Clean-up in a divided nation, Danish Environmental Protection Agency

South African – Danish Environmental Co-operation

Clean-up in a divided nation

South Africa has all the complex environmental problems of the world in one country. Industrial discharge flows through a landscape scarred by erosion and overgrazing

On a beautiful autumn day in 1994, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as South Africa’s first black president following more than 350 years of white rule. Mandela inherited two vastly different worlds in one nation. One was a small piece of Europe on the southern tip of Africa, the other an African world with many of the problems found on the rest of the continent; a sometimes vulgar affluence was the close neighbour to poverty in all its guises.

South Africa’s history since 1994 has been marked by often frustrating attempts to make one nation out of these two parallel worlds. Danced was soon to realise that environmental assistance to the new nation could not happen independently of this reality. Interventions, which elsewhere in the world would be purely technical, invariably became part of a political, geographic and socio-economical puzzle in South Africa.

The white world

The nation’s former white government defined South Africa as the small piece of Europe they had carved out of the underbelly of Africa since the Dutch explorer Jan van Riebeeck arrived in Cape Town in 1652. The ambition of the apartheid system was a total racial segregation in which blacks were only allowed in the white world as workers and servants.

Geographically, this translated into reserving 87 percent of South Africa’s land for the minority population, the whites. On this land you would find all the major cities and most of the best farming land. The black population was to be removed to 10 so-called homelands, divided according to tribes. Four of these homelands accepted their "independence" – a move which every other country in the world labelled a farce – before the system collapsed.

The overall division of the country was mirrored in towns throughout South Africa’s white world. The towns each had their township, a ghetto far from the town centre, which in principle would house only the number of workers and servants necessary to keep not-entirely-white South Africa operating. The rest of the population was meant to be deported to the homelands.

The ambition of creating a European nation in Africa succeeded, if we – for a few seconds – forget the racial oppression that had become unacceptable in Europe in the 1960s and 70s. The bureaucracy and the judicial system worked, provided you were white. The army had the best weapons on the continent, including six nuclear bombs, produced by South Africa itself. Profits from gold and diamond mining and cheap black labour secured much of the white minority one of the highest standards of living in the world. In luxury cars, put together on the country’s own assembly lines, members of this minority could cruise perfect highways gazing at well-run farms.

But the flip-side of this golden coin was the same environmental problems that industrialized Europe and the USA were fighting. The difference was that South Africa seldom fought for a cleaner environment. There were two main reasons for this. One was isolation, the other a feeling that the country had never-ending resources and space.

Isolating South Africa was the United Nations’ attempt to force the apartheid government to introduce democracy or, in other words, to create a system of one-person, one-vote. From the mid-1980s, most countries in the world backed economic, cultural and sports sanctions against South Africa.

While the effects of the economic sanctions are debatable, the mental isolation of the nation was effective. For this reason, the growing environmental awareness experienced elsewhere in the industrialized world during the 1980s didn’t seem to reach South Africa.

If anything, UN sanctions reinforced South African perceptions that they were living in a land of plenty. The oil embargo was easily shrugged off by a nation which for 30 years had made oil from coal at a unique plant in Sasolburg, named after the national oil company. For every item hit by sanctions, local industry would churn out copies made from supplies of the country’s abundant raw materials.

For many years this feeling of living in a land of petrol and honey, even in times of hardship, kept environmental issues so low on the national agenda that they were hardly visible.

The land was seemingly endless, the sky was high and the mines regarded as bottomless. The national parks were world famous, the Cape Peninsula boasted the highest floral bio-diversity on the entire planet. The sea was so vast it seemed able to absorb any waste.

Or so most people thought. In fact, Mandela inherited a country whose white world had all of the problems of industrialization but very little of the environmental consciousness needed to fight them.

The African reality

The former black homelands and the townships, marred by poverty and overpopulation, represented a South Africa very different to the white one.

In reality, apartheid’s ideology of "separate development" meant two sets of standards: a high one for whites, a low standard for every one else. This went for everything, from education and health services to housing, and it also affected the environment. While white South Africa’s headaches were created by a luxurious lifestyle and industrialization, the problems facing the black majority were those normally associated with over population.

In the rural areas, this meant soil degradation, overgrazing from too much cattle on too little land and the resulting erosion. In the townships, the environmental difficulties were mainly waste problems, ranging from insufficient sewers to fragmented collection of garbage. To make matters worse, much of the heaviest industry was placed next to homelands and townships.

The environmental problems also had a political dimension related to the struggle against apartheid. While most whites could build the houses of their dreams, blacks were normally forced into small standardized houses – so-called match boxes – which the government had built in the townships. Or it could be the mens-only hostels on the mines or in the townships.

People had no great love for these enforced surroundings and when the struggle against apartheid gained momentum in the 1980s with slogans like "make the country ungovernable", this was interpreted as a sign to attack apartheid’s infrastructure, including the townships. Part of this approach was to boycott rents and rates, which led to the breakdown of maintenance of water and electricity supplies.

In the end, both the enforcers of apartheid and its opponents contributed to the slum-like conditions in many traditionally black areas.

One could argue that while white South Africa was environmentally pacified by its belief in endless resources, the black population’s apathy towards the environment was caused by the degradation being all too visible and overwhelming.

The new South Africa

With some notable exceptions, environmentalism in South Africa prior to 1994 mainly had to do with national parks and conservation. The country’s isolation and political turmoil were of far more importance to the government than anything else.

When the green wave hit Europe and the US in the 1980s, most of the potential environmental activists in South Africa, the young and the politically aware, were busy fighting apartheid. "Our Common Future", also known as the Brundtland Report or the bible of environmental awareness in the industrialized world, was published in 1987 – right at the height of the unrest in the townships. Five years later, when the UN Earth Summit in Rio got the whole world discussing the environment, South Africa was busy with the transition from apartheid to democracy.

This is not to suggest that no one was thinking about the environment. The African National Congress’s Reconstruction and Development Plan, put together in 1992, outlines principles for environmental policies that later became a guide for the first democratic government. The new constitution of 1996 mentions environmental rights as a means of safeguarding both present and future generations from harm caused by damage to the environment.

Since 1994, South Africa has had the political will to solve environmental problems found in both of the worlds created by apartheid. But the strained economy has often made it difficult to implement the ideals. The following is a brief overview of the political and socio-economical environment in which South Africa’s government and Danced are working.

Political stability: South Africa held its second democratic election in June 1999. Nelson Mandela was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki, his former deputy. With few exceptions the country is beyond the political violence of the years leading up to the first democratic election in 1994. The two largest of the traditionally black parties, the ANC, and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), rule in an often uneasy coalition while the two largest traditionally white parties, the Democratic Party and the National Party amalgamated to form the Democratic Alliance (DA) in June 2000 .

Even if all parties eagerly try to attract voters of all races, these two blocs represent the divisions in South Africa. The ANC/IFP rule via the black vote and see it as their priority to better the life of the poor majority in the townships and rural areas. The DA’s voters come from the white communities and – apparently because they feel threatened by the blacks – from the three million people of mixed race ("coloureds"), primarily descendants of slaves from Asia. A major priority for the DA is to ensure that improvements for the majority don’t happen at the expense of the economic privileges enjoyed by the lucky few, mainly whites.

Tight financial management: The former Marxists of the ANC surprised everyone when they opted for tight financial policies aimed at a reduction of public expenditure and the budget deficit. Rather than employment in the civil service, the government preached job creation in the private sector through growth. The ambition is to create a healthy environment for business and thereby attract foreign investment.

The macro economic targets have to a large extent been reached; there is a low inflation rate, there have been cuts in interest rates, and a lower budget deficit. But in early 2001, South Africa was still only beginning to reap small benefits from seven tough years of belt tightening.

The economy has seen constant growth since 1994, but it has barely been sufficient to cover the population growth, particularly as thousands of illegal immigrants have poured into the country from its African neighbours both near and far. The turbulent global economy and South Africa’s soaring crime rate, strong labour unions and comparatively low levels of education have allegedly contributed to the relative lack of foreign investment.

Conflicting agendas

Danced’s contributions to South Africa’s "new" struggle for a cleaner environment has so far been well received and appreciated. There are, however, potential future confrontations between Danced’s ecological agenda and South Africa’s desire to create new jobs through growth.

Two of South Africa’s main advantages in the global competition for investment and export markets are low energy prices and cheap raw materials. The targeted growth rate of six percent per year can easily lead to substantial threats to the environment if the government is not serious about saving energy, cutting emissions and securing a sustainable use of natural resources.

So far, much of South Africa’s re-written environmental policies have concerned themselves with the very real need to unite the divided nation. South Africa’s and Danced’s efforts have often had a common, dual purpose. Many projects have targeted the environmental problems created by overpopulation in poor communities. But since these problems have an often very direct effect on people’s living conditions, much time and resources have been spent on development efforts.

If the environmental targets are to be reached, however, there will probably be a need to focus more directly on pollution and less on development.

Danced has often been forced to relate to the political and historical heritage behind South Africa’s diverse environmental problems. Alternative energy is a good example. South Africa is blessed with sun and heavy winds which could easily be exploited as solar power and wind energy.

This would benefit the poor, particularly in areas outside the national electricity grid. But South Africa also has a very powerful national electricity supplier, Eskom, a heavily centralised organisation which in the apartheid years built Africa’s sole nuclear power plant.

As one of very few electricity suppliers in the world, Eskom is still doing research on nuclear power and hopes to test a new reactor type in 2001. The combination of nuclear-powered ambitions and cheap coal from South Africa’s own mines has so far made it very difficult to promote alternative energy sources on any large scale.