Continued Exclusion is the Unchanged Reality

Pixley Ka Izaka Seme, the founder of the African National Congress, explained the purpose of the first conference of what was to become the ANC, in these words:
“Chiefs of royal blood and gentlemen of our race, we have gathered here to consider and discuss a scheme which my colleagues and I have decided to place before you. We have discovered that in the land of their birth, Africans are treated as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The white people of this country have formed what is known as the Union of South Africa - a union in which we have no voice in the making of laws and no part in their administration. We have called you, therefore, to this conference, so that we can together devise ways and means of forming our national union for the purpose of creating national unity and defending our rights and privileges.”

It is an irony then, that Wednesday 11th September 2013, marked the beginning of the Parliamentary hearings in which the continuation of this exclusion of the people from having a say in the laws that govern their lives and which has historically contributed to their poverty and status as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”

The Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Amendments Bill hearings have appearing before it over four days,  a range of well resourced and well connected Corporations, such as ExxonMobile, Standard Bank, Shell, Sasol, PetroSA,IDC, Chamber of Mines,  some nondescript business entities such as Anadarko South Africa (Pty) Ltd,  Impact Oil and Gas Limited , CNR International South Africa (Limited) , and Barrisford Brent Petersen Law Inc.,  as well as a few environmental  and civil society organisations such as  Legal Resources Centre and the Centre for Environmental Rights among others.

On the surface this appears like a good parliamentary system at work. The irony unfortunately is that there are very few community voices at these hearings, despite repeated calls on the Portfolio Committee to include communities. The Portfolio Committee has not even had the decency to respond to repeated requests by the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA) and other representative community organisations who have been calling for greater community participation.

Just like a century ago, in 1912, when Pixley Seme first articulated the exclusion of Africans from the making of laws, Africans today are faced with an unchanged reality.
Section23 (2A) of the Amendment Bill, which gives the Minister of Mineral Resources the power to impose conditions to promote the rights and interests of communities in the event of an application (Granting and Duration of Mining Right) that affects their land, now proposes the deletion of the specific mandate [including conditions requiring the participation of the community] from the existing clause.

The Amendments further aims to exclude social partners from the Regional Mining Development and Environmental Committee.  Section 56A provides for representation from labour and business, but the amendment excludes representation from communities and other social formations.

The MPRDA in its current form does not adequately deal with the rights of communities affected by mining and who bears the highest costs in terms of violations of their Human Rights and the act does not place sufficient responsibility with the mining companies who are the only ones who ultimately benefit from mining activities. 

Mining has obvious environmental and social impacts which significantly changes the social relations of communities affected by mining, most significantly the growing inequality witnessed across the mining provinces.

Of all the stakeholders affected by mining, the communities who host mining activities carry by far the greater cost yet get the least return from mining activities and that these costs include impacts that often denies them their human rights

Communities, who have long been calling for their inclusion and for proper consultation with communities affected by mining, are now being even further alienated from the process of mining and excluded from participating in this core demand, made by Pixel Seme at the formation of the ANC in 1912.

The irony is then that it is this self same ANC that one century later sits at the head of a government that has systematically excluded their own constituency, and the people whom they claim to represent, from the very core fundamental demand of being able to participate in the process of making laws that directly affect them.
Our Parliamentary system should not fail in its mandate to represent the interests of the people of South Africa. Our Parliament should not only serve the interests of Big Business, and theirs should not be the only voice heard by the Portfolio Committee. The Portfolio Committee would have failed in its core responsibility of “providing a national forum for the public consideration of issues” and would have failed to “facilitate the involvement of the public in the processes of Parliament”. 


Business Corporations are not the public and the Portfolio Committee has failed in its task of consulting with the people most affected by mining, and has not lived up to the founding ideal of Pixele Seme, but instead, through its lack of consultation and the exclusion of communities by the Act, continues the historical exclusion of African communities.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Selling the Family Silver: Power, Extraction, and the False Promise of Balance in South Africa’s Political Economy

Image
  Introduction: Davos , Washington , and the Pedagogy of Humiliation There is something quietly revealing about South Africa’s annual pilgrimage to Davos. There, amid the rituals of elite networking and the theatre of global consensus, South African leaders encounter the realities of power stripped of ceremony: conditional access, asymmetrical bargaining, and the expectation of compliance dressed up as partnership.  It is an experience uncomfortably familiar to those lower down the domestic hierarchy; mining-affected communities, the working poor, and those whose lives are shaped by decisions taken elsewhere and justified after the fact. The irony is not that South Africa is treated poorly at Davos or in Washington, but that its political leadership appears perpetually surprised when it is. When President Ramaphosa travelled to Washington and was treated as an inconvenience rather than a partner, some commentators rushed to frame the moment as an aberration, a function of Donald...
Read more

The Madlanga Commission Must Not Ignore the Billion-Rand Smoking Gun.

Image
    A billion-rand policing operation may have been guided not by crime intelligence or public-safety imperatives, but by a government apparatus whose strategic orientation has become increasingly indistinguishable from the corporate mining lobby and criminal interests. When MACUA submitted evidence to the Madlanga Commission raising serious concerns about the evidence that had emerged in the Madlanga Commission about Operation Vala Umgodi and the deaths in Stilfontein, the Commission acknowledged receipt, but its hearings have yet to reflect any engagement with the issues raised. Instead, the inquiry has focused almost exclusively on the Political Killings Task Team (PKTT) and the Ekhurhuleni Metropolitan Police Department . To an extent, this is understandable. The Commission was established in response to allegations by General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi that the PKTT had been disbanded due to improper links between senior politicians and criminal syndicates. The inquiry was b...
Read more

South Africa Must Defend Its Sovereign Wealth, Before It’s All Sold to the Highest Bidder

Image
  When Anglo American Plc announced its plan to merge with Canada’s Teck Resources and relocate its holding structure to Vancouver, it was not merely another corporate transaction. It was a seismic act of capital flight, the slow-motion exit of one of South Africa’s most historically powerful corporations, taking with it a century’s worth of accumulated wealth, expertise, and control over our national mineral assets. As economist DumaGqubule outlines in his recently released report, The Anglo–Teck Merger: A Global Power Play , this deal is not about efficiency or synergy; it is about jurisdiction. It is about where wealth will be controlled, where taxes will be paid, and where accountability will end. It is a reminder that, despite our constitutional commitment to economic sovereignty, South Africa still lacks the institutional and legislative backbone to protect its sovereign mineral wealth from transnational looting disguised as “global investment.” While Canada has built ...
Read more