Spent some time in a mining community today. It was really depressing to see how many young people were drunk by midmorning on a Sunday.
I have been working in this community since platinum mining began there almost 20 years ago. There have been dramatic changes. What were once isolated but coherent rural communities have grown and merged into a huge incoherent rural/urban sprawl.
There has been an undoubted increase in wealth and enterprise but this growth has come at enormous cost. Their way of life, their sense of community and order, everything has been shredded, nothing coheres.
What hasn’t changed is the quality of services, the roads are as bad as ever, there is still no water, the clinics and schools are a mess, the police are completely ineffective. Government and governance are conspicuous only by their absence.
The context of my visit is a new mine Nkwe Platinum, making a grab for a huge chunk of what remains of their communal farming land. A local headman, elevated to the status of Chief by the Limpopo Premier, has traded the land for, who knows what private reward.
The individual crop field owners are coerced, through bribes, rewards and punishment to sign away their rights. An all pervading sense of hopelessness and inevitability, born of powerlessness and a history of defeat saps their will to resist, even to demand fair terms.
Government in the form of the local authority, the DMRE and DRDLR are complicit. In them I also see hopelessness and acceptance of failure, they know that there is nothing they can do to change anything for the better and it’s much easier to give way.
Of course they won’t acknowledge their failure to improve their people’s lives, they will defend their weakness and ineptitude aggressively, those who do resist will be labelled as enemies of progress and opportunists and punished.
It would be great if my clients were heroic defenders of their land, their culture and way of life, but they are not, they have already lost it all. All that remains is to try to do what we can to ensure that they are not completely screwed over one more time.
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