The revival of Qamata, once one of SA’s top irrigation schemes, has been on the cards for years. But when Farmer’s Weekly visited Qamata basin this month there was plenty of finger-pointing but little evidence of agricultural activity. Stephan Hofstätter reports.
Eric Qoko is an angry man. He’s been farming at Qamata outside Queenstown in the Eastern Cape since he left the mines of Gauteng in 1985. He’s seen the irrigation scheme in its heyday in the 1980s, watched it slide into collapse in the nineties and been fed a steady diet of promises of its imminent revival ever since. Excuses for failure are wearing thin. Like many here, Eric had good reason to believe his ship would come in.
After years of mismanagement and neglect by the outgoing Transkei government and transitional councils of post-1994 South Africa, Qamata was finally liquidated in 1997. Its assets were put under the management of a community structure, the Qamata Irrigation Development Scheme Trust – the first step in handing control of the schemes to communities working the land. Two years later, in 1999, the then water affairs and forestry minister Ronnie Kasrils pledged R11 million to rehabilitate the scheme’s infrastructure. Water from the perennially well-stocked Lubisi dam is gravity-fed to about 30 storage dams down an elaborate system of concrete-lined canals capable of irrigating 5 500ha of high-yielding soil. There is land and water in abundance.
By 2001, lack of visible progress was beginning to worry the highest authorities, and the then Eastern Cape premier Makhenkesi Stofile sent an urgent memo to former Eastern Cape agriculture MEC Max Mamase. The memo, seen by Farmer’s Weekly, berates the dismal performance of Mamase’s department in failing to kick-start agricultural revival in the province, specifically the irrigation schemes at Qamata and Ncora. In his 2002 budget vote speech Mamase pointed out that Eskom had “indicated a willingness to invest R6,5 million to upgrade centre-pivot irrigation equipment” at the scheme.
Moreover, in this year’s State of the Province address, Eastern Cape premier Nosima Balindlela claimed that five irrigation schemes had been revitalised, including Qamata.
All of which leaves Eric cold as he gestures to a landscape of fallow fields, with only the occasional cabbage patch, that was once the Eastern Cape’s breadbasket. Eric recalls a time when over a million cabbage seedlings were planted, with harvests staggered so that every day of the year nine trucks thundered down Qamata’s dirt roads, each carting 27 tons of produce to Port Elizabeth. “You should have seen this place,” he enthuses. “We used to grow wheat, maize and cauliflowers. We had more than 20 pivots with 60ha each. We filled 22 railway trucks during our wheat harvest and our maize silos were always full. There was tons and tons – and we made millions. Now there’s nothing left,” he says.
A piggery produced 40 to 50 units that were sent to East London each month, and the scheme boasted 3 000 sheep and a small herd of dairy cows, with a feedlot supplied by surplus maize. Even in its heyday the scheme wasn’t sustainable, largely because donor funding promoted inefficiency. “I remember we had pivots whose electric motors burned out when they were hit by lightning – which happens all the time around here,” says Eric, who was a supervisor when the scheme was known as Xonxa Rural Development, funded by the Austrian government. Those who had an interest in ensuring the pivots kept breaking down blocked any efforts at devising a technical solution to cut down on maintenance costs, he says.“There was a company in Queenstown called Golden Engineering that made its fortune fixing the pivots, but when the pivots left, GE died,” he says. “That company existed only for those pivots!”
Eric believes this skewed economic logic (subsidised inefficiencies lining a few well-placed pockets) keeps the scheme from prospering.
Allegations of corruption are rife in this place. Agriculture Department extension officers are accused of colluding with contract ploughers who pocket government soil preparation grants of up to R200 000 without performing the work they were paid for. Local government officials are accused of pocketing funds destined for rehabilitating the scheme and paying their associates hundreds of thousands of rands for business plans lifted from funding proposals received. Board members of the trust managing the scheme’s assets are accused of stripping them, syphoning off building rental income and paying themselves unauthorised travel and other allowances.
Zukile Pityi, the senior agriculture department officials in charge of rehabilitating the Eastern Cape’s irrigation schemes, says any evidence of criminal acts should be presented to the police. He also refutes claims that the scheme’s revival has ground to a halt. “Rehabilitation is fully under way. Last year we made tractors available. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry is cleaning the dams, fixing pivots and providing an engine to strengthen the water source,” he explains. Delays are being caused by community conflict, he says. “But we are doing everything in our power to resolve them.”
At the time of going to press the attorney general’s office in East London was still awaiting approval and terms of reference from Pretoria to look into some of the allegations made against officials, which are also being investigated by Farmer’s Weekly. True or not, evidence of neglect and failure abound, contradicting protestations to the contrary from Bisho.
The scheme is littered with empty tunnels worth millions. Sugarbeet crops lie rotting in the fields. Maize fields – according to locals, planted with government subsidies – are for the most part patchy, derelict or barren. A nursery paid for by municipal funds lies derelict, its seedlings dying. The only evidence of noteworthy agricultural activity in the Qamata basin is an impressive maize crop about to harvested on a 200ha section of land irrigated by centre pivots donated by Eskom, and production costs paid for by a private loan.
Mpilo Mbambisa, manager of Chris Hani district municipality, which has jurisdiction over the scheme, says it’s “very unfair” to blame alleged actions of his officials for delays in reviving the scheme. He blames “social instability”, unpredictable weather conditions, private-service providers with commercial interests to protect and interference from traditional authorities, which includes launching a legal battle against the municipality and agriculture department over which structure should represent the community and disburse government funds earmarked for the scheme. “We are doing what we are doing in the interests of the whole community, but certain elements are pursuing their own destructive agendas,” he claims.
In the meantime Eric and hundreds of farmers sharing his anger wait in vain for the scheme fulfil its immense agricultural potential. “For years we’ve been waiting for government to assist us but there’s nothing going on,” says David Mfebe, who represents a section of the farming community. “Every day we wait we are getting poorer.” |fw
