April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

negotiators were already criticized by G77 climate leader Lumumba Di-
Aping for having ‘actively sought to disrupt the unity of the Africa bloc.’
One SA official, Joanne Yawitch, then forced a humiliating apology from
Di-Aping for his frank talk (to an African civil society caucus), as reported
by Noseweek blogger Adam Welz.
Yet by joining the presidents of the US, China, Brazil and India to sign the
2009 Copenhagen Accord, Zuma did exactly what Yawitch had denied was
underway: destroyed the unity of Africa and the G77 in a secret, widelycondemned
side-room deal.
US President Barack Obama’s Kenyan family and Zuma’s Zulu compatriots
would be amongst those most adversely affected by climate chaos, as
suggested by recent KwaZulu flooding. Di-Aping asked, poignantly, ‘What is
Obama going to tell his daughters? That their relatives’ lives are not worth
anything?’ Di-Aping quite accurately described the Copenhagen Accord as
‘an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a
few countries.’
In Copenhagen and Cancun, the main diversionary tactic used by Pretoria
negotiators was a claim to willingly cut 34 percent of 2020 emissions below
‘business as usual’. However, Tristen Taylor of Earthlife Africa begged
Pretoria for details about the 34 percent pledge, and after two weeks of
delays in December 2009, learned Yawitch’s estimates were from a
‘Growth Without Constraint’ (GWC) scenario used by government
negotiators as a bargaining chip, and was quite divorced from the reality
of the industrially stagnant SA economy.
According to Taylor, ‘GWC is fantasy, essentially an academic exercise to
see how much carbon South Africa would produce given unlimited
resources and cheap energy prices.’ Officials had already conceded GWC
was ‘neither robust nor plausible’ eighteen months ago, leading Taylor to
conclude, ‘The SA government has pulled a public relations stunt.’
And again at the 2010 COP 16 in Cancún, the new Minister for Water and
Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa, played the ‘development’ card
against urgent binding emissions cuts: ‘We believe that it is quite
important that as developing countries we also get an opportunity to allow
development to happen because of poverty.’
Molewa implies that SA’s extremely high emissions contribute to povertyreduction,
when in fact the opposite is more truthful. Eskom’s supply of
the cheapest electricity in the world to two of the biggest mining/metals
companies in the world (BHP Billiton and Anglo American Corporation)
requires a 127 percent price increase for ordinary households from 2009-12
to pay for new capacity. This is leading to mass electricity disconnections.
Did Zuma know what he was doing, authorizing a climate policy that serves
major corporations instead of his mass base? Do these firms keep SA’s
ruling party lubricated with cash, Black Economic Empowerment deals and
jobs for cronies? Do they need higher SA carbon emissions so as to continue
receiving ultra-cheap coal-fired electricity, and then export their profits to
London and Melbourne?
Perhaps the answers are affirmative, but on the other hand, two other
explanations – ignorance and cowardice – were, eight years earlier, Zuma’s
plausible defenses for promoting AIDS denialism. He helped President
Thabo Mbeki during the period in which 330,000 South Africans died due to
Pretoria’s refusal to supply anti-retroviral medicines, as a Harvard Public