, have their standing fees (which runs into millions) paid by WoF, and are then taken back north for the winter fire season, also at WoF’s expense.
One hopes it is merely oversight on the premier’s part to claim these aircraft as her own, and not blatant dishonesty.
The premier rightly praises the improvements in planning and prioritisation, but once again falsely claims full credit. She writes: “Learning from international successes, we adopted the Incident Command System – a multi-agency disaster management approach used to great effect in the United States.”
It was in fact WoF which initiated and facilitated the use of ICS across South Africa, and co-ordinated the training in ICS, including for CoCT and provincial officials. Then there are the claims that “the City of Cape Town’s Fire and Rescue Service now has more resources than the rest of the country combined”.
Even if the premier realises (as one hopes she does) that the issue is primarily about fighting a wildland fire, and not structural fires, her claim is false. When it comes to wildfire capacity, WoF has over 5 500 trained wildland firefighters, and an annual budget of over R500m.
As the government, we emphasise that it is the planning to avoid catastrophic fires that really matters. To this end, WfW is a R1.3 billion per annum programme, providing work to over 35 000 people across the country.
Premier Zille’s article omits the fact that WoF is part of the national government’s EPWP, providing jobs that are sustainable and have value; and that it transforms the lives of young people into a trained, disciplined and fit firefighting force.
Some 800 young people (who would otherwise be unemployed in the Western Cape), form part of the 5 500 people employed in WoF nationally, counting in their ranks the highest proportion of women firefighters of any comparable force in the world.
It is unfortunate that the laudable, combined efforts of the national, provincial, city, SANParks, FPA and volunteer bodies have been sidelined in Premier Zille’s attempt at political point-scoring.
Her analysis insults those who incurred devastating losses in the fires, including the tragic loss of life of our WoF helicopter pilot, Willem Marais.
There were also significant partnerships in fighting 10 other fires that were raging in the Western Cape at the same time as the Table Mountain fires. These partnerships are successes we should be proud of and build on, not seek to undermine.
Molewa is the Minister of Environmental Affairs