The FEED Strategy
How to Achieve Full Employment
through Equitable Development in the Eastern Cape
A
strategy for the creation of 500,000 to 1,000,000 new employment opportunities
making optimum use of human resources
and funds already available in the EC through in the three tiers of government
Submitted
to the Eastern Cape
Originally
Written by Cecil E Cook and Crispin Pemberton-Pigott
Revised
and Adapted by C E Cook: December 2011
Abstract
With
the failure of numerous development models of the post-World War II world
imposed by the over developed upon the less developed nations and in the light
of the recent failures of unregulated capitalism, mass unemployment, and
excessive debt caused by people and nations living beyond their means, there is
a growing interest in development models and methods that that correct for the
short comings of too much and too little government control over the
economy. In Africa – and specifically South
Africa - we are desperately in need of a feasible and affordable approach to
development that has the potential to create employment and modest prosperity
for all our citizens who want and need to work.
Such
a new Africa friendly model of development must harness the potential of the
impoverished rural and peri-urban majorities – particularly the youth – to play
an active role in expanding the South African economy. The workless and impoverished who find themselves trapped and frustrated at
the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) need to be challenged to play a central role in
their gradual political and economic liberation from poverty and
powerless.
For
this process of self help liberation to take place, it is first necessary for
national and provincial government, the big and small private sector, the
NGO’s, and local government to accept
and master a radical shift away for today’s dominant development paradigm. The top down ‘delivery’ of infrastructure and
progress to citizens who passively wait to be developed by public servants has
to be replaced by a tough minded strategy of self help and community
mobilization and investment. By adopting
a development model where the government, business and the people and
communities trapped at the BOP each accept responsibility for playing an active
role in creating modest prosperity and work for all, there is little chance for
the new SA to escape from accumulated powerlessness, unemployment, and poverty created
by the apartheid economy over the previous 50 years. It is the responsibility of enlightened
government to assist today’s victims of underdevelopment and dependency into powerfully
creative agents of a future economy offering Full Employment through the discovery and enactment of Equitable Development policies and
processes at the international, national, provincial, and local levels of
governance.
The
recent collapse of the sub prime housing bubble and the knock-on implosion of a
derivatives generated by an out of control ‘casino capitalism’ has exposed the
inherent risks and limitations of an economic system that is based on a mistaken ideology that presumes our finite
planet can support an infinitely expanding population which aspires to a
Euro-American lifestyle and standard of consumption of everything: water,
energy, metal, biomass, food, medicine, housing, land, etc.
The
endless pursuit of material advantage, conspicuous consumption and an empty
imitation of the currently faltering societies of the North is today threatening
the viability and traditional capacity of the land based societies in the
remaining rural zones of the planet.
Destruction forms of aggressive urbanization are today undermining the
capacity of the +/- 50% of humanity that
is still heavily dependent on the use of indigenous culture and traditional
expertise to feed, shelter, energize, secure enough water, care for the sick,
raise up healthy families, and govern themselves peacefully.
A
symptom of the cultural confusion and moral malaise that is sapping the
vitality of traditional rural communities in the Eastern Cape and the greater
Southern Africa is the growing dominance of a world system that privileges
urban values, lifestyles, and infrastructure at the expense of rural values,
lifestyles and infrastructure. Rural
South Africans are being prematurely relegated to the ‘dustbin of history’ as
they lose confidence in themselves, their African culture, and its value as a
template for a dynamic Afro-centric future. Typically these stresses are
manifested in rising crime and vandalism, promiscuity, suicide and the
emergence of extremist forms of politics and religion.
In
order to address these symptoms, it is first necessary to break through to a deeper
understanding of the problems that are gnawing at the vitals of South African
society. Part of the problem is one of
blind imitation - the copying of crude and frequently even vulgar foreign models
of modernity derived from ‘extrinsic (alien)’ cultures that are captivating the
youth and the better off middle classes who reside in both poor and wealthy hyper-urban
spaces. They are increasingly under the
spell of the increasingly obsolete but still prosperous economies of the
North. The onslaught of pseudo modernistic
ideas has only been exceeded by the deluge of materialism that together have
blinded South African of all persuasions, cultural backgrounds and classes to
the impossibility of growing the largely borrowed and imported Euro-centric
economy with its neo-colonial ethos fast enough or forcefully enough to replace
the indigenous values, the deep culture, the intimate knowledge of place and
the land, and ultimately the dreams of the African majority and the dreams of
their forebears.
An
example of this is that people can no longer get married without Lobola paid in
advance. Gone are the days of mutual
indebtedness and the strengthening fabric of a trusting society. The focus of South African society has
shifted from the extended family and the small community to the individual,
money and material goods. Cattle are now
prized more highly than children born in wedlock. The erosion of the family unit has placed the
South African society in great peril.
This
single issue is not the most important problem to be addressed, but it is
indicative of a society in rapid transition, in the process of which it is
collectively becoming unhappy with the way things are turning out.
Never
has there been so much open dissent, so much organized strife in the labour
field, so much random crime and in the end, so much despair that anything will
improve. Land is idle, yet people
clamour for it. The problem most
frequently mentioned as being at the root of so many of the evils is
unemployment among the youth. Nature abhors a vacuum and idle youth will always
find something to occupy themselves.
Training,
employment and entrepreneurship are the best solutions for this, but apart from
the obvious tactic of attracting foreign investment, there has been no progress
toward actually reducing the number of unemployed people in the Eastern Cape.
When those who are so discouraged they have given up on looking for work are
added to the total unemployment figures, the percentage of unemployed in rural,
peri-rural and peri-urban communities approaches 50%.
Arnold
Toynbee’s monumental Study of History
identified increasing urban concentration, inequality between the have’s and the have not’s and growing
unemployment among the surplus urbanites collecting in bloated cities as tell
tale symptoms of a civilization in terminal decline. How viable is a South Africa
What
follows is an overview of how the challenge of creating work opportunities and modest
prosperity for all South Africans
can be affordably, practically and creatively addressed on a scale that is
grand enough to actually build an economy of full employment. The intention of
the FEED Strategy is to provide
between 500 000 and
1 000
000 new work opportunities in the Eastern Cape by making more efficient use of
the scarce public sector funds as well as the labour power, knowledge and
skills embodied in the people of the province.
The general directions required of the Departments of the Provincial and
Local Government are indicated and the outlines for a sustainable economy given
in the FEED Strategy Document. The new
Provincial Growth Strategy for the Eastern Cape must be self help driven and
largely government and even financed from the bottom up, not from the top
down. It is the thesis of the FEED
Strategy that a new South African will only be built by a highly motivated work
force that offers employment to all its citizens.
Background
of the Authors
The
authors are both professionally involved in experimenting with different
socio-economic approaches to uplift the rural poor in Southern Africa through
the demonstrating and documenting the most cost effective approaches to ‘self
help’ and land-based development leading to full employment within the local
economy through the revitalization of the village and township by making
optimum use of the skills, cultural strengths, and resources controlled by the
residents.
Between
them they bring 76 years of experience in working directly on the underlying
problems faced by small scale communities and village economies that are
undergoing ‘destructive integration’ into highly industrialized national
political economies. The fruits born of
their collaboration have been more than 50 types of low cost, robust, manually
operated Appropriate Technologies and hundreds of proof of concept
demonstrations in rural communities of the Eastern Cape – undertaken by the
former Transkei Appropriate Technology Unit (now the Eastern Cape AT Unit) and
subsequently supported on a ongoing basis by the fabrication and sale of these
appropriately scaled and contextualized technologies by New Dawn Engineering in
Swaziland.* To date their collaboration
been resulted in thousands of jobs created, hundreds of communities
strengthened and the launching of a number of land and village based new
enterprises.
We
believe a much needed corrective can be gained from examining the ‘appropriate
technology’ perspective and practice at this moment in the struggle to transform
both the
macro
and the micro economies of South Africa.
It is these intentions that the Full Employment through Equitable
Development (FEED) Model and Strategy are now being updated by the authors in
the hopes that the people and community leaders, professionals, businessmen and women,
government officials, and political leaders of South Africa will be inspired to
turn adversity into victory. We believe the ideas and approaches contained in
this document will add value to the national and provincial consultations
presently underway in the country. It gives
examples of radically low cost technologies and proven self help
approaches. The authors believe the
challenges confronting the new South Africa will only be met and overcome
through different types of self help initiatives and bottom up mobilizations. The purpose of the FEED Strategy is to
stimulate the people and their leaders to create a totally new type of people
centered and inclusive economy that provides work opportunities and modest
prosperity to all the able bodied citizens of the new South Africa.
The
people and government of the RSA are challenged to create a growth based
provincial and national economy for the country and the province that radically
reduces joblessness and poverty while the mature urban industrialized economies
of the North are beginning to contract and the world economic system is passing
through a period of austerity. The FEED Strategy asserts that it is indeed
possible to achieve continuing growth and development by mastering the economic
art of ‘doing more with less’ resources
per capita of land, water, minerals, energy, etc. The late great futurist and
innovator Bucky Fuller defines ‘synergy’ as the science of ‘doing more with
less’. Those approaches and technologies
which use less materials and energy to achieve an increase in useful benefits
are by definition ‘synergistic’ and therefore appropriate innovations.
The
FEED Strategy attempts to creatively and systematically apply the synergy
principle to the here-to-fore neglected socio-cultural, economic, and
environmental potential in the Eastern Cape and Southern Africa to achieve the
greatest possible beneficial outcomes for the lowest possible costs in the +/-
4000 small rural communities in the Eastern Cape Province, and by extrapolation
to the 25 000 to 30 000 rural and peri-rural communities making up the still
vast rural sector of the South African economy.
Cecil
E. Cook TechnoShare
(SA)
Crispin
R. Pemberton-Pigott New Dawn
Engineering & Appropriate Technology
Exchange Ltd.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE
FULL EMPLOYMENT through EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT (FEED) STRATEGY for the Eastern
Cape
1. The Provincial Government of the Eastern Cape (PG/EC) should avoid the
Euro-American example of the careless destruction of natural resources followed
by hugely expensive attempts – after the damage has been done - to reconstruct
it.
2. Where
possible the PG/EC needs to minimize the entanglement of Local Economic Develop
(LED) with partisan politics at any of the three levels of governance:
national, provincial, and/or local government; the insulation of local
development processes from partisan politics creates a neutral space in which
different local constituencies and interest groups have an opportunity to
identify and advance their common interests.
3. The
role of "Big Government" in peoples' lives should diminish and the
role of local government should be greatly expanded. Institutional mechanisms promoting broader ‘bottom-up’
participation are required.
4. Proposed
publicly financed solutions to economic or social problems should not, for
example, use up all the resources and end up solving – say - only 40% of the
problem. Such a proposal is a "40%
Solution". We need 90% solutions.
5. Thousands
of jobs can be created by systematically re-directing government expenditure to
the adaptation of labour-intensive methods for delivering services, goods and
infrastructure supplied to the public sector.
The percentage of the total budget spent on labour and the resulting
cost per employment opportunity should be used as criteria by Tender Boards.
6. The
establishment of a "Block Grant" system combining public sector funds
from different levels and departments of government into multi-purpose LED
funds makes it possible for Community Development Corporations, cooperatives
and/or small units of local self government to democratically manage the
design, implementation, ownership and maintenance of their own enterprises,
infrastructure projects, and programmes.
7. Land
use planning should concentrate on creating New Communities which optimize the
use of their natural resources to create agro-enterprises and enable as many of
its residents as possible to generate their employment, food, fuel, shelter,
and well being within these revitalized New Communities.
8. As
a rule of thumb, on average it is five times cheaper to meet all of the social,
economic and environmental needs of a family that resides in a rural community
than it does to meet the equivalent requirements for infrastructural,
employment, housing, transportation, water, etc. of that same family in an
urban environment.
9. Grazing
and other communal resources should be re-structured so that all people derive
some direct benefit from the several different forms of collectively held lad
based "wealth". A Cattle Bank
is one way to address this issue.
10. A
National Greening Strategy needs to be prepared, including the formation of a
civil force of "Green Guards" who function as a ‘development army’.
The Green Guards would draft and train all unmarried, unemployed, and
out-of-school youth to help rural, urban and peri-urban communities restore the
ecological health, beauty and utility of their degraded environments. Guards
will receive monthly stipends for living expenses while undergoing serious
vocational training.
11. A
profound review of hands-on technical education to identify the most affordable
and practical ways to train the next generation to become life-long problem
solvers and creators of new forms of self employment. The improved technical education will
prioritize the building training institutions – Village Technikons - that
contribute directly to the creation of an inclusive economy of full employment
and the equitable distribution of work
opportunities where they are most needed in the communities and zones with the
highest rates of unemployment. .
12. An
Institute for Development Exploration and Appropriate Standards (IDEAS) should
be created to provide rural and urban zones of South African society, as well
as traditionalist Africans and Euro-centric modernists, with effective
"science and technology parity" by giving them equal access to the
power of the world’s knowledge system for the purpose of empowering them to realize
their very different visions of the ‘best of all possible’ future communities,
families, governments and economies.
13. Development
Innovation Panels need to be formed that represent the cultures, classes, and
interest groups of South African society as well as the relevant science
disciplines and professions. By respecting the different interests, needs, and
aspirations and identifying the commonalities shared by different
constituencies, it becomes possible to objectively apply cutting edge science
and technology to the fulfilment of both the convergent and divergent
aspirations of the multiplicity of cultures, classes, and interest groups that
make up South African society.
14. If
70% of the local food market can be captured by local agro-businesses and
farmers, up to one-quarter (25%) of the entire population of South Africa could
be economically sustained through this process, alone.
15. The
FEED Strategy Plan aims to create and/or maintain between 500 000 and 1 000 000
employment opportunities simply by making much better (more efficient) use of
the public resources that are already in the hands of the three tiers of
government here in the Eastern Cape: national, provincial and local.
INDEX
1. Introduction 11
1.1 Difficulties
Ahead 13
1.2 The
Diminution of Government's Role 15
1.3 Percentage
Development 15
2. The
Disciplined Use of Government Purchasing
Power to
Generate More Employment 17
2.1 Fence
Making 17
2.2 Buying
Local Products 19
2.3 Construction 19
2.4 Political
Courage 21
3. Small
Producer Set Asides 21
3.1 Reserved
Industries 21
3.2 Equitable
Decentralization 22
3.3 Materials
Depots 23
4. Conversion
to Employment Intensive Public Works
rogrammes
and Infrastructure Maintenance 24
4.1 Labour
Based Road Maintenance 24
4.2 Road
Keepers 25
4.3 Project
Minders 25
5. Area
Based Community Development (ABCD)
pproaches
and Block Grants 27
5.1 Local
Control 27
5.2 Botswana 27
5.3 Leveraged
Funds 28
5.4 Unresolved
Conflict with Modernism 29
6. Low
Cost Self-Help Housing and New Self-Reliant
Communities 29
6.1 Land
Use Planning 30
6.2 Economic
Realism 32
6.3 Appropriate
Standards 33
7. Food
First: Innovative Programmes Leading Toward
Food
Sufficiency for the Eastern Cape
7.1 Small
Scale Agro-Enterprise Schemes 34
7.2 Agro-Enterprise
Homesteads 35
7.3 7½%
of the Land 36
7.4 Homestead
Trust 36
7.5 Dam
Construction 37
7.6 Get
the Right Cultivars 37
7.7 Improving
Grazing, Agro-Forestry and Cattle Banks 38
7.8 Permaculture
Grazing 38
7.9 Cattle
Bank 39
7.10 Small
Scale Food Processing 39
8. Environmental
Protection, Restoration and Quality
8.1 The
Problem and the Solution 40
8.2 National
Greening Strategy 41
8.3 The
Green Guards 42
8.4 Food
Production on Public Land 42
8.5 Hunger
Hedges - Permaculture for the Poor and the
Unemployed 43
9. The
People's Technikon concept: community based
Education
of rural and peri-urban residents for modest
prosperity
in the 21st century
9.1 Choosing
the New Path 44
9.2 Community
Technikons 46
9.3 Mentoring
Entrepreneurs 47
9.4 Community
based Folk Schools 48
9.5 The
resulting Impact 49
10. Eastern
Cape Province needs its own Institute for Development
Exploration
and Appropriate Standards (IDEAS) to
Create a
sustainable civilization for the 21st century
10.1 The
Information Superhighway 49
10.2 Gaining
access 50
10.3 Development
Innovation Panels 51
10.4 Freeing
the Programme from Interference 54
10.5 Gaining
Parity 54
11. Feed
of, for and by the people: a Summary of
Potential
Benefits of the proposed feed strategy
11.1 Typical
impact on food production 55
11.2 Total
Benefits 56
THE
FULL EMPLOYMENT through EQUITABLE DEVELOPMENT (FEED) STRATEGY: a socially and culturally feasible,
environmentally sustainable and affordable plan of action to transform the
social, cultural and political ‘economies’ of the Eastern Cape within a
generation
1. INTRODUCTION
The long awaited and painful struggle to replace
minority governance in the RSA with non-racial majority governance has finally
been consummated. From the beginning the
ANC led government deeply committed itself in its original Reconstruction and
Development Plan and subsequent reincarnations as GEAR and ASGISA to deliver an
urban biased, state dominated, welfare oriented, industrially driven, high mass
consumption future of prosperity to the unemployed majority of South Africans,
most of whom dwelt in impoverished rural and peri-urban communities in 1994 and
now 16 years later in 2010 - fast approaching a short generation – still find
themselves stuck in rural, peri-rural and peri-urban economies and cultures of
poverty.
The ANC organized its first three election
campaigns around promises to the people that it would in due course deliver
employment, redistributive pensions and grants, and highly subsidized medical
services, basic housing, electricity, and water and it has indeed made massive investments over the first 16 years
of its leadership of the government to begin
reducing the huge racial and class backlogs accumulated over the long
years of apartheid.
The Eastern Province is a small peripheral
economy within a South African national economy that is dominated by the highly
industrialized and relatively ‘over-developed’ metropolitan economies of
Gauteng, Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, and several other
important provincial industrial and commercial centers. These industrialized metropolises generate
+/- 90% of the GDP from the economic activity of +/- 30% of the population of
the country of which more than 30% are currently unemployed. If the ANC led government at the national and
the provincial levels is to ultimately succeed in creating an equitable economy
of full employment, one that provides useful and meaningful work to all able
bodied adult citizens who need and want to work, it must use its electoral
dominance of South African politics to radically reconfigure the National
Democratic Revolution (NDR). The ANC’s
vision of a NDR will have to move away
from today’s high cost/low benefit urban industrial ‘paradigm’ by giving up its
present fixation on privileging the interests of upwardly mobile black
professionals in the public and private sectors, entrepreneurs and unionized
workers over the interests of the low income majorities who still - and for the
foreseeable future - reside in land based rural communities, informal squatter
settlements, formal townships, and in-between peri-rural zones of settlement.
Unless the political leadership of the different
parties and political tendencies within the ANC at the national and provincial
levels discover how to capitalize upon the comparative advantages - what Veblen and Trotsky referred to as the
‘advantages of backwardness’ - that land based rural communities and small
towns enjoy in the form of their greater natural capital and the capacities of
rural residents to meet many of their basic needs using their own labour and
know-how:
·
owner built
housing,
·
(ii.)
water, building materials, grazing, and wild foods harvested from the nearby
environment,
·
(iii.)
growing a percentage of their food from small gardens and maize fields,
·
(iv.) lowering
costs by constructing infrastructure to rural standards (gravel roads, on site pit latrines, basic schools and
clinics, and community centers).
If the delivery fixated ANC led government does
not soon learn how to make effective use of the self help capacity of rural
residents and communities in predominantly rural provinces like the Eastern
Cape, then it runs the risk that within another generation and a half - say 30 years – the governments’ treatment
of the rural residents and communities - as if they are do not know how to
build their own housing, plant and harvest their own gardens, manage their own
livestock, construct and maintain their own basic improved water supply systems
and simple small scale irrigation schemes, govern themselves through indigenous
forms of African participatory democracy - will cause rural dwellers to forget
their culture of self help and local self governance. The careless destruction of the self help
tradition by the ‘developmental state’ which temporarily confused itself with
the ‘nanny state’ will be a tragedy that will cripple the capacity of the state
to use its scarce resources to create a more equitable economy with a realistic
chance of offering full employment to all its citizens.
If the Eastern Province allows the destruction
of its political, cultural and land based comparative advantages by the
irrational imposition of inappropriate urban standards and approaches upon a
predominantly rural province that is composed of +/- 4000 communities of +/-
200 households (average of 5 members x 200 households = 1000 residents) then it
could be accused of indulging in de facto
‘culture-cide’ because its biased development policies and programmes are
causing the gradual eradication of a land based culture and a rural way of
life. The prospects for a renaissance of
self governing rural communities in the Eastern Province is bleak and leans in
the direction of ‘extinction’ as thousands of formerly self reliant village
economies and enclaves become increasingly dependent upon the ‘megapolitan’
political economy of Gauteng and the other socially, economically and
technologically dominant metropolises in other Provinces; in the Eastern Cape
the dominant metropolises are Port Elizabeth, Mthatha, and East London. . The
degree to which rural, peri-rural and peri-urban communities are reorganized
around the use of expensive urban standards and technologies is a measure to
just how culturally inappropriate present day anti-rural development strategies
have become. Development strategies targeting
rural communities in the Eastern Cape when they do not maximize the use of the
land based skills, environmental resources and ‘peripheral advantages’ of rural
people. All three tiers of the
government in South Africa is today guilty of using the ‘developmental state’
to systematically alienate the rural masses from their African roots.
If present trends continue, it is entirely
predictable that the rural hinterlands of the Eastern Province will gradually
become even more disadvantaged and politically and economically subordinate to
the metropolitan centres of South Africa. The still predominantly rural Eastern
Province will in time become totally subordinate to the inappropriate and often
anti-rural political and economic policies, standards, and prejudices that are today
professionally designed to meet the ‘superior’ standards of urban
infrastructure, the urban built environment, and urban services. These superior urban standards are much more
costly per capita (per citizen and per family) for the government to provide. In addition, the cost to create sustainable employment
in the knowledge intensive, high tech industrial sector, which are typically
favoured by the IDC, parastatals and the big private corporations now operating
in South Africa far exceed the public and private capital available to the
developmental state for the purpose of gradually creating a full employment
economy that provides work for all citizens.
The global market meltdown of the last few years
has exposed the limitations of free market and socialist fundamentalism in both
the over-developed and the under-developed nations of the world system. The
road ahead is no longer certain. After 17 years of rule by a political movement
deeply committed to using the financial and human resources of South African
state to uplift the welfare of the majority at the BOP, it is increasingly
obvious to observers inside and outside of the country that a number of profound
‘paradigm shifts’ are necessary if the country is to stop its descent into chaos and begin to
fulfil its RDP - and now MDG –promises.
The current leaders in all walks of life have the responsibility - as well as
the opportunity - to objectively review the country's experiences with social
and economic development to date - its successes and failures - so that the
country can converge on the unity of vision and approach needed to build a
society of full employment and modest prosperity on the lessons of the recent past.
The purpose of the FEED Strategy document is to
challenge the thinking public and the creative leadership of South Africa to
first imagine, then test through pilot projects and finally to systematically
implement a series of transformational programmes which together will replace
Afro-pessimism by opening a uniquely South African path to the development and
modernization of its rich culture and diverse society. Many of the foundations and opportunities for
rapid social and economic development that are today present in the Eastern
Cape may not be present at all or to the same degree in other provinces of the
country. It would be a tragic mistake -
in our view - if the Eastern Province allows itself to be bulldozed by the rush
of events in the urban industrial centers of the country - sudden changes in AID donor policies,
pressures to forge new political and economic alliances with powerful and
persuasive role players - into accepting development approaches which do not
achieve the highest possible rates of meaningful employment and the most
equitable distribution of development benefits within the country.
The recommendations presented here will be
directed toward the goal of achieving virtual FULL EMPLOYMENT within a
framework of EQUITABLE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT in the span of a
generation (20 years). Hence the acronym
FEED, the Full Employment through Equitable Development plan. Together, the proposals presented in this
document together constitute the vision of the FEED Strategy. The recommendations will necessarily be
presented in outline form. If there is
interest in any of these recommendations, then it is possible to develop them
in greater detail. Illustrative numbers
are used in the presentation so as to indicate approximate quantities, costs,
and benefits. The methods for
implementing the various FEED proposals first as pilots projects and – if successful
– later ‘rolling’ them out as major programmes can only be briefly described.
The purpose of these brief descriptions is to convey a general understanding of
the likely cost and benefit performance of the different pilots, how to assess
the development performance of each FEED project and the general templates for
their mass implementation.
1.1 DIFFICULTIES AHEAD
There should be no illusions about the degree of
difficulty in getting the disparate interest groups, that are today competing
for power within the development arena in the Eastern Province and the RSA, to
map out, agree on and then cooperatively implement a common vision and method
of implementation. The main obstacles to
realizing the recommendations present in the FEED Strategy is the problem of
conflict and distrust between competing elites who are seeking to maximize
their control over the institutional shape of the future and their efforts to
protect their special interests.
Naturally, each elite believes that its vision for a better South Africa
is superior and more complete than the visions of other elites. Only a sincere spirit of consultation, and an
open minded process of give and take, will
serve the combined interests of the relevant communities and levels of
governance. If the different interests, perspectives and action proposals are
to be reconciled into a coherent and implementable development strategy, then a
microcosm of the constituencies objectively involved in the struggle for
development will have to first understand and trust each other enough to form a
moral community of interest and begin learning how to cooperate with each
other.
It is our considered opinion, as development
professionals with 76 years of experience between us, that there will be very
little progress toward a sustainable pattern of social and economic development
in the Eastern Province unless and until enough of the significant actors and
stakeholders agree among themselves on the objectives of development, as well
as on the means for realistically achieving these objectives. The unrealistic visionaries and the narrow
minded opportunists must be co-opted into a nationally and/or provincially mandated
Strategy for Full Employment through Equitable Development. The FEED Strategy proposed here in summary
form is one possible way to awaken the nation to the life and death crises it
faces and to mobilize its often feuding and antagonistic factions to cooperate
to build a more self reliant society.
The final FEED Strategy that will be adopted by
Eastern Province, and hopefully by the other provinces as well, needs to be
deeply grounded in the shared experiences of both leaders and followers,
experts and lay people, businessmen and workers, rural and urban dwellers. The long term interests of all South Africans
are ultimately inseparable. The
different interest groups in the Eastern Cape and the other provinces are like
the crew and passengers on a ship at sea.
If the ship sinks they will all drown, regardless of whether they are
first, second, or third class passengers, the captain, a waiter, the head
mechanic, or the stoker.
A unifying vision and a practical plan of action
will be gradually discovered through open ended consultation that is honest, respectful and evidence
based (scientific). The follow on mass
implementation of the FEED Strategy will gradually accelerate the creation of
thousands of new permanent jobs through the systematic practice of equitable
development. The small FEED pilot
projects will be initiated by different groups, factions, and communities of
interest in the Province. By encouraging a spectrum of different public and
private development agents and harnessing the voluntary motivations of
functioning moral communities these FEED pilot projects mobilize and augment the
creativity, social networks, and natural resources owned by these moral
communities of interest. By multiplying the number and diversity of self help powered
‘pilot’ projects undertaken under the umbrella of the FEED Strategy, a
collective process of learning through consultation, action, and critical
reflection is started. The break
throughs achieved by these pilots will guide the government, the communities
themselves and other development actors toward the most feasible and affordable
mass implementation programmes for different geo-economic regions of the
Eastern Cape. By means of consultation,
experimentation, and critical reflection on the results achieved by FEED pilots
and programmes of mass implementation an accelerated process of systematic
learning will take place. A grand framework and methodology is necessary to resolve
fruitless political contestation over differing ideologies and practices. The FEED Strategy provides this
meta-framework and process because it enables government officials,
professions, NGO activists to objectively assess the costs and benefits of
competing development approaches. The FEED Strategy manages to achieve full
employment through the rigorous practice of equity, bottom up governance and
self help financing and management of local economic development by and for
people at the BOP in the Eastern Cape (and by extension to the other 8 provinces of the country) .
1.2 THE DIMINUTION OF GOVERNMENT'S ROLE
One major departure by the proposed FEED
Strategy from the development orthodoxies of the past 50 years is the
presumption by the authors that the government of the Eastern Province (GovEP)
will not be the major initiator, controller and/or implementer of
development. Instead, the national and
provincial governments will play an important facilitative role while other
major actors - the big, medium and small private sector, local government,
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO's) and Community Based Organizations
(CBO's), professional associations, communities, families and even leading
individuals - will be freed to get on with the many tasks necessary to release the self-help initiative
of citizens who then actively manage their own regeneration by creating the
greatest number of new employment opportunities at the lowest possible cost
through the rigorous practice of equity.
1.3 PERCENTAGE DEVELOPMENT
A second major departure is made by the FEED
Strategy because it clearly differentiate between short
term "token" development that only solves 10% to 20% of a major
development challenges from a long term approach that manages to gradually
solve 80% to 90% of the same development challenge. For example, a ‘token’
development programme is one that spends all
the available resources of money, professional capacity, and capital –
whether from government, the private sector and donor sources – and only
manages to solve a small fraction of a major development challenge like
housing, water supply, local food security, and employment creation, with the
most efficient use of these limited resources.
What
is the difference between a 20% and a 90% development solution? Surely
the difference is attributable to the ingenuity, professionalism, commitment to
serve the public good and the degree of cooperation achieved by the team
collaborating to innovate a complete development solution: the planners,
funding agents, mass implementers, politicians and local community
leaders. The FEED strategy starts with a
solemn commitment by change agents to squeeze the greatest possible
socio-economic improvement for the largest number of beneficiaries at the
lowest possible cost.
The change agents set out to discover the lowest
cost and most socially and culturally appropriate solutions to the people’s
development backlogs. To achieve 90%
solutions with constrained resources, it is normally necessary for both the
people and their mentor’s and professional benefactors to mutually empower each
other. Through trust and cooperation the
people and their professional advocates combine forces, capacities and resources
for the struggle to overcome blockages standing in the way of potential socio-economic
and technological break- troughs that radically reduce costs and enhance
socio-economic benefits.
One way to assess the relatively efficiency of
competing approaches to development is to measure and compare the total cost
per capita to ‘deliver’ a particular development benefit, for example, the cost
to permanently provide each person in a community with 25 litres of potable
water a day to within 250 meters, or solar thermal water heating systems, or to
provide a basic 4 room RDP house together with streets, landscaping and storm
water drains, water and energy services, etc.
The question being asked in this planning exercise is: how much, or what
percentage, of existing backlogs will
the Eastern Province meet if it chooses to use specific designs, technologies and approaches and then spends
all of projected public revenues available from national, provincial, and local
levels of government each category of infrastructure? Increments in demand for infrastructure must
be factored into the equation to carter for population growth and
redistribution over a planning horizon of 20 years.
What is the annual percentage of the existing
infrastructure backlogs is the public sector able to supply from its annual
budget? Is the government achieving 25%,
50% or 75% development solutions? After
spending all of it earmarked funds for a particular type of infrastructure,
what percentage of the annual backlog plus the projected increments going
forward 20 years – and distributed equally along the same 20 year time horizon - is the Eastern Province managing to deliver??
A 100% development solution, by definition,
cannot leave any major stakeholder, actor, or beneficiary outside a given
development solution because the objective is to solve the whole problem by
leaving no citizens outside in the cold looking. Every willing, interested and needy citizen
of the Eastern Province must be enabled to personally contribute to and then
also directly benefit from a 100% development solution.
At this juncture the Eastern Province’s has a
priceless opportunity to exercise it freedom to choose the form and content of
its political and economic future by actively experimenting with alternative
development paths, technologies and approaches and deciding ‘what must be done’
only after careful assessment of the costs and the benefits, the likes and
dislikes of client communities, If the people and their leaders are given an
opportunity to experience and then critically reflect upon cost/benefit
performance of competing development pilots and strategies – that lead toward
very different futures for the Province - they will have the facts and figures which
they and their advisers need for them to decide rationally about the best of
all possible futures for them to pursue.
They need to reflect critically on the comparative advantages and
disadvantages of the following dimensions of development:
·
the
Province’s natural environment,
·
indigenous,
Western and global cultures,
·
the
accidents of history, and
·
the
strengths and genius of all its people.
The knowledge about the most likely ‘downstream’
advantages and disadvantages of different development strategies between which
the people and their leaders have an opportunity to decide now empowers the African majority to exercise their
God given freedom to choose the best of all possible futures for themselves,
their families, their communities and the Province.
The proposed FEED Strategy places the African
majority in the driver’s seat. The electorate and the political leadership are
given the tools they need to rationally and responsibly define development
according to their own cultural priorities, values, and socio-economic imperatives. By asserting ownership for the socio-economic
future of the Province, the leadership and the general populace will be asserting
their capacity for self-reliance, self mobilization, and self governance, and
self finance. Therefore, the proposed FEED Strategy is an exercise in
self-definition that takes place when a community selectively chooses to invest
their natural resources, labour power, and indigenous skills in those FEED pilots
and programmes that have demonstrated their power to deliver the greatest
possible socio-economic benefits to the people at the lowest possible costs.
The FEED Strategy demonstrates and assesses alternative
ways to radically reorganize the present economic system of the Province and
the country so that it will vastly increase - perhaps to triple or even quadruple
- the employment created through the wise expenditure of public monies. The
alternative labour intensive
technologies and approaches presented here – when combined with appropriate
technologies that have elsewhere in the developing world already demonstrated a
capacity to create many permanent work
opportunities at very low costs - have the potential to create full employment
in the Eastern Province within a generation (about 20 years).
2 THE DISCIPLINED USE OF GOVERNMENT
PURCHASING POWER TO GENERATE MORE EMPLOYMENT
The Government of the Eastern Province (GovEP)
in cooperation with the national, provincial and local levels of government has
considerable power to create thousands of new employment opportunities by
making much better use of the purchasing power of each provincial Department. It is estimated that the Provincial
government annually spends between ??? and ??? million Rands on capital
projects, capital goods, materials, and services. As a matter of highest priority, the
government of the Province needs to make a concerted effort at the highest
levels of authority to use the government's purchasing power to maximize the
creation of employment opportunities for the citizens of the Province who are,
right now, without work and who want to earn their daily bread.
The following sections will give examples of how
the GovEP could rapidly expand the conversion of its substantial purchasing
power into tens of thousands of inexpensive new employment opportunities that
are equitably distributed to those citizens most in need of work and income.
2.1 FENCE MAKING
For example, any fence products needed by the
government can be purchased either from companies using big machines employing
relatively few paid workers or, alternatively, from a much larger number of
self-employed fence makers using inexpensive and readily available
‘appropriate’ technologies to hand fabricate the same or comparable fence
products. On average, the hand making of
fencing products creates employment for +/-10 hand fabricators for every
industrial worker that would be displaced.
Surely it is in the interest of the GovEP and
the people to use the government's fence purchasing power to create thousands
of permanent, decentralized, self-employment opportunities hand-fabricating
fence products instead of retaining a few hundred high cost industrial jobs in
fence manufacturing. For each R1 000 000
worth of fencing purchased by the government from small enterprises that hand
fabricate fence products approximately
30 full time employment opportunities will be created. These 30 hand fabricators will together
produce +/- 100 kms of fencing between them.
Only about 3 permanent jobs would be created to fabricate the same
100kms of industrially produced fencing.
The cost of the industrial fence making machine
will typically cost between R100 000 to R150 000 per employment opportunity. The 3 jobs created would cost a total of +/-
R300 000 to R450 000. A minimum of 6
permanent jobs would be created by an industrial scale fence production
operation, so an initial capital investment of between R600 000 to R900 000
would be required to produce 100 kms of fencing for sale to the government.
The cost of the hand powered fence fabrication
technology would average out at R5000 per worker so the cost of the hand fabrication
technology needed to gainfully employ 30 fence makers would come to R150
000. Therefore the capital investment
per employment opportunity to hand fabricate fencing is approximately 1/15th
the capital cost of industrialized fence fabrication. That means the government can create about 15
employment opportunities to hand craft fencing products for the cost of
creating just a single job producing industrialized fence products.
The same 10 fold decrease in the capital
required to hand craft many other types of products is observed for a range of
products regularly purchased by Provincial Departments and Local Units of
Governments when more appropriate labour intensive production technologies and
methods of decentralised manufacture are discovered and properly used. Therefore, it is possible to radically reduce
the capital investment by as much as – or even more than - an order of
magnitude (x 10) which the government and/or the private sector are required to
invest to create new jobs when they decide to systematically shift from the
industrial mode of production over to the appropriate
technology and labour based (hand crafted) mode of production. There is also a comparable 10 fold increase
in number of employment opportunities created when the method of production is
changed from a technology intensive mode
over to a labour intensive mode of production. By systematically shifting the government’s
procurement of products from the purchase of industrialized products with relatively
little labour content over to the purchase of appropriate technology fabricated
products that have a much larger labour content, the Provincial Government has
the potential to absorb relatively vast amounts of unemployed labour in the
Eastern Cape.
Each Department of the Provincial Government can
be challenged to compete with the other Departments to see how many new
employment opportunities within the Eastern Cape can be created by altering
their capital goods, materials and service purchasing policies away from a
high-tech/low-labour input mode of production over to a lower-tech/higher-labour
input mode of production.
On the assumptions (i.) that the capital, materials
and services expenditures of the government departments run as high as
R??????????????? per year, (ii.) that 70% of this expenditure can be converted
to more labour-intensive production within the Province (R???????????????) and (iii.)
that on average the labour intensity can be increased by at least 50%, then
this change over to higher labour content production can be expected to generate
additional wages of R????????????. If
the average wage or income paid for this labour input is pegged at R12 000 per
job-year, then ?????? new jobs can be created by the GovEP getting
serious about intensifying the use of hand, craft and manual labour in
fabricating the products and materials it buys, and in the provision of
services to the public sector.
2.2 BUYING PROVINCIAL AND LOCAL PRODUCTS
For a start, the GovEP should look carefully
into using more employment-intensive fabrication to produce the following
products that are commonly purchased by GovEP and Municipalities or by private
sector companies, particular construction and engineering companies, under
contract to the GovEP and the District/Local Municipalities:
* school furniture
* office furniture
* office decorations - curtains, rugs, wall
hangings, etc.
* hospital soft goods - towels, gowns, bandages,
bathrobes, etc.
* concrete and stone building materials -
blocks, bricks, pavers, lime,
aggregate, soil cement blocks, etc.
* concrete and wooden building components -
windows, doors, roofing tile,
cabinets, trusses, paints/pigments, etc.
* fencing, brickforce, coat hangers, fence
poles, reinforcing, etc.
* vegetables, milk, meat, cheese, cooking oil,
peanut butter, etc. for
government institutions
* fertilizers, compost, trees, plants and
flowers for landscaping
* ferrocement water tanks, grain storage bins,
culverts, septic tanks, etc.
* uniforms, coveralls, smocks, aprons, etc.
* medicines, especially galenicals (syrups and
ointments)
* metal products - gates, burglar bars, doors,
ducts, gutters, cabinets, door
frames,
window frames, etc.
The above list is only illustrative and can be
greatly extended by officials who are more familiar with the vast number of
products and services the GovEP purchases from the market.
2.3 CONSTRUCTION
Further, the construction of all publicly
financed and controlled infrastructure projects can be made far more labour
intensive as a matter of government policy.
It can be stipulated in the public tenders that realistic percentages of
the total contract budget must be expended on labour inputs. Those
tender submissions with the highest percentage of paid labour input can be
awarded extra points in the assessment of competing tenders. The requirement that infrastructure projects
be made significantly more labour intensive must not, however, be permitted to
reduce the quality of the finished product or increase the total cost of the
bids of successful companies more than a certain agreed upon percentage (if
such an increase is proven necessary).
The following public infrastructure projects and
activities can be considered for labour intensification:
·
digging and
backfilling of trenches for water supply, sewers, electrical
cables,
·
secondary
and tertiary road construction, including bridges, fords, storm drainage
·
landscaping,
digging storm sewers, contouring, storm surge reservoirs, etc.
·
dam
construction, irrigation canals, ‘terraforming’, etc.
·
donga
control, land reclamation/earth repair
·
school and
clinic construction, government building construction
Further, much mechanized or semi-mechanized
maintenance work is done by government employees or contracted out to the
private sector that can be done in a more labour intensive manner. When maintenance contracts are written up it
can be stipulated that human labour is to be substituted, wherever cost
effective, for heavy plant or mechanized equipment. The following types of maintenance work can
be made far more labour intensive, thereby creating additional work
opportunities:
* maintenance and repair of primary, secondary
and tertiary roads
* maintenance and repair of primary, secondary
and tertiary schools
* grounds keeping (retire the lawn movers)
* painting and general up keep of all government
buildings such as schools,
clinics,
municipal buildings, etc.
* maintenance and repair of dams, canals,
contours, etc.
* upkeep of nurseries and tree plantations,
windbreaks, fire lanes, etc.
* garbage pickup and recycling of all wastes
It is estimated that the GovEP can create up to
100 000 additional permanent employment opportunities by redirecting its
purchasing and contracting away from high tech/low labour input products,
services and projects toward lower tech/higher labour input approaches.
In summary, the decision to honestly follow the
path of employment intensive development means that the government will
aggressively search for opportunities to multiply the number of manual, entry level
low skill, and high skill/craft level jobs by reducing the capital (machine
powered) intensity of the economy of the Province.
Of what benefit is it to have more than 50% of
potential workers sitting, unemployed, watching the other 50% managing high
tech machines and production processes.
For example, there is absolutely no reason not to park the road graders and
to keep them parked until such time as there is a labour shortage. Surely it is in the long term best interests
of the country and the Province to employ, say, 100 part-time "road
keepers" using hand tools and paid R750 a month (R9000 a year for each
road keeper) x 100 = R75 000 a month (x 12 months = R900 000) instead of
employing a highly skilled driver, a diesel mechanic, a book keeper, and a
manager? The estimated monthly cost of
R125,000 to hire a grader, including the grader operator, supporting workers
and a management oversight team, plus the additional foreign exchange capital
cost to purchase the grader (R150 000 a year depreciation) and the foreign
exchange cost of diesel fuel and repairs (R240 000) could employ up to 200 road
keepers or 20 times more entry level workers, who already reside in scattered
settlements that are conveniently distributed along the entire road network
Such ‘distributed’ road maintenance workers will reduce the transport
expenditures of the Dept of Public Works because these road keepers can walk to
and from work every day with their tools in wheel barrows.
2.4 POLITICAL COURAGE
It will require considerable political courage,
administrative imagination, public sector honesty and private sector
cooperation to systematically implement a new government purchasing and
contracting policy that gives employment creation and labour intensity the
highest possible priority. Can we not
look forward to MEC’s and HoD’s competing with one another to see who has
managed to convert their departmental budgets into the greatest number of basic
jobs through the purchase of low-tech/high-labour input products, materials,
services and projects? The elected
representatives of the people, the GovEP, and Municipal Officers have a special
responsibility to lead the nation by showing their commitment to put a FEED
Strategy into practice.
3. SMALL PRODUCER "SET ASIDES"
AND MARKET STRUCTURING
Mahatma Gandhi preached that India would never
become a genuinely developed nation until every village and region of the
country became largely self-reliant because it was able to meet a significant
proportion of its economic requirements through ‘local production for local
consumption’. He called for "production by the masses, not mass production". In a collection of writings by Gandhi
entitled, Industrialize and Perish, he documents exactly how the Western
approach to economic development based upon the over concentration of people,
workers, expertise and wealth in urban industrial metropolises has empowered
and enriched the few and brought poverty and powerlessness to the majority of
urban workers and rural dwellers. One
important part of Gandhi's struggle for the liberation of India from colonial
status focused on the preservation and expansion of village level production,
symbolized by home spun cotton thread and hand woven cloth (khadi) as a
political and economic declaration of independence from the textile factories
of Great Britain.
3.1 RESERVED INDUSTRIES
At the time of India's official independence
from Great Britain in 1949, the Congress Party under Nehru created the Khadi
Village Industries Commission (KVIC) to symbolically honour Gandhi's vision of
vibrantly self-reliant village and regional economies. Although the government of India did not really
believe in the Gandhian vision of village centered, bottom-up development, it
did make a half-hearted attempt, that continues today, to reserve a long list
of products and commodities for village based producers such as: matches, soap,
sugar, stone aggregate, lime, cement, sandals, etc. The KVIC is charged with ensuring that an
officially established percentage of the national production of some 840 items
must be reserved for small village-based producers, even if urban factories can
produce better products at lower prices.
The rationale behind the KVIC programme of set
asides for village producers is to strengthen the economies of hundreds of
thousands of villages by reserving a relatively small percentage of the
national economy of India for village workers who otherwise face a life of unemployment
and poverty in their rural homes or as internally displaced persons who are
forced by hunger to relocate to the cities. By helping struggling rural
households to survive economically, the KVIC reduces both social and economic
pressures pushing the ‘poorest of the poor’ to permanently migrate from their
rural homes into squatter settlements on the margins of mega-politan urban
centers like Calcutta and Mombai.
The set aside programme actually saves the
government and the society money over the longer term by avoiding the even
greater sums of money that would have to be found and paid to sustain the
impoverished rural families forced into urban centers as economic refugees from
a collapsing rural economy. The
deepening breakdown of the subsistence farming economy of the in the former
Bantustans of the Eastern Cape bears an uncanny resemblance to India a
generation ago.
3.2 EQUITABLE DECENTRALIZATION
Closer to hand, the Eastern Cape Appropriate
Technology Unit (ECATU), originally known as the Transkei Appropriate
Technology Unit or TATU, has been experimentally testing this Gandhian approach
to strengthening the rural economy in the former Transkei for more than two
decades, with particular emphasis on the use of ultra-low-cost self-help
approaches and technologies applied to the construction and maintenance of
public infrastructure in rural areas. By
carrying out hundreds of community based projects, TATU/ECATU has documented
that it is indeed possible to reduce the costs of:
·
the built
environment (houses, schools, community centers),
·
village
water supply systems,
·
rural roads
and storm sewers,
·
community
sewage systems,
·
fence
fabrication,
·
small scale
farming systems,
·
local
biomass energy systems
by as much as 80% below the cost of providing of these same structures
and services in built-up urban areas or even in a formal quasi urban
township.
If we extend these findings to other rural
communities and peri-rural zones in the Province, it tells us that for each rural
family that relocates and establishes itself in Mthatha, East London, Port
Elizabeth and the smaller town – and is provided with housing and infrastructure
at the higher Euro-settler standards -
it would be possible for the same public expenditure - to radically uplift at
least five rural families in situ in
their original rural communities and areas to a level of modest prosperity at
the rural standard of housing and infrastructure: a decent shelter, water
supply, garden, school, clinic, road connection, and including an entry level
job close to where they live.
On average, ECATU/TATU found that rural
development is five times less costly than urban development across a wide
spectrum of different types of infrastructure, services and dimensions of progress. However, the only way to deliver the benefit
of this 5 fold cost-saving to rural and "peri-rural" (a zone falling
between the peri-urban and the deep rural zones) households is when the
provincial and municipal governments make major investments of public resources
to equitably and systematically decentralize enterprises of many different
types into the rural areas of the Province.
In this way, rural dwelling workers will be able to actually walk to
their places of work as farmers, school teachers, road keepers, shop keepers,
fence fabricators, cooking oil producers, food processors, etc.
The Tender Boards of the GovEP and Municipalities
can be instructed by Parliament, the PM, the Cabinet, the Traditional Ruler,
and the political parties to introduce an initial 10% to 15% "small
producer set-aside" in as many product lines, materials and services as is
feasible (i.e. where small producers can cost effectively and practically
compete with capital-intensive producers).
It is the author’s opinion that small scale producers based in rural
communities, small towns, and townships deserve to be given a higher tender
advantage than both highly industrialized local producers as well as foreign
producers because of the lower handling, storage, transportation and other
management costs to the public sector of already distributed production. Every year the percentage set aside for small
producers should be increased until the latent productive capacity of small
scale producers is fully utilized.
3.3 MATERIALS DEPOTS
The GovEP will need to create, or facilitate the
establishment of new institutions such as a network of raw materials depots
that purchase in bulk from major suppliers who have ready access to the highly
industrialized regional or world economies and then pass their savings to the
small producers by charging them cost recovery prices. These materials supply depots will be needed
to flow large quantities of raw materials to hundreds and thousands of small
producers scattered around the Province in hundreds of different rural
areas. These same depots can also serve
as purchasing channels that act on behalf of the government to aggregate the
output of many small producers and maintain quality control. It is through this mechanism that Mozambique
managed to build up a cashew nut collection business that is now worth hundreds
of millions of Rands.
If the markets of the Eastern Province are
broken down into their ‘natural’ catchment areas they can then be organized to
flow the raw materials and other inputs needed to maximize the local production
of food for sale to and consumption by local residents, as well as the supply
of materials and services required for the profitable fabrication and sale of
labour intensive products and services for which there is a strong local
demand. Once the local economy begins to create products for which there is a
real local or regional demand, it will then be possible for these buying and
selling depots to establish direct linkages between major buyers such as boarding
schools, hotels, government training centers and suppliers like small farmer
markets and nearby small producers. For
example, a hotel or school will be strongly attracted to purchase an increasing
percentage of its vegetables, milk, eggs, chickens, meat, etc. from nearby
producers because the price is lower and the quality better.
4. CONVERSION TO EMPLOYMENT INTENSIVE
PUBLIC WORKS PROGRAMMES AND INFRASTRUCTURE MAINTENANCE
During the latter 1980’s and early part of the
1990’s the Development Bank of Southern Africa successfully pressured the
former Bantustan governments into radically re-organizing many of their public
works contracts to substitute as much human labour power as was compatible with
the used of ‘intermediate technology’ plant and equipment across a broad
spectrum of different types of infrastructure construction and maintenance:
* road construction,
* dam building,
* water supply construction,
* land reclamation,
* housing site development,
* building materials fabrication,
* etc.
Contractors were required to spend major
percentages of the budgets on human labour.
The name of the new game at the demise of apartheid South Africa was to
maximize the use of human powered technologies that made it possible to
incorporate as much labour as possible into public works programmes without
them being allowed to cost more than the ‘traditional’ Euro-centric, capital-intensive
approach. One technique was to award
more labour intensive approaches a significant tender advantage, because of the
direct and indirect benefits to workers and the local and regional economies
from simply hiring more workers. The United Nations has perfected sophisticated
socio-economic assessment indicators which measure the true benefit of a proposed
project or pricing structure, including the benefits of labour-intensive civil
works projects. (REFERENCE??)
4.1 LABOUR BASED ROAD MAINTENANCE
In the former Transkei, major improvements in
the maintenance of primary roads, as well as significant cost savings, were
achieved by the old Transkei Department of Works and Energy by training small,
private, road repair contractors, and then contracting the up-keep of
particular sections of the roadway to them.
These private road repair and maintenance teams were paid for work
completed. Work crews would often be
seen working late into the evenings and on weekends, or whenever it suited
them. Some of the members of these road
repair enterprises also are part time farmers as well. It would appear that small private contracts
and task based remuneration for work
completed up to an acceptable standard, gets far more value for money out of
small private contractors than is the case with big construction companies or
the government departments who used unionized workers.
4.2 ROAD KEEPERS
The following exercise will be helpful in
grasping the employment generating potential of labour based infrastructure
maintenance. Let us assume that the
Eastern Province has 30 000 kms of secondary and tertiary roads and that on
average a "road keeper" can reasonably maintain a one (1) km stretch
of gravel or sibunga road surface, margins and storm water run-off drains as
his or her full time job.
If the entire network of secondary and tertiary
roads was contracted out to road keepers who live nearby and therefore can walk
to work, then some 30 000 mainly rural residents of the Province could be
permanently employed to do this work.
Except when special tasks are being performed, such as replacing a
washed-out drift over a stream, the road keeper will only require hand tools
such as a pick, spade, tamper, rake, watering can and a wheel barrow. The cost of these hand tools would be no more
than R1000 for each road keeper, or R30 000,000 in capital cost for 30 000
employment opportunities. The road keepers
can be paid on site every one or two months by a supervisor who checks the
status of the road surface and storm water drains. If the roadway is not up to standard, then a
part of the payment can be withheld until the roadway is done properly. Alternatively, payment can be authorized by a
local public works committee which represents the interests of the households
served by the road, based on their assessment of the quality of the work
performed.
This same system of small private contractors
can be used for to service the following public work programmes and
technologies:
* windmills,
* hand pumps,
* village water supply systems,
* dams,
* donga barriers and
* soil conservation works,
* woodlot upkeep and management,
* etc.
4.3 PROJECT MINDERS
Rural water system "tenders" or
"minders" can be given a cluster of public water supply systems to
look after. Ultimately, all of these
privately contracted minders of public owned infrastructure should become de facto contract employees who work for
and report back to units of local, area, and or regional self-governance. The
’water system minders’ would be directly accountable to the local ‘tax payers’
who depend upon the maintenance of ‘their’ infrastructure for a continuous
supply of potable water. Until competent, honest, and democratically
accountable institutions of local and area governance are in full operation in
the rural and peri-rural and peri-urban areas of the Easten Province, the
central, provincial and municipal governments can do their best to decentralize
operations by systematically contracting maintenance work back to resident
keepers, minders, and small contractors.
These minders of local infrastructure are accountable to their government
supervisors and to their neighbours for doing the work that they are being paid
to do.
Another example: minor school maintenance can be
handled by local school boards who can draw upon an annual school maintenance
fund to contract the following basic repairs and maintenance tasks to locally
resident service providers:
·
plastering,
·
painting,
·
window
glass replacement,
·
gutter,
down spout and
·
water tank
repair,
·
school
furniture repair,
·
fencing,
·
etc.
The annual savings to the tax payers of the
Province and the country that would result from repairing school furniture on site
will come to many millions of Rands every year.
Additional millions will be saved by the timely painting and repair of
school buildings, rather than allowing them to deteriorate past the point where
they can be no longer be inexpensively restored to full functionality.
It is estimated that the contracting of
maintenance tasks back to competent, trained and accountable resident members
of rural communities in the Eastern Province will create permanent employment
for a minimum of 100 000 rural and peri-urban
dwellers. Such a work force would amount
to some 40 members formed into +/- 2500 local public works maintenance teams
each of which is accountable to an area based community development (ABCD) unit
of local self governance. It would
require some 40 members x 2500 ABCD units or 100 000 Rural Public Service Workers
to adequately maintain all the public infrastructure within an Area Based
Community Development unit of local self government. If these Rural Public Service Workers were
paid R1000 a month or R12 000 annually, then the Eastern Province would need to
find approximately R1 200 000 000 within the budgets of the three levels of
government.
Continuing the previous ‘thought experiment’,
each of these ABCD units of local self governance would have +/- 400 households
or about 2 000 members. About 40% of these 400 households or 160 households
would have one member working - at an annual income of between R12 000 to R18
000. At a cost to the Province of R1.2
billion it would be possible to employ an additional 40 rural public service
workers in each of the ABCD units where on average +/- 160 of its members are
already involved in some kind of paid employment. These additional 40 public
service jobs would bring the average employment in these ABCD units from 40% (160
workers) to 50% (200 workers). Major
savings will be realized by the three tiers of government because of reduced
logistical costs when maintenance work is contracted back to private
contractors who reside close to their places of work; additional savings will
be realized due to higher rates of productivity by rural public service workers
who are now directly accountable to their neighbours and community members,
rather than indirectly accountable to third party government officials in the
centers of provincial and local government. The community inevitably will
become involved in supervising the quality of the work performed by ‘their’
local public service employees.
5. AREA BASED COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT (ABCD)
APPROACHES AND BLOCK GRANTS
The War on Poverty in the USA during the l960's
and 1970's gave a preliminary demonstration, in a highly industrialized urban
oriented country, of how supplemental benefits that can be effectively
delivered to structurally disadvantaged strata of society. The War on Poverty also experimented
extensively with the use of block grants to under-developed regions that
enabled the leadership of ‘backward’ (neglected) areas, through democratic
consultation with their constituents, to assume full responsibility for
deciding how to spend the limited public funds at their disposal. For example, the Economic Development
Administration (EDA) within the Dept of Commerce granted federal funds to very
depressed and backward regions which could then be joined with local tax
revenues and used to draw down, on the basis of different matching formulae,
additional monies for infrastructure funding programmes that made use of other
funds provided by the federal government of the USA to upgrade the standards of
schools, roads, water supply, sewers, industrial parks, training programmes,
business start up assistance, and so on.
5.1 LOCAL CONTROL
The genius of the block funding approach is the
way it returns the primary responsibility for deciding how best to spend
limited development capital back to the local community and their political
leaders. The block grant approach keeps
the end users' feet planted in economic reality because they must locally
generate and then pay a certain percentage of the front end capital in order to
draw down larger amounts of block grant funds from the federal government. This local match requirement means that enough
local and regional tax flows must be generated to be at least sufficient to
maintain any capital improvements that get financed with block grant funds
provided by the central government, both in the USA and here in SA by the
National and Provincial Governments.
5.2 BOTSWANA
In Botswana, there is an on-going 40 year
experiment with the devolution of control over a significant part of the
national governments annual budget which is set aside to be programmed in
detail by the District Development Authorities.
The DDAs were granted considerable freedom to establish their own
priorities, standards, and methods of implementation. The DDAs of the 1980's had appointed
traditional members such as chiefs, non-voting government officials, and
elected members.
If the GovEP decided to allocate block grants to
geographically discrete development areas in the Eastern Cape, a series of
difficult decisions would have to be unambiguously made at the outset
concerning what area based institution would be most competent to represent the
peoples’ interests. There are at least
four possible channels through which it would be possible to plan and manage
the expenditure of block grants in the EasternCape:
(i.)
existing regional and sub-regional
institutions,
(ii.)
traditional area based institutions,
(iii.)
a new combination of both the western
and traditional systems, or
(iv.)
a new system of area-based local
government under the authority of
representatives directly
elected by the people.
The decision about which of the four possible
institutions channels would be the best equipped to plan, manage and protect
the expenditure of such funds in a transparent and accountable way is a highly
sensitive political matter which the people and leaders in the Eastern Province
will have to settle among themselves.
Perhaps the best way forward would be to experiment with several
different approaches, evaluate the results, and with several years of
experience in hand make an informed decision about what system of area based
local governance to institute throughout the Province.
The idea of Area Based Community Development
(ABCD) Teams could be "piloted in"
five different local development areas scattered around the Province to
see how well they might work in practice.
A new programme - possibly sponsored by the Office of the Premier or the
Department of Economic Affairs, Environment and Tourism (DEAET) or perhaps by
the Department of Finance - could be launched to manage the implementation of
the ABCD approach if it proves worthwhile.
The optimum size of ABCD units of self government would have to be
worked out pragmatically on the ground in consultation with rural communities
and their leaders. If the optimum size
turned out to be 2000 households or 10000 members (about 5 villages) then only 500
ABCD units will be required. If the
optimum size is 1000 households and 5000 members then as many as 1000 ABCD
programmes will need to be financed by the Provincial government.
5.3 LEVERAGED FUNDS
It is interesting to note that during the mid
1960s the President of the USA used his authority to create something called
the Office of Economic Opportunity within the executive branch of government,
which in less than two years sponsored and financed the formation of some 1200
private ABCD organizations, known as Community Action Agencies. These local level anti-poverty agencies
managed to "leverage" 5 to 7 times more funds from state and federal
funding programmes than they received in the form of small annual grants
allocated to them by the OEO to keep
them in business. In addition these Community Action Agencies were able to
raise other funds from Foundations, NGO’s, Corporate Social Responsibility
Programmes and Universities. The funds used by CAA to finance their programmes
came from federal programmes, local tax revenues, foundations and even the
private sector. Reflecting on the US
experience and the economic realities of rural areas in the Eastern Province, it
may be wise for the proposed ABCD agencies to receive its revenue as follows:
·
up to 15% of
their revenue from Local and District Municipalities,
·
30% from the Provincial government,
·
30% from
the National Government, and
·
25% from donor
and/or private sector contributions.
We believe that these ABCD Teams, when they are
competently staffed and properly financed by the central and provincial governments,
will constitute the embryos of effective ‘ruralities’ or effective rural units
of local self governance to which many other important functions of local governance
can be attached. The ABCD governing
bodies, which are community based organizations in their own right, may - in
time - be absorbed into fully modern institutions of local self governance.
5.4 UNRESOLVED CONFLICT WITH MODERNISM
The main problem with the majority of failed
development programmes throughout the so-called Third World, including the
Eastern Province, is the inability of urban-based and also urban ‘biased’
governments and "experts" to gradually raise up a competent core of
indigenous leaders and technicians in the neglected and poorly understood rural
"target" communities and regions.
If development experts want to be balanced and equitable in their
approach to the vastly under-served rural sector of South African society they
will need to find the middle path between the dynamic "modern"
sectors of government, Euro-settlers, and western donors, on the one side,
while at the same time engaging honestly with conservative minded traditional
leaders and the rural ‘masses’ on the other.
Most failed development programmes are victims of the unresolved
conflicts between the western-oriented "modern" sectors and interest
groups and past-oriented traditionalists and Afro-centric interest groups. The proposed ABCD approach has the potential
to bridge and permanently reconcile many of the conflicts between extreme
modernism and extreme traditionalism. It
does this by creating conditions that are favourable for the modernization of
Xhosa traditions on its own terms, within the context of a progressive and self-secure
rural enclave society.
If modest start up and sustaining grants of R400
000 are eventually given to +/- 500 ABCD units the ultimate roll out of 800
Planning and Administration units for each of the 800 ABCD programmes will cost
about R200 000 000. The annually
renewable sustaining grant will be spent to hire a director, planner, fiscal
controller, secretary, several community organizers, a driver, and several
other technical support staff. It will
pay for the training of this ABCD team and also cover their minimal operating
costs for 12 months. If it proves possible to leverage 8 times the sustaining
grants for the ABCD programmes, that will generate the additional R1.6 billion
to pay for the proposed 100 000 public service employment opportunities for the
purpose of maintaining, improving and expanding public infrastructure in rural
communities and areas.
6. LOW COST SELF-HELP HOUSING AND NEW
SELF-RELIANT COMMUNITIES
The main problem with housing for low income
residents of the Province in the urban areas and regional towns can be likened
to the futile effort to stop the donga at the bottom of the mountain. As soon as one family is assisted with site
and service and a financed formal house, here come two or three more families,
refugees from a stagnant rural economy who set themselves up as workless
squatters on the margins of the urban centers.
Further, the tendency all over Southern Africa is to construct de facto dormitory suburbs (called
townships or locations) for poor people without little or no economic
foundation, very little or no allocation of space for the many other functions
needed by a community to become dynamic and self reliant, and with absolutely
no provision from the outset for a workable system of neighbourhood and
community self-governance.
In sharp contrast to the prevailing township
patterns in the region, the FEED Strategy strongly suggests that all new
housing complexes for low income citizens should henceforth be constructed as
integral parts of "nucleated, bounded, differentiated, and inwardly facing
small communities". Such self
reliant new communities will be designed from the beginning to internally
provide not less than 30% of the employment needed by the resident households
in agriculture, light and small industry, housing construction, commerce, public service (schools, local
government, public service employment, woodlots), and so on.
6.1 LAND USE PLANNING
One consequence of building economically
self-reliant and self-governing little communities, rather than building
dormitory townships that are totally dependent on remote urban industrial
centers or even nearby small towns will be the rapid relocation of unemployed
rural, per-urban and urban residents into such promising new settlements. Therefore, the land use planners who advise
the GovEP and Municipalities must be directly challenged to create a network of
rationally distributed self-reliant New Communities that will redirect and
absorb the growing "surplus" population from the first world towns
and cities as well as the more traditional rural areas. It is vitally important that these new
Communities be provided with enough of a land base to allow them to develop
their own dynamic internal economies.
These self-reliant land-based New Communities should be laid out
and built as a series of ‘pie slice’ shaped sub-communities which are
constructed one ‘slice’ at a time so that when all the sub-communities are
completed they will constitute a a fully functional and integrated whole little
New Community. In contrast to most other
townships in the region, each of the parts of the proposed New Community should
be designed so that adequate space is allocated for all the necessary
functional elements of a whole and healthy community:
·
a range of
different types of housing,
·
light
industry, commerce,
·
schools,
·
neighbourhood
centers,
·
recreation,
·
the
essential organs of community governance,
·
gardens,
·
urban
agriculture,
·
woodlots
for energy and building materials, and
·
wilderness
corridors through which humans and nature interact
If each pie shaped slice of the community
contains all of the above functional spaces and elements within itself, it
becomes a complete little community in its own right, even if the other pie
shaped components of the larger community never get built.
Each sub-community would be smaller,
approximately one fifth or sixths of the completed community, and a
"holographic replica" of the entire New Community. A New Community would be constructed one sub-community at a
time, including the formation of its own internal institutions of
self-governance. One sub-community,
perhaps 1/4th of the whole community, would consist of about 250
households and a completed New Community would accommodate about 1000
households, between 5000 and 6000 residents.
The governing bodies of the sub-communities would naturally all join
together to form the governing council of a completed New Community..
Each 25% of this proposed New Community would
typically occupy about 100 hectares. The
completed New Community, combining four quadrant sub-communities into a
circular community pattern, would cover +/- 400 hectares.
The breakdown of the different land uses for one
of the sub-community quadrants of 100 hectares is illustrated below:
Number of units Number
of hectares
(families accommodated)
30 small
farming households (1 to 2 hectares) 45
hectares
70 garden
households (1000 sq m/.1 hectares)
7
100 cluster
houses (300 to 500 sq m/.03 to .05 hectares)
4
50 townhouses
(200 sq m/.02 hectares
1
250 57 57
25 small
industry sites (.2 hectares)
5
10 commercial
sites (.2 hectares)
2
recreational/sports/park sites
3
schools/public buildings 3
13 13
streets/paths/parking 10
windbreaks/woodlots/nature 10
20 20
Other land uses 10
Total land base for quadrant (25%)
sub-community: 100
Total land base for a complete New Community
(l00 hectares x 4): 400
The radically lower costs connected with
developing sites and services schemes in semi-rural and rural area where New
Communities would be typically constructed is due to the much lower population
densities and consequently the radically lower per capita land cost. These lower land costs when combined with more
appropriate technologies make it possible to create the necessary
infrastructure and services in rural areas for a fraction of the costs in more
densely settled and therefore more expensive land.
The cost per household for the development of
the sites and services for the proposed 1000 household New Community should not
exceed R10 000 per household. The
streets, storm sewers, water supply, and sewage disposal are built to standards
that are appropriate to semi-rural conditions.
Because there is enough land to recycle all storm runoff and waste
products within the land base of the community it is possible to substitute
lower standard and therefore cost saving alternative technologies.
It also needs to be remembered that a minimum of
300 full time employment and self-employment opportunities (or 30% of 1000
households) inside the community must be catered for and spatially accommodated
in the complete New Community:
·
120
self-employed small farmers,
·
l00
small-scale producers,
·
50 small
shop or store owners and/or commercial sector employees, and
·
50 public
service employees (a minimum of 75 internal employment opportunities in each
quadrant of the New Community).
It is strongly recommended by the authors that
the GovEP and Municipal land use planning authorities take steps to identify
enough land throughout the Province to accommodate the growing rural,
peri-urban, and urban populations of the Province in a series of
environmentally appropriate and largely self-reliant New Communities.
It is further recommended that the majority of
these New Communities should be situated in the "peri-rural" zone -
outside the ragged peri-urban sprawls now surrounding the built up cities and
towns. The New Communities should be
placed away from the major roads, thereby avoiding endless and dangerous strip
development along the highways, while still enabling residents to benefit from
existing mass transportation to connect with nearby urban and town markets and
services. By intelligent positioning of
New Communities, the GovEP should be able to fairly painlessly redistribute
population away from the already congested hyper-urbanized centers and zones
where there are too many people, too much unemployment, and where the
development costs are relatively much higher. The rationale here is to
gradually relocate this surplus population of often poor, under-educated, and
unemployed people by attracting them to voluntarily relocate to areas that are
less densely occupied. The lower the
density of humans occupying each square km of land, the lower the cost to
secure the land required to develop a thriving New Community that in the future
will hopefully internally and locally generate up to 60% of its employment.
These New Communities must not become dumping
grounds for surplus people. They should
be located on a land and resource base that is advantageous for raising
self-reliant communities that have a realistic chance to achieve near full
employment by combining internal and external employment opportunities. It is certain that the proposed New
Communities, if properly developed, will act as magnets that draw unemployed
people and families positively together on the land in ways that serve the best
interests of the government, the people, the business community and the natural
environment.
6.2 ECONOMIC REALISM
It is estimated the proposed New Communities
Programme with its sites, services, houses and expanded internal employment
opportunities will on average require as little as one-quarter (1/4th)
to one-sixth (1/6th) of the capital investment normally required to
construct a built an urban settlement and infrastructure up to an
Euro-American, middle class standard in one of the metropolises of the Eastern
Province. Thus, the proposed New
Communities in rural areas would create 4 to 6 times more housing,
infrastructure and also much more permanent internal employment than would be
created by investing the same scarce resources on expanding a conventional Euro-settler
version of a middle class urban/suburban community. By using a holistic, self help, appropriate
technology approach to the design and construction of affordable housing and
communities, combined with economic realism and a little common sense, is will
be possible for the New Communities approach to deliver four to six times more
wealth and well-being and uplift many more "have-nots" and
"have-a-little" families out of the trap of rural poverty.
6.3 APPROPRIATE STANDARDS
To multiply the investment in the New
Communities it is, however, necessary to relax many of the irrelevant and/or
obsolete parts of the national building standards and to adopt a new, more
appropriate set of building and community standards. It is worth noting at this juncture, that
during the years when a particular New Community is incrementally growing up,
there will be hundreds of full and part time jobs in the site fabrication of
building materials and the labour intensive construction of houses, schools,
stores, factory sites, storm sewers, water supply, household sewage systems,
etc. The building and community
standards adopted in the Eastern Province must do nothing to diminish the right
of a person and the members of his or her family to convert their self help
labour into income and/or shelter, provided they do not harm the
community. The whole point of building
standards that empower owner builders is to ensure that the final house or
building is safe, sanitary, and decent and offers lasting value for the money
invested by an owner in his or her house.
In conclusion to this section, the authors want
to focus attention on one approach to community building that has worked very
well for middle and upper income housing estates all over the world. We can see no reason why it will not strengthen
the implementation of the New Communities Programme in the Eastern Province for
lower income families. The approach is
to privatize the entire process of community building. There is no reason why a private developer
can not be given a contract to manage all aspect of the community design,
layout, construction of services, sale of sites, construction of public
buildings, landscaping, establishment of parks and community centers, etc. until
the entire community is developed and transformed by degrees into a
self-managing municipality. Such a New
Community may decide to remain a private trust that is owned sectionally by all
of the paid up members of a particular New Community Corporation, and would
include the land, the homes and businesses.
It can just as well be realized by a dozen other mechanisms, provided
the goal of designing, financing, implementing, owning, operating, and
maintaining a viable New Community is achieved.
If the GovEP approved of the concept of the New
Communities Programme, it could encourage the formation of a start-up task
force consisting of selected government officials from relevant departments,
community leaders, professionals in the housing and community building fields,
and private sector innovators and leaders.
It would be the responsibility of this initial task force to put
together a realistic, affordable and politically saleable plan of action. The GovEP and the elected representatives of
the Province would need to dispassionately, as well as passionately, consider
the proposed options and make a major political decision about what is to be
done and who is to do it, thereby setting the New Communities Programme in
motion.
It is estimate that the Eastern Province can
initiate at least 10 New Communities every year accommodating 1000 families x 5
members per family = +/- 5000 residents x 10 New Communities = 50 000
inhabitants a year for the next l0 years, the NC Programme has the potential of absorbing up to 100 000
households and a total of 500 000 residents.over a period of 10 years.
If the
cost for constructing site and services for each New Community of 1000 families
comes to +/- R1 000 000, the Programme will need about R10 million a year to
provide sites and services for 10 000 households. By giving the New Communities Programme the
political go-ahead and supplying the budget it requires, the GovEP will be
giving opportunities to some 100 000 aspiring home owners to relocate
themselves and become members of stable, productive, well situated and
self-governing, and ultimately self-funding New Communities. If each of the New Communities delivers on its
promise to generate a minimum of 300 new jobs then at least 3 000 new
employment opportunities a year for the next 10 years will be created then in
due course some 30 000 new jobs will be created in the peri-rural zone of
opportunity in 100 New Communities. It
needs to be remembered that these 100 New Communities at will be advantageously
distributed around the Province where they will become stabilizing magnets that
absorb dangerously rootless families and individuals in the twilight zone
between the conservative villages and chaotic and confused townships.
7. FOOD FIRST: INNOVATIVE PROGRAMMES
LEADING TOWARD FOOD SUFFICIENCY FOR THE EASTERN PROVINCE
7.1 SMALL SCALE AGRO-ENTERPRISE SCHEMES
The World Bank recently proposed an Agricultural
Development Strategy for South Africa that called for retaining at least 40% of
the population in land based economic activities and living. By inference, the World Bank would no doubt
recommend that the Eastern Province also aim to stabilize between 50% to 60% of
its population in land-based activities and residence. The New Communities Programme outlined in
Section 6 would accommodate up to 100 000 families in 100
"peri-rural" communities in a zone between 10 to 20 km outside of
existing cities and towns in the Province.
In addition, the FEED Strategy calls for the systematic creation of an
additional 100,000 small scale agro-enterprise based homesteads, each with
their own appropriate, low cost water supply and irrigation system, and
averaging slightly more than 3.5 hectares in size.
The agro-enterprise homestead consists of the
following elements:
·
a self help
family residence,
·
a
subsistence food production system to feed the family,
·
fuel wood,
pole and fodder tree windbreaks,
·
a developed
water supply and storage system (pumped from a river or stream or a rain
harvester dam),
·
low
tech/low volume irrigation of year-round fields, and
·
one or more
small cash cropping and/or livestock enterprises such as: tree and bramble
fruits, cattle and milk, broilers/eggs, pigs, goats, fish, rabbits, bees,
vegetables, specialty crops, flowers, natural insecticides, etc.
7.2 AGRO-ENTERPRISE
Research from the RSA on small scale cash
farming ventures and elsewhere in the developing world has indicated that the
demands of a farmer's family, from the domestic economy of the farmer’s own
household, gradually eat up so much of the farm’s operating capital that it
becomes insolvent. Therefore, to remain viable all small farmers have to
protect the integrity of his/her operating capital and also to maintain the
buildings, storage facilities, water sources and irrigation equipment, tractors
and the equipment needed to plough, plant, till, harvest and process crops,
livestock, fencing, and transport to and from the market. The asset base of all
small farmers will remain vulnerable so long as the basic needs of the farmer’s
family are not being adequately met by the subsistence production and the cash
income generated by the homestead farming system and remittances from urban
migrants. When most or all of these basic needs are being met by the homestead agro-enterprise
system it should then be possible to build the cash farming enterprise on top
of a now stable domestic (household) economy.
The ability of an agro-enterprise homestead to
meet most or all of the family's needs for food, water, energy, building
materials, and space, if paid for in the modern sector economy would be worth
about R2000 per family member a year or up to R10 000 per year for a family of
five members. The subsistence part of the homestead system should aim at
delivering about R750 to R1000 a month worth of benefits to the family. The cash farming or agro-enterprise component
of the homestead system only has to generate enough output to pay for those
goods and services which the family must purchase from the external regional/national
economy outside of the homestead and informal local economy, something on the
order of R750 to R1000 a month, or R9000 to R12 000 a year, for a family of 5
or 6 members.
Two different kinds of agro-enterprise
homesteads are envisaged. First, there
would be a 3 hectare "river side" unit requiring 200 meters of
farmable river bank or bluff and extending 250 meters away from the river. Where it is impossible to gravitate, ram pump
or otherwise use the river's flow (energy) to lift water out of the river bed,
there will be a diesel or petrol powered irrigation pump on each
mini-farm. The farm will be fenced and
have a tiny "starter house".
It will have a basic water storage and household water supply
system. A 1 km run of cultivatable river
bank will allow for 10 river side agro-enterprise homesteads (5 on each side of
the river x 2 = 10 agro-enterprises).
Let us assume there are 7 000 kms of perennial streams with farmable
banks be sufficient to give +/- 50 000 acceptable Riverside Irrigated
Mini-Farms in the Eastern Province.
It is assumed that each cash farming homestead
will cost +/- R30,000 to establish and that it will house, feed and support 8
residents. Two full time self-employment
small farming opportunities will be created on each of these irrigated
Riverside mini-farming units. Thus, the
expenditure of R1.5 billion (50,000 river side agro-enterprise homesteads x R30,000)
will stabilize 400 000 people on the land and create +/- 100 000 small farming
opportunities (the primary farmer and several part-time helpers).
The second agro-enterprise homestead is
organized around one or more rainwater fed dams with a storage capacity of
about 25,000 cubic meters of water.
These farm units will average about 4 hectares and typically be located
in undulating land with suitable sites for 1 hectare dams. The house and fields will be below the dam so
that gravity feed irrigation and home water supply can be used.
The FEED Strategy calls for the eventual
construction of 100 000 of these rain harvester farming units. It is assumed that the cost will be roughly
the same as the riverside farming units, or approximately R30,000. Thus, another 800,000 rural residents will
eventually be stabilized on Rain Water Irrigation Homesteads that make use of rain
water harvesting dams at an estimated cost of R3 billion. If two full time self-employed farming
opportunities are created on each of these agro-enterprises, then an additional
200 000 rural residents will become gainfully employed as cash farmers.
7.3 7½% OF THE LAND
Combining the riverside and rain harvesting
agro-enterprise units, we get 150 000 new cash farming units where some 1 200
000 residents of the Eastern Province (+/- 6% of the population) will reside
and some 300 000 rural dwellers will earn a basic income from the sale of
surplus production and livestock into the larger regional economy. A total of 550,000 hectares of farmable land
will be required to completely implement the agro-enterprise homesteading
scheme - about 30% of the arable land in the Province which is roughly
estimated at 1.2 to 1.5 million hectares); if more problematic (degraded) maize
land and eroded grazing land are added the total arable land base can be
increased to approximately 2.5million hectares.
The riverside and rainwater harvesting farming units would monopolize
+/- 20% of this easy to farm land slightly more that 3% of the total surface
area of the Province. It needs to be
emphasized that innovative permaculture and other labour-intensive farming
techniques can be used, whereby marginal land with steep slopes and irregular
terrain - unsuitable for mechanized or even ox drawn agriculture - to be fully
utilized for certain kinds of tree crops and high yield cash crops. .
7.4 HOMESTEAD TRUST
The implementation of such a vast programme will
require the formation of a strong, independent, accountable, highly
professional management institution, perhaps a new kind of Development Trust. The ownership of the land should probably not
be granted outright to the participating families. It is a small business enterprise. Over a 30
year period, the new homesteading families will have to repay most or all of
the original cost at a nominal interest rate of +/- 5% over 30 years. Such an easy repayment schedule would
necessitate a monthly repayment of about R150 a month (R1800 a year). If the family does not seriously work the
land or abuses it, then it must be possible to remove them by repaying them
what they have paid down on the original investment of R30,000. Ultimately the land holding institution that
is formed to "own" and oversee the New Agro-Enterprise Homesteading
Programme should become a political and economic development organization, like
the Kibbutz Industries Association in Israel, that is democratically managed by
all the fully paid-up members of the Agro-Enterprise Homesteading Trust.
7.5 SMALL DAM CONSTRUCTION
The rain harvester dams can either be
constructed by small bulldozer, a D5 or D6, at a rate of one dam with a storage
capacity of 250 cubic liters of water (250 000 litres) completed every week or
+/- 100 dams a year at a cost of R5,000 per dam (or R500,000 a year). Over 10
years, a dozer could construct some 1000 dams.
The construction of 100 000 dams would require the services of +/-100
bulldozers working 8 hours a day for 10 years.
However, it is also possible for the same work
to be done by human labourers using hand tools.
A typical rain harvester dam might require 250 cubic metres of soil and
subsoil to be dug, moved and compacted.
If a worker can dig, move and compact 2 cubic metres a day on average,
then it would take 120 worker-days to construct such a dam. If the workers are paid R50 per day then the
human powered construction would run about R6, 000, or about 20% more than the
cost of using heavy equipment to do the same job.
The GovEP, its donors and investors may well
decide that the benefits of hiring enough teams of 20 workers to hand dig these
dams in place of bull dozers outweigh the extra cost of 20% per dam to the Treasury.
It would take a team of 20 hard working, well motivated and closely supervised
workers about 6 days to complete an earth dam with the capacity to store 250
cubs of water and construct a system of rain water harvesting furrows. The task
of constructing these rainwater storage reservoirs and catchment furrows could
be contracted out on a task work basis. If new technologies or better methods were
used, or a combination of manual and lower-cost machinery were employed, and
the removal/fill rate could be raised to 4 cubic metres per worker-day, the
cost of the labour based method of construction may become competitive with the
mechanized approach.
7.6 GET THE RIGHT CULTIVARS
Work done in the 1980’s by agricultural
researchers at the University of Natal, School of Agriculture, have
scientifically demonstrated that the highest return on input investment, where
the aim is to improve the productivity of subsistence farming in KwaZulu, is to
get the correct cultivar into the hands of the small farmers. This is a very important finding and goes
contrary to the conventional wisdom that mechanization is the primary source of
progress. When the optimum bean
cultivars are used, production can increase as much as four fold with no other
change in farm inputs or procedures. It
is therefore strongly recommended that the GovEP and its aid donors find a way
to identify the most promising cultivars for use in the different bio-climatic
regions of the Province, and find ways to disseminate these seeds throughout
the Province.
Preference should be given to open pollinated
varieties which can be saved and replanted year after year at no additional
cost to the small farmer. Many different
systems for disseminating these seeds can be used once the optimum cultivars
are known and become widely available in the Province.
7.7 IMPROVED GRAZING, AGRO-FORESTRY, AND
CATTLE BANKS
Much of the grazing land in the Eastern Province
is degraded as a result of over grazing, over burning and human (anthropogenic)
de-vegetation. The country suffers from
the well known "death of the commons" syndrome because there are no
significant immediate costs to cattle owners who can get away with collectively
"ripping off" the communal grazing resources by pushing more and more
livestock units onto it. The cattle
owners get some small additional benefits by upping the number of livestock and
the land gets a little more destroyed each year. A visit to many overgrazed area in the former
Transkei shows the extraordinary phenomenon of weed-tree encroachment on land
that is chronically over-grazed. In this
case, the tree cover is actually increasing, but with useless, unpalatable
varieties. When a fence separates a degraded
area from a well managed one it is possible to observe a striking contrast between
good and bad pasture management.
7.8 PERMACULTURE GRAZING
At the present time there is absolutely no
feedback mechanism which makes each cattle owner pay his fair share of the long
term costs to the country and to nature from the gradual degradation of the
communal grazing resource. People
without cattle or goats gain nothing from this pseudo commonage. The FEED Strategy proposes a more systematic
approach needs to be taken by the GovEP and relevant District and Local Municipal
politicians and officials. After
consultation between the cattle owners and
appropriate agents of local government, it is necessary to identify all badly
over-grazed and/or eroded areas, and temporarily removes them from regular
use. These excised grazing areas should
then be profoundly upgraded by planting an appropriate mix of forage trees,
shrubs, and ground plants on land which have been ‘terraformed’ by the digging "swales" on contour to
capture and infiltrate as much rainfall as possible.
The resulting "permaculture" grazing
camps will belong to an association of local stock owners who will have to
learn how to cooperatively manage this important shared resource. One proposal we have heard holds that the
residents of the whole community should receive a household income derived from
grazing fees, so that the communal resource provides benefits to everyone
without the share holder needing to own cattle, sheep or goats.
These newly upgraded permaculture grazing camps
should be kept in reserve for periods of acute drought when the rest of the
"free" veld becomes critically over-grazed and the livestock lose
condition. All the stock farmers with
grazing rights will be permitted to graze their livestock inside the
permaculture camps, up to the number of livestock units officially allocated to
each stock farmer. Any surplus stock
will have to be registered, if the area association of stock holders has any
unclaimed stock units, or sold off. Over
time, the controlled areas where the veld's carrying capacity has been greatly
enhanced will be expanded to the point that all grazing land is inside tightly
controlled permaculture enhanced grazing camps and all the livestock units
within the area controlled by a particular stock owners association will be
registered.
7.9 CATTLE BANKS
Years ago an imaginative and wise economic
planner by the name of Ralph Clark, while working on Swaziland's first five
year plan, proposed the formation of a Cattle Bank to absorb the surplus stock
units in a systematic way. The
government would maintain a series of stock yards where all cattle, sheep and
goats in excess of the stock permits held by a particular farmer could be sold
and exchanged for a cattle ownership certificate. A man's herd might consist of 10 beasts on
the hoof and 10 certificated beasts "held" by the Cattle Bank. The idea was for the government to fatten and
sell the beasts ‘deposited’ in its Cattle Bank. The condition of cattle
retained in the Cattle Bank and rate of stock off-take from the Provincial herd
would increase dramatically, thereby providing more income for cattle
owners. If the Cattle Bank venture is
professionally managed, there is no reason why it will not earn profit on an
efficiently run cattle feeder and marketing enterprise for the GovEP as
well.
When an owner wants cattle for lobola or for a
ceremony, he could redeem his cattle certificates at the nearest Cattle Bank
holding yard. The stock farmer would
also be able to use his official cattle certificates as collateral for business
loans, housing mortgages, vehicle or tractor loans, etc. The certificates can also be converted into
cash upon their surrender to the Cattle Bank.
This Cattle Bank notion has much to recommend
it. To be implemented, it requires, like
any bank, honest and competent managers who are dedicated to the mission of the
proposed Cattle Bank. They must be given
enough authority, political support, and professional detachment to ensure the
honesty of all the employees involved with the Cattle Bank. The value of the cattle in the Cattle Bank
will grow in value rapidly enough to stay up with the rate of inflation because
most of the cattle in the Bank will be kept in the form of money invested in
secure mutual and provident funds, money markets, bonds and stocks. The wise farmer's cattle certificate will
increase in value according to the way these various funds perform in the
national and regional economy. Once a
stock farmer's surplus stock units are converted into cattle certificates, in
effect shares in the Cattle Bank, they will not die or be stolen, and at any
time the certificates can be converted back into live cattle or cash.
7.10 SMALL SCALE FOOD PROCESSING
There is no excuse for the Eastern Cape not to
be completely self-sufficient in such processed commodities as cooking oil,
peanut butter, milk and cheese products, grains and grain products, dried
fruits and vegetables, etc. New Dawn
Engineering (NDE), a Swazi company specializing in well designed, robust,
modestly priced, human powered ‘appropriate’ technologies, has developed a wide
range user tested food processing machines.
For example, NDE produces several different sizes of oil presses that
‘cold presses’ sunflower seeds directly into pure cooking oil. One hectare of sunflowers will produce 1.5
tons of seeds which in turn will give up to 750 litres of cooking oil and
another 750 kgs of seed cake (R2.00 per kgs) which has value as a component in
all animal feeds. A litre of cooking oil
is worth about R12 so a hectare of sunflowers will gross up to R10 500 from the oil and seed cake produced from a
well cared for hectare of sunflowers.
The oil yield of one hectare is enough to meet the cooking oil requirements
of +/- 20 families for a continuous supply of 750 ml week from the
neighbourhood or ‘walk-in’ economy.
As mentioned above, the "waste" seed
cake falling out of the press is a valuable and nutritious feed supplement for
poultry and livestock (especially dairy cattle) and can be converted into eggs
and meat or sold for about R2 a kg which gives another income of +/- R1500 from
a hectare of sunflowers.
The GovEP needs to identify other crops that
grow well in the different bio-climatic regions of the Province which - like
the sunflower seed - can be easily processed with simple hand powered
technologies into much higher value food commodities such as:
·
peanut
butter,
·
brown
sugar,
·
dehydrated
vegetables and soups,
·
fruit jams,
·
organic
fertilizers,
·
green
pesticides, etc.
The GovEP has an obligation to exploit this
opportunity in a systematic way be providing small amounts of money to pay for the
assessment, field testing, and further development of additional food
processing technologies and systems from around the world to identify and then
transfer into the Eastern Cape those technologies that show the most promise
for each of the different bio-climatic environments of the Eastern Cape. This activity could be handled by a
revitalized, well funded and completely autonomous Eastern Cape AT Unit, or by
one or more specialized Appropriate Technology Design and Development
Programmes linked to the Universities and GET Colleges in the Province.
In section 10 of this document, a number of
specific proposals are made about how to reorganize the applied research and
development activities of the Universities, FET Colleges and Agricultural
R&D Institutes to better support the major initiatives called for by the
FEED Strategy.
8. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION, RESTORATION
AND QUALITY
8.1 THE PROBLEM AND THE SOLUTION
Unless dramatic steps are soon taken to
preserve, upgrade and skilfully expand the limited land and biomass resources
of the Eastern Cape, then within another 20 years the Province will be so
degraded and ugly that no one in his or her right mind would want to visit a
place that looks like the eroded surface of the moon. Such a run down and degraded environment
completely looses its appeal to tourists and also to anyone looking for an
agreeable place to establish a major new enterprise.
Why is that scenario highly probable? It is likely because of the uncontrolled
peri-urban creep of squatter and informal settlements along all the major
highways in the Province.
To confront this problem before it gets
completely out of hand, the FEED Strategy proposes that the entire Province be
re-landscaped for long term environmental and socio-economic sustainability,
starting with the densely settled cities, towns, and congested ribbon
development along all the major highways.
The quality of the environment in the UK and the
USA is today being vastly enhanced through the creation of nature trails and internal
and external green belts linking inner city parks with natural areas and
corridors radiating in all directions into the surrounding countryside. It is possible to walk along old foot paths
across much of England. Abandoned
railway lines are being converted into bike paths in many municipal areas in
the USA so that it is possible for those who choose to commute by bike,
jogging, or walking to go part or all of the way to their place of work in the
Central Business District. It is
necessary for the Eastern Cape to skilfully map out and preserve nature
corridors or buffers along all of its major roadways.
8.2 NATIONAL GREENING STRATEGY
A national Greening Plan for the Eastern
Province needs to lay out a comprehensive network of biking and hiking trails,
nature corridors, a system of rural and urban parks with sports and
recreational facilities, nature barriers along highways, buffers between
different land use areas (e.g., to separate industrial areas from surrounding
residential areas), peri-urban and peri-rural woodlots, grazing and
agricultural zones, etc. To have a
chance to be enacted and enforced, the Provincial Greening Strategy needs to be
rapidly put into operation before the land around the urban centers and along
major highways is so densely settled that it becomes prohibitively expensive
and politically suicidal to change present land use patterns.
It needs to be remembered that in Europe it was
the lands and parks of the royalty that protected nature and which were
available in later, during the era of democracy for conversion into people's
parks. There is virtually no public park
space in Mdantsane nor any of the big townships around Mthatha, Port Elizabeth,
Queenstown, Grahamstown, King William’s Town, and the other regionally
important urban trading centers.
In the USA, the federal and state governments,
together with the institutions of private property, have preserved large tracts
of land that remain available for conversion to public use as nature preserves,
parks, corridors, air cleansers, and so on.
The Eastern Cape must rapidly evolve its own public and private institutions
for preserving, enlarging and maintaining green belts and nature networks in
both the urban and rural areas, otherwise the countryside will soon degenerate
into a state of chaotic congestion and peri-urban sprawl that will rival the
squalor of such hopelessly degraded
conurbations as Calcutta and Lagos. The
future of our children and grandchildren 20 years hence is being irrevocably
shaped by our present actions and inactions, by what we do and do not do right
now.
The government, the private sector, and the NGOs
need to join hands to form a nature protection and conservation movement and
one or more private-public agencies that can build up a systematic network of
buffers, green belts, parks, paths, reserves, woodlots, etc. across the length
and breadth of the Province. Let us name
it the Eastern Cape Green Trust. The
Green Trust will be charged with planning and implementing the conserving of
nature at the provincial, regional and area levels of action. Interested and well-heeled environmental
organizations from the North can be invited to join with the Green Trust in
funding particularly critical and expensive components of the Provincial greening
strategy. The Provincial greening
strategy should be drawn up so that every level of society in the Province has
its own environmental duties to perform in perpetuity. The challenge for the Green Trust is to
convert the greening process into jobs and long term development processes that
will be as beneficial to the average hard working urban or rural citizens of
the Eastern Cape as it is to the visiting tourist from Paris, Berlin, New York,
or Tokyo.
8.3 THE GREEN GUARDS
Many of the existing natural areas in The
Eastern Cape are becoming badly degraded.
They need to be demarcated, restored, properly maintained, creatively developed,
and used in a sustainable manner. One
way to do this is to create a National Youth Service and Training Programme,
which we suggest could be known as the Green Guards of the Eastern Cape. The Green Trust could employ some 200 or so
teams of +/- 25 youth (5,000 nationwide) who would be trained to carrying out a
wide range of nature conservation and repair tasks at a cost of R6,000 a year
for each Green Guard. The annual cost to
the Green Trust and its benefactors would be on the order of R30,000,000.
The teams of Green Guards, under the direction
of the Trust, would carry out such tasks as fencing, restoring, developing, and
policing existing nature areas and corridors.
The Guards could also be called upon to develop completely new nature
areas and green belts or to plant fuel wood tree plantations around peri-urban
settlements. Another major function of
the Green Guards will be to surround indigenous forests and land reserves with protective
belts of planted vegetation such as fuel wood trees that can then be harvested
to low income households rather than cutting down more valuable indigenous
forests. These sacrificial vegetative barriers will protect the indigenous
green zones from de-vegetation by nearby populations of lower-income and under
employed citizens who are used to harvesting biomass for free from the nearby
environment.
8.4 FOOD PRODUCTION ON PUBLIC LAND
Another major function of the Green Guards would
be to plant and oversee the management of community woodlots, establish systems
of windbreaks, and protect all green areas, woodlots, and windbreaks
with adequate fire breaks. This work
will be done in partnership with the area-based
plantation minders who have already been employed by the local government (or
Area Based Community Development Units acting like a proto-local governments)
to perform the same tasks.
The Green Guards will be brought into an area to
help get a big job done. Once completed
then the local public service employees will be expected to maintain the green
belt/ plantation in prime condition. It
can be noted in passing that the windbreaks and green corridors interlinking
communities and nature areas with walking, biking trails, horse and oxen trails
can be planted with a range of different trees – fuel wood trees, pole trees,
fruit and nut trees, fodder trees, etc. so as to build food reserves into the
design of the environment. There is
absolutely no reason why public sector land cannot be used to grow food, fibre
and energy that can be harvested in a controlled way by the less well off
members of nearby communities.
The plan for the greening of the Eastern Cape
must include the reservation of fuel wood plantations – whether on a family,
neighbourhood and community scale - that
are within close proximity to living areas thereby minimizing the work load of
women to gather and transport firewood for cooking , heating and construction
materials. The peri-urban townships, as
well as the proposed New Communities, must also be bounded with windbreaks and
fuel wood plantations which serve as green zones and corridors. The Green Guards can help with the
establishment and planting of these productive green areas which the primary
‘user community’ will be charged by the Trust and the government with
maintaining in perpetuity. As mentioned
earlier, the public service employees assigned to a particular area will be
tasked by the local authority with managing fuel wood and windbreak plantations
on a sustained yield basis.
8.5 HUNGER HEDGES - PERMACULTURE FOR THE POOR
AND THE
UNEMPLOYED
The Provincial Green Trust - in partnership with
the Dept of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Department of
Environmental Affairs, Environment and Tourism - needs to actively search for
the most useful and productive tree and plant cultivars from around the world
that are well adapted to one or more of
the different bio-climatic regions of the Province. Field research will quickly determine the
subset of "winning" indigenous and alien cultivars that are most
appropriate for the Eastern Cape.
The first step in the ‘permaculture’ design
process is to identify those cultivars that are found to be environmentally
safe and economically beneficial and therefore will lend themselves best for
planting in well demarcated, intensely cultivated and easy to harvested green
zones close to densely occupied human settlements. The second step would be for regional
nurseries to propagate large numbers of seedlings and/or cuttings for
replanting in selected green areas, buffers, and corridors such as:
·
community
fuelwood plantations,
·
(ii.)
highway margins,
·
(iii.)
inside settlements along streets, or
·
(iv.) in
peoples' front and back gardens.
The main idea behind this component of the FEED
Programme is to inoculate the land inside and around the settlements where the
less well off residents live and work with as many hearty and prolific food
bearing trees and plants as possible as a hedge
against hunger. The indigent and the
unemployed, as in the times of Jesus, will find that food is left for them in
the margins of urban, peri-urban, peri-rural and rural landscapes for them to
harvest and eat.
9. THE PEOPLE'S TECHNIKON CONCEPT: Community-Based Education of
Rural and Peri-Urban Residents for Modest Prosperity in the 21st
Century
9.1 CHOOSING THE NEW PATH
It has become tragically obvious that so called
"modern", western style education does not prepare youth residing in
rural and peri-rural communities, squatter settlements, small towns, and formal
townships of the Province to cope creatively with today's stagnant economy. Under today’s depressed economic conditions, perhaps
only one or at most two out of 10 new entrants into the labour market actually
find wage employment in the formal sector.
The purpose of education necessarily involves
far more than just preparing youths to become economically active adults. We
are not blaming the stagnation of the formal urban industrial economy in the
Eastern Cape, South Africa, the African continent, and the world economy entirely upon inappropriate education. However, it is a terrible indictment of the
irrelevance of today’s educational system that up to 80% of its
"graduates" are not able to find full time formal employment or self
employment. As the New World Order gathers
momentum, it is inevitable that small, weak and peripheral nations like South
Africa, and the Eastern Cape Province as a dependent and marginal part of the
national economy, are being irresistibly incorporated into the global economy
as de facto "lower class" countries and regions with little or no
prospects of ever escaping from the poverty trap. The poverty trap, much like a debt trap,
happens when the population of a country or a class out grows its earthly
resources and begins to decline because the per capita resources of capital,
land, water, energy and access to cutting edge Science and Technology are
unable to support an expanding economy.
Marx defined ‘immiseration’ as a process that
takes place in the last stages of imperialism when a capitalist economy becomes
severely constrained and the mal-distribution becomes so acute the majority of
its members find themselves retrogressing, developing backward because per
capita resources available to the majority has contracted to a point that
traditional patterns of welfare and consumption can no longer be sustained. A civilization
that exceeds its available per capita resources of land, water, food, fibre and
energy resources will quickly retrogress and collapse or innovate new technological means to escape
from these per capita resource constraints.
In passing, it needs to be noted that it is
still difficult to predict what the final impact of AIDS will actually be upon
the development equation of the Eastern Province and South Africa. It is possible that AIDS will indeed
tragically result in an eventual die back of populations in the Eastern
Province and South Africa. At the same
time AIDS may be reducing the population load that must be carried by the
environment and the economy. Further, it
is also possible that AIDS will differentially shrink the pool of educated
manpower, who possess competence in science and technology and therefore capable
of innovating a new future for the Province. Highly educated world class
professionals in South Africa and the Eastern Province represent an indispensible
component in the innovation system because they possess the mental powers
needed to change the dominant paradigms and to redefine the interface between
the wealthy "have a lot" minority and the poor “have not"
majority.
The youth of the Eastern Cape are confronted
with twin economic crises. On the one
side, the old, low intensity pattern of land use and subsistence of yesteryear
is no longer economically viable; nor is it acceptable to the majority of
younger generation who today assert their right to participate fully in the
"modern" world economy as typified by the high tech and high mass
consumption lifestyles exemplified by Europeans, Americans and Japanese
patterns of civilization.
As the financial turbulence of the past three
years indicate, the "modern" urban industrial system, is itself in a state of grave instability and
incipient collapse around the periphery.
This inward collapse is due to an accumulation of unsustainable human,
economic and environmental costs that are integral parts of a high technology
system of mass production and distribution and a plentiful supply of cheap fossil
fuels. The leaders and the people of the
Eastern Cape have an opportunity to decide whether they will define their path
to modernization in conventional Euro-American terms (or Pacific Rim terms) or
in a more exploratory Afro-centric terms or even more inclusive pro-poor
humanitarian terms.
The authors of the FEED Strategy strongly
recommend that the Afro-centric option be thoroughly explored as an alternative
to the here-to-for dominant Euro-American path to civilization. We do not deny the technological prowess and the
continuing appeal of the Euro-American pattern of civilization. The reasoning behind our recommendation of the
Afro-centric option is as follows:
·
the high
tech urban industrial path is currently only able to incorporate 20% or so of
the youth of the Province in formal employment, while the other 80% of the
youth remain pretty much economically inactive,
·
therefore the
Western economic paradigm is like a family that condemns 80% of its offspring
to lives of unproductiveness, dependency, failure and eventual
criminality.
The Euro-centric path to civilization is rather
like a school that "trashes" more than three quarters of its students
in order to graduate a handful of "winners". It is only these winners who enjoy the full
benefits that are offered to a very hierarchical class society. Clearly, from the perspective of the excluded
low income majority of Eastern Cape residents, the costs of the Western
style urban industrial system too high
because it only delivers benefits to a tiny well off minority.
The
Afro-centric option chooses a ‘majoritarian’
development strategy that invest equitably in
the welfare and advancement of the majority majority over a minority
serving (minoritarian) approach to development
that invests a disproportionately large share of the society's scarce resources
to uplift a small, increasingly multi-racial, middle and upper middle class
elite.
How do we discover a series of Afro-centric
pathways to modernity that will be acceptable to the majority of Eastern Cape
residents and is also dynamic enough to mobilize most of the people in a self
help mass mobilization process that is affordable, technologically feasible,
and environmentally sustainable? It is
proposed by the FEED Strategy that education be turned upside down so that it
assist the youth of the Province, who reside in "humble" and
impoverished rural and peri-urban communities, to begin to transform themselves
in
situ by critically rethinking
their understanding of progress. It is
imperative that the youth and their parents and also their grandparents agree
on a new multi generation Xhosa definition of progress. The task of African intellectuals is to
reconceptualise a post colonial, post Eurocentric vision of modernity that
comprehends role of African culture, social genius, and spirit in world
society.
Instead of offering ‘modernizing’ Africans the
hope that 1 out of 5 of their youth will perhaps secure entry into the
exclusive ranks of an educationally advantaged and materially pampered middle
class, a more liberated Afro-centric perspective would instead focus how to
radically use the world’s knowledge system
(science and technology) to help motivated residents caught in the poverty trap
to gradually uplift themselves as individuals and communities from
powerlessness and poverty. The dynamic
of Afro-centric development involves (i.) ‘downloading’ and
(ii.) ‘comprehensively contextualizing’ and (iii.)
creatively applying the world’s corpus of science and technology to create
local economies offering modest prosperity and employment to every member of
the community.
The political leaders, government officials, and
professionals in the Eastern Cape have the option to launch an experimental
‘peoples’ technikons that draw upon the world’s science and technology system
to empower rural and peri-urban communities so that existential African
villagers gain the power and knowledge they need to create a new type of
inclusive economy that offers modest prosperity and meaningful employment to
all its members. The main focus of the "curriculum" in these People's
Technikons is to find ways and means to directly assist and support adult
community members to become more economically productive, within the limits of
the skill, money, and technology presently accessible to them in the
communities where they reside.
9.2 COMMUNITY TECHNIKONS
The role of "teacher" within a
community technikon is to provide technical assistance by training members of
the community how to
(i.) access relevant resources available to
promote and support LED and
(ii.)
assist households and individuals to evaluate the cost/benefit performances of
different LED technologies
and enterprise for generating a basic income.
The community technikon teacher\facilitator is,
by definition, committed to the long term creation of a dynamic land based “communitarian”
economy. A small inward facing community
economy will grow up naturally when science and technological know how are correctly
down loaded from the world knowledge base and intelligently applied to the most
appropriate forms of wealth creation and
income generation. The community
technikon facilitator is responsible for helping aspiring entrepreneurs to
efficiently combine appropriate technologies and LED approaches with the
locally available resources, demand for products and services, labour power and
skills. The challenge is to generate
enough localized and profitable LED based enterprises to absorb all of the surplus
labour capacity from the community.
Thus, the main long term objective of the
community technikon is to assist economically motivated individuals and
families to gradually construct an "alternative" community centered economy
that maximizes the production and exchange of both old and new forms of wealth
within the locality or enclave economy. The idea of building an alternative,
"enclave" economy is not as far fetched as it may initially seem in
the 21st century. For
example, there is room for one or more honey farmers in every village or
neighbourhood who extract "sweetening" from the nearby environment by
managing a "herd" of honey bees.
Why purchase sugar or cane syrup when you can purchase honey at a competitive
price from a neighbour or at a nearby shop?
The list of foods and other essential products which rural, and
peri-urban household buy from shops, traders and increasingly from supermarkets
is very long:
candles, fencing, bread, ground maize meal, maize,
sugar, fish, oil, cabbage, carrots, beets, meat, chickens, eggs, milk and milk
products, building materials and components, seeds, fertilizers, tanks,
toilets, hand tools, timber products, furniture, cloth, fiber, blankets,
stoves, musical entertainment, batteries, paraffin, fruit, nuts, beer,
etc.
The
task of the community technikon is to find practical and affordable ways to
"re-inflate" the collapsed rural and peri-urban economies.
Firstly, community members must be assisted to
become efficient producers and marketers of an ever-increasing percentage of
all products and services consumed on a regular basis by other families within
nearby communities, whether these goods and services are sold, bartered or
given away. Secondly, these People's Technikons
must also encourage the export of enough surplus local production, services,
and labour power to maintain a net positive balance of trade with the larger
external (exclave) economy.
9.3 MENTORING LED ENTREPRENEURS
One way for a network of community technikons to
stimulate more ‘local production for local consumption’ is by identifying the
already successful small producers in the area and encouraging them to act as teachers and role
models for other aspiring LED "entrepreneurs" in nearby
communities. The "mentored” small farmers
and other local resource based enterprises can also be encouraged to accept unpaid
apprentices who receive training instead of wages. Where necessary successful LED
entrepreneurs can also be hired
part-time by technikons to act as guides for students who are interested in
starting up the same or similar kinds of small enterprises in their own
communities.
Another major function for full-time technikon
staff is to expose aspirant small business men and women to a wide range of
simple, affordable technologies and productive techniques that increase their
profits and/or reduce their costs of doing business. The transfer of more appropriate technologies
into the communities served by a technikon will open up new possibilities local
farmers and entrepreneurs to earn a modest living with their own labour and
skills. The objective is for the Community Technikons is for them to focus
primarily on stimulating small producers who generate products, produce and
services for the local and nearby regional markets.
We have already mentioned that Technikons will connect
particular aspirant local enterpriser with other nearby "experts" who
are capable of providing practical, hands-on technical assistance and small
business support. In addition, very practical
short courses can be given at the People's Technikons by "itinerant"
experts on particular types of small enterprise, technology and agro-enterprise
when enough students have registered to justify the expense of bringing in such
a specialist.
Once a particular small-scale enterprise
"package" has proven itself in one community, it will tend to naturally
spread by example and word of mouth into dozens of other communities. The
network of community technikon facilitators will insure the transfer of
appropriate technologies and small enterprise innovations all over the Eastern
Province.
9.4 COMMUNITY BASED FOLK SCHOOLS
The proposed People's Technikon Programme
requires dedicated and competent full-time facilitators who feel "at
home" with the language, the culture and the socially integrated pattern
of life found in rural communities and peri-rural areas of the Province. Foreign
development workers such as Peace Corps volunteers cannot serve in front-line
positions as the community based technikon facilitators.
One way to initiate the proposed Community
Technikon Programme in the Eastern Cape would be to critically review the role
played by the Scandinavian Folk School movement during the last century in
helping displaced and disoriented rural peasants to revitalize their rural
communities. The folk school movement
was begun in the 1840's by clergymen and intellectuals who were concerned about
the demoralization of rural families and the disintegration of rural community
life caused by the massive social and economic disruptions that were unleashed
in northern Europe during the early 1800's by the rapid growth of powerful and
dynamic urban industrial metropoles.
The rural hinterlands became stagnant
backwaters. The folk schools organized
short courses during the long cold winter months where rural residents were
assisted to become literate. They were
introduced to the high culture of the metropoles, and given the tools they
needed to understand, and if they wished, to participate as self-confident
rural dwellers and farmers in the transformations taking place in the urban
centers. The folk schools helped the
rural people recover their identity as self-respecting rural citizens of a
larger polity and to regain their capacity to identify and defend their
interests against exploitation by new and powerful big city interest groups.
The folk school concept has spread throughout
the world where the idea of community centered education has been adapted to
the task of revitalizing demoralized rural dwellers in other lands. For example, the Gandhian movement has drawn
heavily upon the folk school tradition in its struggle to revitalize the
economic self-reliance of the hundreds of thousands of villages in India. The anthroposophy based schools founded on
the teachings of Rudolf Steiner also focus upon central importance of a
well-integrated local economic system.
More recently, the "education for production" programme, and
earlier the brigades movement in Botswana inspired by Patrick van Rensberg, drew
heavily upon the folk school's implicit critique of urban biased national
school systems that typically ignore and devalue local traditions, resources
and the many opportunities for community building and local wealth creation in
rural areas.
The folk school tradition can be adapted to suit
the cultural traditions of the Xhosa majority in the Eastern Cape and used as a
proven foundation on which to build an Afro-centric educational programme that
capitalizes upon the cultural strengths and unique capacities of ‘existential’
and modern rural residents. The proposed
People's Technikon is one iteration of the folk school vision of an alternative
technical school system that is designed to uplift and affirm for rural
students. The community technikon
concept offers a bottom up, community building alternative to today’s
Euro-settler dominated South African education system in the Eastern Cape which
almost exclusively serves the interest of the urban and industrial elites who
rule the provincial, national and global economies.
9.5 THE RESULTING IMPACT
If we assume that every year a community
technikon facilitator will assists 20 individuals or small groups to launch
themselves into some form of locality based enterprise, and each facilitator
cost the programme about R80 000 a year (all costs in), then each self-employed
community member – or some other funding agent - will need to pay approximately
R4,000 for a year of training and mentoring.
If we further assume that each community member who becomes
"economically activated" by a technikon facilitator will earn a
minimum of R12 000 a year in cash or in kind, then over a ten-year period the
expenditure of R80,000 or R800 000 will
generate approximately R2.4 million worth of new value largely within the
economies of the local communities where the successful small business people
reside. The authors believe that a network of + 200 community based
technikon facilitators - if well trained, motivated, supported and managed -
can play a major role in transforming the rural, peri-rural, and peri-urban
economies of the Eastern Cape in the direction of a profoundly Afro-centric
renaissance.
10 EASTERN CAPE PROVINCE NEEDS ITS OWN INSTITUTE
FOR DEVELOPMENT EXPLORATION AND APPROPRIATE STANDARDS (IDEAS)
- around which to Build a Sustainable Civilization in the 21st
Century
10.1 THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY
The much celebrated advent of a global
information network that is linked together with high speed data delivery superhighways,
does not necessarily lead to greatly improved socio-economic conditions for the
"have not" masses of the planet.
Only a small fraction of the science and technology information within
the global knowledge base is uniquely relevant to the people and the
development problems of the Eastern Cape.
The more specific the science and technology requirements, the more
difficult it becomes to capture, download, adapt, and apply this generic information
from the world knowledge base to the socio-economic conditions in specific
rural communities in the Eastern Cape.
Furthermore, the semi-educated, poor, and ‘computer-less’ mother and
father of a family of hungry children cannot satiate their hunger with
information. Science and technology
information is not an end; it is only a means to an end. Information, once obtained must first be
correctly interpreted and contextualized before it becomes actionable
knowledge.
Relevant knowledge still has to be translated
into practice within a real world that is full of blockages to rational problem
solving that is caused by special interests, shortages of resources, human
imperfections, political factions, and myriads of obstacles. After new knowledge has been turned into
prototype technologies and projects and tested in the field, it is next
necessary to obtain real political support for a programme of mass implementation
and to gain public acceptance for anything new by the end users. The innovation of new products and methods of
production require that these end users – the ultimate producers and consumers
– pass through a learning process that makes it possible for them to accept and
internalize more appropriate standards and solutions to familiar economic and
environmental problems.
Confronted
with the push and pull of competing interests, different dreams about the best
of all possible futures, and thoughts about ‘what must be done’, all
socio-economic change becomes a complex
and unpredictable process. Often powerful commercial or ideological interests
bitterly resist or try to block the introduction of new technologies, products,
and approaches. The old guard, protecting their market share and influence over
government policies, typically ignore the fact that the new approaches – in
fact - deliver much higher socio-economic benefits at significantly lower cost
than the traditional standards, technologies and approaches. When the old regime of politics, technology
and business struggle with new technologies and approaches that more
efficiently serve the interests of greater numbers of consumers, it is just a
matter of time before the old order weakens and collapsed into the ‘dustbin of
history’.
10.2 GAINING ACCESS TO THE WORLD S&T
KNOWLEDGE BASE
Now that the global science and technology
information network has come into existence, how does a Province on the
periphery of the developed world like the Eastern Cape, with limited science
and technology resources at its disposal, become faster, more rational, and
sure-footed in the "discovery" of that tiny subset of the world's
science and technology knowledge base which contains those approaches that
appear to be uniquely suited to unlock the blocked productivity and potential
for wealth creation of the land based rural majority.
Once the most appropriate technical and
organizational approaches have been objectively assessed and identified, it is
necessary to convert this abstract ‘planner’s knowledge’ into real products and
prototypes in order to investigate their socio-economic performance in test
communities. It is only after extensive testing of new technologies and
approaches in the field that it becomes possible to state definitively whether
a particular development package will be capable of making any significant
contribution to the task of liberating a majority of the people in the Province
from poverty, unemployment, impending social collapse and worsening
degeneration of the environment.
How can the highly educated members of the
Eastern Cape, who are capable of creatively interacting with the world
knowledge base through computers, gain access through the Internet, or other
global data base systems, to the science and technology information that is
most appropriate to the development of the Province? Also, how will they use
this valuable knowledge to begin constructing a more Afro-centric pattern of
civilization? To whom are they
accountable?
In answer
to these questions, the FEED Strategy proposes the formation of IDEAS - the
Institute for Development Exploration and Appropriate Standards - as an
autonomous, multi-disciplinary science and technology application R&D
organization. The proposed IDEAS would have its own Board of Directors. The
organization is envisaged as being loosely linked to all the Universities in
the Eastern Cape (Walter Sisulu University of S&T, Fort Hare University,
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University of S&T, and Rhodes University), the
agricultural and technical colleges, existing research stations such as the
Agricultural Research Facility at Dohne, and technical high schools and FET
Colleges. It would also maintain close
professional and working relationships with other organizations such as the
Agricultural Research Council (ARC), Human Sciences Research Centre (HSRC) and
the Council for Scientific Research (CSIR) in South Africa which engage in a
very wide spectrum of development oriented R&D and standard setting.
The mission of IDEAS is to aggressively
investigate the world data base to discover that subset of development
technologies, techniques and organizational approaches that are most
appropriate to the needs, socio-economic context, and environmental realities
of the different interest groups in the Eastern Province. The IDEAS initiative will require enough
funding and political support to overcome petty bureaucratic divisiveness and
obstructionism.
It will form small highly focused Development
Innovation Panels in such high priority areas of content as:
* new high-yield open pollinated cultivars
* renewable energy technologies for rural
communities
* new settlement patterns designed to promote
full employment
* low-cost building standards, materials,
techniques
* technologies and organization models for rural
micro-enterprises
* earth care and environmental restoration
* agro-forestry/permaculture transformations of
settlements, arable land,
grazing,
and tree plantation
* minimum cost/minimum disruption approaches to
agricultural
intensification through small holder agro-enterprise schemes
The list of possible appropriate Development
Innovation Panels is potentially a long one.
The above list of development
research problems is only illustrative.
10.3 DEVELOPMENT INNOVATION PANELS
These Development Innovation Panels will bring
the most experienced development practitioners from the Province and the
country together with
·
relevant
science and technology experts,
·
government
officials and
·
community
leaders
for the purpose of identifying the highest
priority development needs and opportunities within the different DOMAINS or
problem areas of development identified for the Eastern Cape. The Panels will also establish in broad
outline the particular cutting edge technologies that are presently on offer
around the world and identify those particular approaches that need to be further
adapted, field tested and optimized in different of communities.
These Development Innovation Panels would also
be asked to begin the immense task of gradually rewriting all those standards
for infrastructure, the built environment, settlements, food supply,
manufacturing processes which are judged to interfere with the implementation
of minimum cost/maximum benefit approaches to development, particularly in
rural and peri-rural communities.
Where
major obstacles to progressive development are discovered, these Panels will be
asked to assume a leadership role in the removal of all scientifically baseless
obstacles to the use and roll out of low cost/high benefit appropriate
technologies. In some situations, it may be possible to
create lower cost alternative rural standards and/or set asides for housing,
schools, clinics, water supply, roads, dams, etc in rural communities.
Lastly, these Development Innovation Panels are
charged with providing technical, commercial, governmental, political, and
community decision makers with the support they need to select of assemblages
of technologies and socio-economic approaches that optimize the interests and
factor advantages of the communities and/or market segments they are mandated
to advance. These Development Innovation Panels are also responsible for
minimizing and/or overcoming any obstacles interfering with implementation of
optimized technology packages once they have been piloted and approved for roll
out.
The proposed IDEAS organization and programme is
desperately needed in the Eastern Cape to function as a well-resourced and
protected institutional channel, comparable in many respects to the Manhattan
Project organized by the Allies toward the end of WWII with the overriding
objective of creating the A bomb before the Nazis. The Apollo Project was America’s cold war
race with the Russians to beat them in landing a man on the moon and returning
him alive to earth as proof that the capitalist Military/Industrial/ University
Complex had greater mastery over space science than its socialist
competitor.
The challenge to the survival of South African
civilization posed by acute poverty, worsening unemployment, global warming,
the peaking of oil production and the end of the era of cheap hydrocarbon fuels
is actually a far greater challenge than the race to build the A bomb before
the Germans, or land an American on the moon before the Russians.. In the US
example, it was first necessary for the American people and their leaders to acknowledge
they faced a life or death threat to their collective survival to plan and
implement the Manhattan and Apollo missions. Nest it was necessary for the
political, military, industrial and university leadership to unify and give the
appointed leaders of these missions – particular the Manhattan Project - the
authority they needed to instantly over
ride all normal obstacles to the imperative of beating the Germans to the A
Bomb.
Development Innovation Panels, under the
supervision of IDEAS management, are mandated to insure that the objectives of
the FEED Strategy are not frustrated by the business-as-usual attitudes of
conventionally minded civil servants and profit-over-progress attitudes of
selfishly oriented businessmen and women.
The IDEAS Programme becomes a rallying point for every advocate for the
FEED scenario of an Eastern Cape cooperating to achieve an economy that offers
work and modest prosperity for all through the discipline of ‘equitable
development’.
The Provincial Government is responsible for
ensuring that IDEAS, like the Manhattan Project before it, gets access to:
·
the
expertise and talent it requires,
·
the funds
needed to search the world’s knowledge base to identify the most promising
Appropriate Technologies, and
·
uncontested
opportunity and resources it requires to pilot, optimize and then progressively
implement these proven development approaches in every village, squatter
settlement, small town and township in the Province,
We have every reason to expect that Development
Innovation Panels in the Eastern Cape, if given the same broad powers as the Manhattan and Apollo
Projects, will achieve the same break throughs and rapid innovation in response
to the survival challenges facing South African civilization today that were
achieved during the 20th century by a similarly challenged and
mobilized American society. The proposed IDEAS vehicle may be thought of as a
meta organization that is composed of different but interdependent Development
Innovation Panels, each with its own staff, funding and mission to achieve
specific development break throughs in particular domains, such as:
·
worsening
unemployment,
·
family and
community disintegration,
·
homelessness
and squatters,
·
widespread
and growing hunger,
·
energy
poverty and the end of the era of peak oil
·
violence
and crime,
·
AIDS,
·
atmospheric
pollution and climate change,
·
loss of
arable land and topsoil to erosion
·
drought and
intensifying water shortages
It is obvious that each of these miscarriages
and dysfunctions of Euro-American civilization in South Africa and the Eastern
Cape constitute challenges that are individually and collectively threatening
the New South Africa with collapse.
The IDEAS begins with the creation of a
technologically powerful and competently manned "way station" on the
global information superhighway through which Eastern Cape based development practitioners, researchers,
businessmen and women, government officials, politicians, etc., can critically
and deeply "surf" on the Internet in search of the best-case,
most-appropriate Science and Technology applications from around the globe. Each
Development Innovation Panel is searching for those proven technologies and
approach that are uniquely relevant to the needs, environment and opportunities
of particular communities and regions in
the Province.
Every department, business, community, etc.
which needs a world-wide perspective on the Province’s development challenges, possibilities
and options would be assisted by IDEAS to critically and creatively "surf"
the Internet in search of the most appropriate innovations, proven approaches and
liberating (least cost) development standards which uplift the greatest number
of people out of poverty at the lowest possible cost because these technologies
and approaches deliver the most development bang for the buck. It is inevitable that highly stimulating dialogues between like-minded organizations
and experts within the Province and around the world will be facilitated by the
establishment of IDEAS as a well resourced development innovation, testing, and
piloting facility.
The next step would be to create IDEAS'
Fellowships that will allow both seasoned practitioners and promising students
at the University or other tertiary institutions the time and resources they
need to provide particular Development Innovation Panels with the staff support
they require to properly do their work of research, innovation, field testing, optimization,
and dissemination of the those technologies and approaches that create the most
jobs and add the most value to the economy of the Eastern Cape.
10.4 FREEING THE PROGRAMME FROM INTERFERENCE
The political leadership of the country needs to
be at pains to minimize interference in the IDEAS Programme by reactionary
elements and negative attitudes that are generated by today’s hyper-politics and unresolved conflicts
between groups dreaming of very different future South Africas. The IDEAS Programme is not asking for, nor
would it ever be given, a series of blank cheques. Its mission is to enable the disadvantaged
majority of the citizens of the Eastern Cape to benefit personally and
equitably from the global knowledge base. Therefore, IDEAS aims to bring the Science and Technology capacity of humanity to
bear on the complex task of simultaneously providing full employment and
equitable development to the unemployed and impoverished majorities in the Eastern
Cape when the resources of land, water, energy, investment capital, expertise,
etc. available per citizen is diminishing .
Is it not possible to apply our common heritage
of science and technology, both traditional and modern, to the task of creating
a soul-satisfying civilization within the per capita resource constraints that today
constrain the future development of South Africa and the Eastern Cape. By
constraints are meant the present average resource base per capita in land,
water, energy, labour power, public and private monies, cattle, sheep and
goats, trees, vehicles, foreign exchange, aid funds, professionals, government
workers, etc.
It is a crime against humanity for the people of
the Eastern Cape to needlessly suffer from hunger, thirst, drought,
homelessness, sickness, unemployment, poverty, political and bureaucratic
oppression, etc. when the appropriate technological and organizational means to
overcome all of these tragic problems of omission and commission have already
been invented and proven somewhere else on the planet. Instead of waiting 50 or 100 years for a
particular socio-technological innovation to be belatedly recognized and
transferred to the Eastern Cape, the goal of the proposed IDEAS Programme is to
use computers, search soft ware, and the Internet to profoundly accelerate the
rate at which knowledge gets converted into experiments that are assessed by
applying Afro-centric criteria and standards.
10.5 GAINING PARITY
One way to focus clearly upon the power inherent
in the proposed IDEAS Programme is to imagine the radical changes in the form
and content of a future South Africa if Afro-centric traditionalists had the
same access to the world system of science and technology as the
"chiefs" of the Euro-centric corporations – like the Anglo American
Corporation – that today dominate the economy of the country. Ultimately, the trajectory of development is
deeply dependent upon what is known to be technically and organizationally
possible, which is to say, upon the degree of access to the state of applied
science and technology.
If culturally traditional South Africans gain
science and technology parity with the Euro-"modernists" in the
government and private industry, or the corporate chiefs of the World Bank and
the OECD, then we will be well on our way to "equitable development"
within a completely changed New World Order in which scientific and
technological know-how becomes democratically accessible on more or less equal
terms to all the citizens of the world.
11. Full Employment through Equitable Development - FEED FOR
AND BY THE PEOPLE: a Summary of the
Potential Benefits and Costs of the Proposed FEED Strategy
The FEED Strategy proposed by the authors is a
complex strategy. We will conclude with
a simple "thought experiment" and a "guestimate" on how
many new self-employment and/or formal employment opportunities would be
created if the proposals contained within this document were seriously
implemented by leaders with the requisite political will, popular support and
ample resources.
11.1 TYPICAL IMPACT ON FOOD PRODUCTION
If each of some 700 000 non-farming urban
residing families in the Eastern Cape spends an average of +/-R1200 a month on
food, or about R15 000 a year, then we get a food expenditure on the order of
R10 500 000 000. If Eastern Cape farmers
capture and supply 50% of this Provincial demand for food, then about
R5,000,000,000 worth of food would have to be grown and supplied by farmers
residing in the Province. If 60% of the
gross income from the sale of food goes to Provincial farmers in the form of
wages, income and profits (R3 billion), then some 120,000 farmers would earn on
average +/-R25 000 a year from small scale family farming. If each of these 120,000 farmers care for six
dependents, then 720,000 residents of the Province or about 20% of the
population could be economically sustained through the aggressive promotion of
small-scale food production for the Eastern Cape market. The food products include chickens, eggs,
cooking oil, potatoes, rice, sorghum, milk, cheese, goats, sheep, cattle,
maize, beans, vegetables, fruit, nuts, etc.
If we include the present market for food within
the rural communities of the Province, there are another 3,500.000 residents or
700 000 households which spend an average of +/- R750 a month or another +/-
R525,000,000 (per month x 12 months =) or about R6.3 billion a year. If 50% of this monthly expenditure on food by
rural households is met by nearby small farmers (R3.15 billion), and some 70%
of this R3.15 expenditure on food stuffs or R2.2 billion a year. That means that about R180 000 000 a month gets
paid to small farmers and farm workers.
If village farmers earn an average of R1,000 a month then there is the
potential to create an additional
180 000 small farming opportunities if all of
this rural demand for food is meet by local production for local consumption.
The total on farm employment that is potentially
created by meeting the combined rural and urban demand for food within the
Eastern Cape comes to 400 000 employment opportunities.
11.2 SUMMARY OF PROJECTED TOTAL BENEFITS
The figures given in the table showing Projected
Benefits of the FEED Strategy were worked out for Swaziland. New projections need to be made for the
Eastern Cape portion of the South African economy. (if the estimated benefits for Swaziland are
multiplied x 9 they will give some idea of the expected benefits to be gained by
the people of the Eastern Cape with a population that is approximately 9 times
larger than the population of Swaziland.
The authors of the FEED Strategy are convinced
that if the proposals made in this document are rigorously put into practice
with a good spirit and there is little or no resistance to the revitalization
of the land based rural economy, then the following numbers of new employment opportunities
will be generated:
Individuals economic active
|
Total size of population
|
Average size of family
|
Number of households
|
Typical family cash income
|
|
Direct Small Farm
Production
|
100,000
|
275,000
|
8
|
35,000
|
5,000
To 12,000
|
Rural Subsistence
Farmers
|
100,000
|
300,000
|
6
|
50,000
|
2 400
to 5 000
|
Rural Services to Rural Residents
|
22,000
|
75,000
|
5
|
15,000
|
5000
To 15,000
|
Urban/Peri-Urban Wage Earner (gov't, pvte sector,
retirees)
|
70,000
|
325,000
|
6
|
30,000
|
15 000
To 40 000
|
Peri-Urban Residents (self-employed
within Informal Sector)
|
40,000
|
150,000
|
5
|
30,000
|
1800
to 3600
|
TOTALS for Swaziland
|
332 000
|
1 100 000 population
|
160 000 households
|
||
TOTALS for Eastern Cape (x 9)
|
3
000 000
|
+/-
10 000 000
|
Avg
family size of 5
|
2
000 000
|
|
The authors lack up-to-date information on the actual household
income and expenditure figures for Swaziland.
It is estimated that less than 150 000 Swazi adults are today
economically active (earning in cash or kind more than R1 000 per year per
number of dependents).
The FEED Strategy as presented here gives the broad outlines of how
to more than double the number of economically active Swazis in a decade and
also how to gradually increase the average income in the form of cash or kind
of all economically active Swazis.
The authors of the FEED Strategy are available to advise and assist
the traditional and political leadership, government officials, NGO activists,
and the people’s representatives to make full employment within a framework of
equitable development plan and process a reality in Swaziland.
We thank the organizers of this Vusela for providing us with an
opportunity to share our ideas and experiences and perhaps to be of service to
the great struggle to create an ever-advancing civilization that will enfold
all of mankind within a just and liberating economic system.
It is our hope that the FEED Strategy will be critically reviewed
and then adopted by the three tiers of government in the Eastern Cape. The authors will continue to refine the
socio-economic data on which the FEED Strategy is based. We are eager to
dialogue and debate the value and the viability of the FED Strategy as
illuminating a path leading to full employment through the practice of equity
and democratic consultation here in the Eastern Cape.
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