Food systems and development lessons from Bojanala

An instance of sewerage extending over a prolonged period in my suburb reminded me of a survey I conducted in the present-day Bojanala District of the North West Province. During my tenure in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, I diverged from the Bureau of Statistics (BopStats) and worked at what was then the Agricultural Corporation (Agricor) for two years before returning to BopStats. I had the privilege of taking a break from counting populations as the head of BopStats to engage society in their production of food and the logic of food systems across the  island-like country.

This was not a phenomenon new to me, for in rural Lesotho, where I was born, bred, and taught, food systems and food security were central to our village life. In that regard, I also had the privilege of university vacation work where we enquired into farmers’ risk perception and risk avoidance strategies.The islandic Bophuthatswana homeland provided testing grounds for ideas.

The region in which I was privileged to evaluate some thinking is what is called Bojanala today - a region that anchored platinum mining, tourism, and animal husbandry in Bophuthatswana. My task was to interrogate the relationship of the food system within the context of the tourism and mining ecosystem, examining the related backward and forward linkages and what needed to be done.

The investigation followed a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey with qualitative key informant interviews.On the qualitative side of the survey, an interesting and memorable interview was with Kgosi Modisakgomo Mabe of Mabeskraal, whose community is a cattle-rearing one, a stone’s throw away from Sun City and immersed in the mining economy. One could not have landed on the lap of a better key informant in relation to community development within this ecosystem.

Two points stand out in my mind to this day. The first was the construction of the pipeline from the Brits Water System to Sun City, which was his main gripe. The second was how you develop.On the first, he was extremely critical of the government of Bophuthatswana, arguing that the water solely served Sun City, while the surrounding communities did not enjoy the benefits of this project. The second point, which found greater correspondence with the Chinese model of development when I later studied it, aligned with Modisakgomo’s conception of development.

As a corollary to the Sun City pipeline, Modisakgomo argued that for the construction of the pipeline to be truly effective for community development - beyond the fact that it only ended in Sun City—it should be constructed from the end-user side.

I then asked, “Why should it start from the end user?” He said to maintain community participation, you need to start with the end in mind and act from the end in the practice of community infrastructure. For instance, if you construct a road, always start from the end point and construct backwards to the source of connection. Then everyone will participate until the end. But if you start from the source towards the end, those who begin to benefit drop off from the cause and course, weakening and abetting mission failure.

The first in the queue often cannot believe their luck and turn that disbelief into a right to the privilege, spending their time justifying why they deserved to have been privileged and undermining the cause and course of the mission. Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) in its different vintages deserves to be put to a Modisakgomo test.In interpreting the qualitative side of the survey, Modisakgomo’s context of what it takes to stay the cause and course of development challenges was instructive. This takes me to China. Aspects of the Chinese model of ‘ground-truthing’ development are relevant. 

The Chinese design their development mission by testing their ideas in the worst-case geographies, assessing the veracity of these thoughts and processes in those environments, and debriefing their efforts. When such a model succeeds under those conditions, they know it is just a matter of replication and workable adaptations for adoption in either a centralised or devolved environment. This approach creates astronomical value in development.

On the quantitative side, I drew a sample of several households and had markers that defined them. However, to my horror, I realised that the natural innate human power of global positioning, inherent in living organisms, has been weakened by assistive devices such as addresses on dwellings and other markers.

I could not believe my misfortune when a marker for a dwelling I listed to investigate had disappeared, along with the notion of knowing which house structure it was. My marker was an old Volkswagen (VW) Kombi that was sitting on stumps, so the possibility of that moving was near zero—at least not within a week of identifying it. 

But alas, my luck failed me. After driving several times up and down, I gained the courage to ask whether there was a Kombi at the household, and they said yes, there was, but it had been removed four days ago. 

With that knowledge, I was able to conclude my study.The results of my investigation were disappointing but unsurprising. The lens of Modisakgomo was clear. There were neither backward nor forward linkages across mining, agriculture, and tourism in this area that had the best of these three economic attributes. The clear benefit, albeit at a clerical level of employment, was in the tourism industry, drawn as labour from the surrounding communities. This, however, had truly little by way of inter-industry benefit, which is the force of development. The convergence of all this was externalised to  Gauteng, where these three industries converged.

This reminds me of how the sewerage that ran down my street for weeks on end served as a locational attribute that uniquely identified my house. While the benefits of the sewerage converged and pooled at the lower end, its source was located right in front of my dwelling. I was able to direct visitors by the human-waste product stream and say to them, “Follow the stream of sewage; where it oozes from, which is the manhole in front of my house, that is where my house is.”

Fortunately, the sewage identifier was as temporary as the VW Kombi—it has disappeared, and I pray it will never return. But what should prevail is the interlocking and internalisation of the benefits of backward and forward linkages of mining, agriculture, and tourism in the Bojanala District of the North West Province. This is a design that Modisakgomo’s economics of development suggested.

Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, a board member of the Institute for Economic Justice at Wits, and a distinguished alumnus of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa.

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