Wild Coast communities resort to court over toll road resettlement

Communities along the Wild Coast living in ecologically pristine areas which will be intersected by the controversial N2 toll road have resorted to court over what they believe is the unlawful treatment they have suffered at the hands of the SA National Road Agency (Sanral).

They want Sanral’s conduct in failing to draft a detailed relocation action plan (RAP), before it attempts to resettle communities and assets living in the path of the new toll road, to be declared unlawful and unconstitutional.

The N2 Wild Coast toll road project, which starts in East London and ends near Durban, has been vigorously opposed by affected rural communities in the so-called pristine and ecologically sensitive Greenfields section of the Wild Coast.

At the forefront of those objecting is the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) represented by Richard Spoor attorneys and the Legal Resources Centre.

Members of the ACC are asking the Gauteng high court to direct forestry, fisheries & environmental department director-general Nomfundo Tshabalala to issue a compliance notice to Sanral setting out how Sanral had violated its own environmental authorisation by resettling communities and assets without a detailed RAP.

They want the court to order her to issue a directive forbidding the road agency from resettling any further communities or assets without submitting a detailed plan to the DG that complies with international best practice.

Octogenarian and elder of the Umgungundlovu community Mashona Wetu Dlamini, who lives in Sigidi less than a kilometre from the N2 road reserve, sets out in a lengthy affidavit the communities’ running battles with Sanral over its failure to consult them or plan around issues which would dramatically affect their way of life. 

He said he and 20 other individuals were bringing the application in their personal capacities and on behalf of residents of Sigidi, Mdatya and Bekela villages, as well as members of the Umgungundlovu community, in the public interest, and in the interest of protecting the environment.

He said Umgungundlovu was an area of “immense natural beauty” and his community enjoyed the right to use and occupy “this stunning, fertile land” through which Sanral sought to build the N2 Wild Coast Toll Road .

“This would take land from the community and scythe the Umgungundlovu villages of Sigidi, Mdatya  and Bekela in half” with devastating impact if not carefully mitigated.

Sanral’s own social impact assessment revealed that if the road were developed without built-in mitigation, the effect on communities would include landlessness, homelessness, joblessness, economic and social marginalisation, increased morbidity and mortality, food insecurity, loss of access to common property resources, and social and cultural disruption.

“To ‘mitigate’ these harms, Sanral’s consultants recommended that Sanral be obliged to prepare a comprehensive RAP.”

This had never happened, he said, before communities and their assets were disrupted.

“This is having devastating consequences for communities.”

He said the land had sustained them for generations through crops, natural resources, seafood and tourism, and was central to their identity as a community.

“We are gravely concerned about the negative impacts of slicing our community in two with a toll road without a resettlement action plan. The environmental department has declined to fulfil its duty to ensure Sanral complies with the environmental authorisation.”

Spoor said the case was only likely to be argued some time in 2022.

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