by Maxwell Chivasa
Lake Kariba, one of the most beautiful holiday resorts in Africa, presents contrasting irony of development in southern Africa.
Families displaced by the Kariba Dam which generates electricity for Zambia and Zimbabwe, live in the shadow of electrical power lines taking electricity to Lusaka, the Copper Belt in Zambia and Harare and Bulawayo and other areas in Zimbabwe, while they depend on firewood and paraffin for energy.
Almost 36 years after the construction of the Kariba Dam Wall, where most of the hydroelectric power for the two countries is generated, communities who were promised compensation for their displacement have received token assistance — only for a year.
Communities living within a radius of70 kilometres of Kariba’s electricity generators were not catered for in the planning of the Kariba Dam. These were some of the issues highlighted by 20 journalist’s workshop, reporting the Southern African Environment, held in Kariba.
The workshop was organised by SARDC’s India Musokotwane Environment Resource Centre for Southern Africa (IMERCSA) under the Communicating the Environment Programme (CEP).
The CEP programme is a partnership of the Southern African Development Community’s Environment and Land Management (SADC ELMS), the World Conservation Union (IUCN), and SARDC. Africa Information Afrique (AlA), a southern African non-profit news features service, was also involved in organising the workshop.
The journalists discussed environmental problems caused by lack of foresight in some of the development programmes, sustainable development and other environmental challenges facing the SADC region.
Environmental experts at the workshop underlined the fact that environment or natural resources are the “basic capital” which has to be conserved at all times for any development, a fact hardly recognised by planners.
As the SADC region braces for development, environmental experts are urging the media to highlight issues that negatively affect people and the environment.
Generally, most speakers felt there was a need to strike a balance between empowering people to make choices while at the same time benefitting from their natural resources.
Zimbabwe’s Environment and Tourism Deputy Minister, Edward Chindori-Chininga, officially opening the workshop, said environmental management issues, especially wildlife conservation during colonialism, alienated local communities from the wildlife and forests they had utilised sustainably for generations.
“Sustainable utilisation of the environment was an integral part of the life of our forefathers. Suddenly, the people became criminals in the eyes of the law,” said the deputy minister. This created conflicts over the use of natural resources and “poaching” was inevitable.
Community-based wildlife management programmes, such as Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas Management Programmes for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), shows that rural communities can sustainably manage wildlife, said Chindori- Chininga.
Dr Rob VIsser, environmental advisor with the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Harare, told the journalists that the media should be wary of sustainable development and not accept it wholesale without questioning its objectives.
“If people think that economic development should be sustainable, what do they mean?” asked Dr Visser, opening debate on the several definitions used by some developmental organisation. The most common definition is one which says sustainable development is the ability of the present generation to use resources without endangering future generations’ ability to have access to those resources.
From the socio-economic point of view, development projects can be very attractive but have serious effects on the environment. Trade-offs had to be examined too as the project progressed checking if The social, economic and environmental impacts adhered to sustainable development principles.
The natural resource capital should be dealt with optimally, always finding “the best way to use the natural resources.” A major constraint to sustainable development and management was the process of renewal of natural resources which very few people in development programmes regarded as capital in the economic growth, said Visser.
Noting that sustainable development challenges are enormous, Dr Yemi Katerere, the regional director for IUCN for southern Africa, said there is a need to reconcile economic growth with social and environmental objectives.
In a paper entitled “Ecologising Politics in Southern Africa: Whose Responsibility?” Katerere said: “Sustainable development has to be people-centred, and in the final analysis, must eradicate poverty.”
While development was a right of all people, it had to take due regard for environmental and social processes to achieve sustainable development. He argued that to achieve sustainable environmental management, communities must first be empowered to make choices to participate and benefit from the natural resources they control or manage.
Some disadvantaged communities were being forced to make short-term unsustainable decisions for “survival”, raising the issue of poverty and environment. The plight of such communities was worsened by the fact that they were excluded in decision making.
It has been argued that such communities were poor because they had destroyed their environment, but some development analysts feel that policy and market failures had disenfranchised the majority through inequitable access to resources such as land, water, finance, technology, skills, employment and other material resources. As a result, they were crowded on unproductive land in the rural areas and slums in urban areas.
“People must have the means to define problems and solutions, and participate in environmental audits of the effectiveness of programmes,” said Katerere. ”The greatest challenge is how to integrate the interests of diverse social communities and countries.”
Therefore, setting a southern African regional agenda for sustainable environmental management required participation of all stakeholders, from government, private and non-governmental sectors to grassroots communities.
Governance processes and human rights were closely associated with development. People must be consulted and should have the right to express their choices and values with respect to development, said Katerere. ‘The state, private sector, NGOs and the broader civil society have a responsibility to influence good governance practices.
“In examining the role of the media in the process of ecologising politics, it would be short-sighted to assume that such a role will necessarily always be a positive one,” he warned adding that a failed project would obviously be negative.
While developmental projects were a sign of growth, southern Africa had some examples of projects that were extremely unpopular with local communities and the media played an important role in communicating messages from all sides involved.
“Only a small amount of effort is given to assessing the actual outcome in terms of the people and the environment,” said Katerere pointing out that the media helped in the environmental audit process.
Dr Shakespeare” Maya executive director of the Harare-based Southern Centre for Energy and Environment, says that for environmental and development issues in southern Africa to be understood, the media should be able to analyse the Issues.
In a paper entitled “Critical Background for Building a Constituency Relevant Story on the Environment”, Maya said in the past the tendency by super powers was to rush for the control of land and economies. Now attention had been diverted to the control of scarce or declining resources and control of global transaction systems.
He said environment was the contemporary paradigm which was now the basis for current play in global economic relations. It was, therefore, important to indicate the relevance of the events in any environmental analysis.
Some environmental management practices or technologies affected the trade advantages of some Southern African companies on the international market. This, in turn, affected the workers and national policies in terms of import duties and state revenue, said Maya.
“The environment is not only significant as a science but more in terms of its social relevance. This is more the case with the issue of climate cha age which is a major global debate.
“It is major not because it’s an important environmental degradation but because it has significant implications for global economic and technological relations,” he said.
The journalists visited several locations of environmental interest in and around Kariba and on the banks of Africa’s largest artificial lake. These included a crocodile farm, a fishing cooperative, a newly built kiln for drying fish which is environmentally friendly technology imported from Ghana by the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ).
At the end of the workshop, the journalists came up with a draft chapter outline for a book to be published soon by IMERCSA on Reporting the Southern Environment, to help improve the reporting skills for environmental journalists. (SARDC)
