Grahamstown has a poverty problem. It is a problem that is growing with more people living below the poverty line than in 1994.
Grahamstown has a poverty problem. It is a problem that is growing with more people living below the poverty line than in 1994.
Poverty can be attributed to the shocking reality that according to Rhodes University’s Centre for Social Development, roughly 60% of the population of the town’s population is unemployed with most of the unemployed being people living in Grahamstown’s townships.
The efforts of the Kaolin Trust and the Kaolin Cooperatives sustain hope for several hundred local young people who work continuously and systematically towards realising the implementation of small-scale kaolin-related projects in this municipality, but sadly with almost no tangible support from the municipality.
In 2011, President Zuma in his State of the Nation Address, pointed to research that indicates
six priority areas in which opportunities for creating work have been identified in South Africa
– infrastructure development, agriculture, mining and beneficiation, manufacturing, the green
economy and tourism.
The Makana Municipality Annual Report for 2010 confirms that some progress has been made in this municipality in all these areas with the exception of mining and beneficiation. There have been infrastructure development projects that have upgraded certain parts of the townships.
There has been agricultural support to various initiatives including to an ostrich farming project. There is progress in efforts to generate energy from wind in this municipality and the Makana Edutourism Partnership Project has created SMME opportunities in the tourism sector.
In respect of mining and beneficiation, a ceramics consultant was employed for nearly two years
in the municipality with the purpose of starting small-scale ceramics production in the town.
Nothing got off the ground during his tenure.
The Trust would argue that this is because of the inappropriateness of the municipality’s dominant development approach – an approach that privileges the use of consultants over support for participatory opportunities for the economically marginalised.
The Kaolin Trust and the Kaolin Cooperatives both overwhelmingly reject this approach because
it bypasses and wishes away the very people for whom development is crucial – the young people
of this town who continue to experience relative or absolute material deprivation.
This is an approach that has been called development without the poor. The appointment of consultants
at high cost to the municipality represents the approach of development for the poor, when what
is really needed is development by the poor where the people themselves are provided with the
means and the necessary support to become productive in their own member-owner cooperatives
in which they learn by doing. Member-owned cooperatives are one form of SMME.
The Makana Annual Report 2010 explains that a Local Economic Development Strategy
was approved for the municipality in February of that year, with the purpose of directing how
local economic viability would be ignited in the municipality through support to SMMEs in the
municipality. It also explains that a Kaolin Forum and a Kaolin Trust were established and a best
practice study in terms of small-scale mining completed.
The Local Economic Development strategy was welcomed by the members of the Kaolin Trust
and several hundred unemployed young people were organised into cooperatives to take forward
the recommendations of the best practice study commissioned by the Eastern Cape Social and
Economic Consultative Council (ECSECC) and conducted by Urban-Econ in 2009.
In line with its recommendations, the Kaolin Trust accepted the responsibility of serving as project champion and protector of the kaolin resources for mining and beneficiation by local cooperatives.
The land where kaolin is to be mined by the cooperatives is owned by the municipality and the
municipality has been mandated to provide lease agreements to the Kaolin Trust to facilitate
access by the mining cooperatives to these identified resources.
The process of awarding leases to the Trust for access to this land has been long-delayed despite resolutions taken by the Makana Council. The Kaolin Trust has also lodged mining rights applications with the Department of Mineral Resources and will meet officials of this department in the course of the coming week to determine progress with this process.
The Kaolin Cooperatives have continued their efforts to prepare themselves for implementation
of beneficiation activities to produce bricks, roof and floor tiles and a range of ceramic products
from the kaolin. The cooperative members meet regularly with some 200 young people attending
each meeting to receive progress reports.
At these meetings the view has been expressed that the kaolin beneficiation activities should not be under the control of the municipality and its councillors given the widespread past experience of the bias and partiality on the part of the municipality in the allocation of opportunities to particular people within the municipality.
How far have the Trust and the Cooperatives come in their preparations for implementation? The
Kaolin Trust has worked hard to secure support from strategic partners including from the staff
and students of Rhodes University and from local business owners.
The commerce students’ society on Rhodes campus, SIFESA organised a very successful four-day bizweek to introduce cooperative members to what was involved in establishing and managing small businesses. The
bizweek ended on a high note with two local business leaders from Makana Brick and from PG
Glass sharing their own stories of the many challenges that are involved in succeeding in small
business.
The university’s Faculty of Economic Sciences has committed to a concrete plan to train and support the management components of each cooperative through an ongoing learning programme. This will commence with the actual setting up of the beneficiation operations.
Other strategic relationships have been secured with the Department of Mineral Resources; with
MINTEK, the division of the Department of Trade and Industry tasked with providing technical
and training support to small-scale mining and beneficiation initiatives across the country; with
the Department of Economic Development of the Eastern Cape Provincical government; with the
Eastern Cape Development Corporation and the Department of Social Development in respect of
its programmes to give support to cooperatives, amongst others.
All of these engagements have been focused on igniting the kaolin-related opportunities and protecting them for local people most in need of these economic opportunities.
Despite these many efforts, the Makana Municipality has conducted business related to kaolin
mining and beneficiation with the exclusion of the Trust and the Cooperatives, such as when it
produced and submitted a funding application to the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC)
for a grant of R500,000.00 to provide for the development of a feasibility study into kaolin mining
in the municipality and a business plan for the setting up of one incubator.
The tenders that were received for these opportunities were adjudicated without the participation of the members of the Kaolin Trust or Kaolin Cooperatives Task Team.
When the Kaolin Trust contacted the IDC about its exclusion from these processes, the IDC sent
staff to discuss the matter with the Municipality and the Kaolin Trust. The IDC pointed out in that
meeting that it was not their business to fund municipalities. The IDC did not however recall the
grant it had provided to the municipality.
The IDC did, however, recommend to the Municipality that it contribute funds from the R100,000.00 provision for contingency purposes within the grant it had provided, to assist the Trust and the Cooperatives with their operational expenses. To date, the Municipality has not acted on this recommendation of the IDC, nor has it responded to any of the business plans submitted to the LED Office of the Municipality or to the Office of the Mayor to date.
The question as to whom the municipality envisages as beneficiaries of kaolin beneficiation
remains unanswered but the evidence suggests that the municipality has different plans from those
of the Trust and the Cooperatives.
This matter was not settled by the two-day workshop held on September 11 and 12, that the municipality had proposed to construct a shared understanding of how kaolin beneficiation would proceed in this municipality. No Memorandum of Understanding between the Makana Municipality and the Makana Kaolin Trust was finalised and adopted as promised by the municipality.
The municipality used the platform of the workshop to insult and denigrate the Trust and Cooperative Task Team members and to bring in new potential partners who presented models to the workshop in which ‘experts’ would implement kaolin mining and beneficiation and would thereby provide some employment to local people as workers, not as owner-producers. This is contrary to the work and plans undertaken by the Trust and the Cooperatives over nearly three years.
Consequently, the Trust has written a letter rejecting the conduct of the workshop and especially
of the way in which the chair of the final session of the workshop, the Chairperson of the LED Portfolio Committee in the municipality, arbitrarily and prematurely closed the meeting, unilaterally
declaring that the meeting had approved five resolutions when no debate had been allowed.
The Trust will hold Executive Mayor Mr Zamuxolo Peter accountable to his assertion in his
inaugural speech that under his leadership this “municipality will develop the programmes that
seek to uplift young people and also provide a support system” to them.
The Kaolin Trust and the Kaolin Cooperatives expect Mr Peter to be a man of his word. They expect him to support the efforts of the Kaolin Trust and the Kaolin Cooperatives Task Team. They expect him to decry the undemocratic practices of some members of his Council. They expect him to support the efforts of the Trust and the Cooperatives Task Team to enable development by the poor without continuing delays.
It is time for the Executive Mayor to get behind the efforts of the people of this municipality and to share their vision of the possibilities for their own development through small-scale mining and beneficiation in Grahamstown.
Marjorie Jobson is a member of the Makana Kaolin Mining Trust. The views expressed here are her own and are not necessarily shared by Grocott's Mail.
