SOUTH AFRICA: Rights to the River

• by Mandisi Majavu (cape town)
• Tuesday, July 28, 2009
• Inter Press Service

Several rivers run through South Africa into neighbouring Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana Zimbabwe, and Mozambique - and international treaties stipulate that a certain amount of water must flow through each river system, says Nigel Adams, head of the Blue Scorpions, the investigative task force of South Africa's water and environmental affairs department.

The Blue Scorpions have started probing the electricity accounts of alleged culprits, and using satellite photographs in a bid to stamp out unauthorised water use. The Blue Scorpions also boat up major rivers every three months, making unscheduled visits to commercial farms, mines and factories.

Adams told IPS that he is investigating 500 cases, ranging from farmers who divert rivers into home made dams; to sand-mining companies who build roads across rivers without asking permission, in order to get to the sand; to mines who pollute rivers with acid drainage, making water downstream unfit for agricultural or human use.

He also describes a case where a farmer, who he declined to name, built agricultural buildings in the middle of a wetland; and another group of farmers from Pongola, in KwaZulu-Natal province, who refused to pay their $7.6 million water bill until the Blue Scorpions intervened with criminal charges.

But swoops by the Blue Scorpions have sparked a war of words between commercial farmers and mining companies, with commercial farmers accusing the Blue Scorpions of failing to crack down on the mines for fear of legal action.

Koos Pretorius, a commercial cherry farmer from Belfast, in Mpumalanga province, told IPS that the Blue Scorpions are 'coming down hard on the farmers, believing us to be soft targets'.

'They know the mines will go straight to the lawyers, but they think the farmers are not capable of taking them to court,' Pretorius says.

Pretorius, who is also a director of the civil society organisation Federation for Sustainable Environment, says in his province 'the Middelburg dam and Olifants river are completely unfit for human or animal or agricultural use. They are even unfit for use by the state electricity company, Eskom, and that is because of mining activities. That did not come around from 150 years of agriculture'.

At the heart of the dispute lies the National Water Act, enacted in 1998 - four years after apartheid ended. The law made all water the property of the state and said that farmers and any other large scale water users should apply for water use licences, instead of continuing to simply harness the nearest water supply to suit the needs of their growing businesses.

Now every farmer along a river gets a water allocation, which they have to pay for and which they may not exceed without permission from the state.

Pretorius says eleven years later government has failed to issue commercial farmers with water licences. Instead farmers have been allowed 'continuation of existing use' - to carry on using the water they used before 1998, pending a 'verification process' by the government.

'But what we find is that they are clamping down on us without verifying anything. In Belfast, verification has been happening for six years now. They don’t know how much water we ever used. Yet there are mines who opened up three years ago, using vast amounts of water and discharging huge amounts that is unfit for use and nobody is swooping on them,' complains Pretorius.

But Adams says the Blue Scorpions are also 'cracking down' on coal mines in Gauteng and Mpumalanga over their alleged pollution of the water table. They are also investigating diamond mines in the Northern Cape province, who stand accused of impeding water courses.

He says 'farmers are not the biggest culprits, it is everybody. Actually we are working very nicely with the farmers but in that basket you get a couple of bad apples'.

He cautions that commercial farmers, who use 62 percent of the country’s water, cannot escape scrutiny. 'A lot of farms are diverting or impeding water and that has detrimental impacts on downstream users, which happen to be other farmers.'

AgriSA, a commercial farmers' association and powerful lobby group mainly catering to the needs of South Afria's white farmers, says it supports the Blue Scorpions' efforts.

AgriSA natural resources director Nick Opperman says 'we can’t accept illegal water. Getting water illegal is also not fair for farmers who get their water legally.' But he firmly believes that 'farmers were given water rights for irrigation by the previous dispensation which we believe are still valid today'.

He also says 'the quality of water has deteriorated and water tariffs make it hard for farmers to access water'.

The Environmental Monitoring Group (EMG) is a non-profit organisation based in Cape Town, which brings communities affected by dams, promotes rainwater harvesting, and puts pressure on government to include civil society in any decisions about water projects.

With an office in South Africa's rural Northern Cape, EMG has first-hand experience of water pollution by mines and farmers, and says there can be no excuses for the pollution both generate.

EMG researcher Elias Mkhwanazi told IPS that his group wants polluting mines and farms to be shut down. He says rural children are at risk when they swim in slime dams - the large, often open, unfenced ponds used by the mines to dump their wastewater that cannot be recycled, or which they have failed to treat in accordance with government regulations.

These dams often contain high levels of mercury and cyanide, and in some cases, radioactive uranium. And he blames farmers for over-using pesticides, which seep into nearby rivers and streams.

'It is only when we make a public alarm that the Blue Scorpions start to act. Even then, they hand out fines to companies that are no bigger than their chief executive's pocket money. Until the Blue Scorpions are given teeth that bite, communities will continue to suffer, and even die, as a result of water pollution,' he says.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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