The Ocean View Fisher Blues

Part two

By Mandy de Waal and Jon Pienaar. Photos by Jon Pienaar.
11 February 2015

Fishers in Ocean View blame their community representatives and cadre deployment for bedevilling their ability to make a decent living.

Read part one, if you missed it.

It is a blazing weekday afternoon at the Witsand boat launch area, a few kilometres from Ocean View and about midway between Kommetjie and Scarborough. Cars hitched to empty trailers populate the parking lot, and a group of fishers sit on the periphery looking out to sea. This is the launch point for Ocean View's fishers.

There are two subjects that keep the fishers earnestly engaged in conversation. The first is someone called ‘the teacher’. The second is the poaching drama that unfolded a couple of hours earlier. “You’re a bit late,” says one fisher with a laugh. “The police were just here to arrest some poachers. You missed all the action.”

“Poaching won’t stop until people get rights. They are forcing people to poach,” says another fisher who adds: “What must we do to get money if we don’t have permits? Work in your garden for R50?”

Carlo Daniels arrives over the dunes with an elderly rasta man and says the man who was arrested is his younger brother Lawrence Daniels. “My grandfather and my grandmother had sex here. I came from here. My father died in 1984 and my little brother was born a month after,” says Carlo.

A few minutes later an aging Nissan pulls up and more rastas get out, their long dreadlocks swinging around their frame as they walk towards Daniels to join him. “My brother says he will go to jail -- he doesn’t care. Who will feed him or his family if he doesn’t fish? We don’t have permits. We must just hang around here for the handouts. My daughter won’t even look at me because I can’t buy her a school blazer,” he says, animatedly.

Carlo Daniels says his brother doesn't care if goes to jail for poaching. "Who will feed him or his family if he doesn’t fish?" he asks.

“The government doesn’t care, they don’t come here to see what’s going on. And she [Daniels points at a woman, sitting in a parked, newish sedan in the parking lot], she doesn’t give us work on their boats. Everything is for her brothers and her uncles. They give us nothing,” Daniels says. He then explains that the person he’s referring to is Louise Hendricks, the women people here call ‘the teacher’.

Other fishers chime in saying that Hendricks sits apart. She is not one of them. “Ek se maar niks (I will keep my mouth closed), but these people know nothing about fishing. She is a teacher and her father worked in the navy. But like the monitors she don’t know about crayfish. The DAFF (Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) monitors are even too scared to pick the crayfish up. Maybe I must take one and put it in their broeks (underwear).” The group roars with laughter. Another fisher says DAFF’s leadership consists of people who don’t even know the difference “between a mackerel and a perlemoen”. There’s even more laughter.

The rastas and the fishers here are predominantly from Ocean View, a town seven minutes drive from Witsand. The area together with Simon’s Town, Glencairn, Scarborough, Froggy Pond and Miller’s Point makes up Ward 61. 16,112 voters are registered in this ward, of which 75,2% participated in the 2014 National Elections. The outcome was an overwhelming victory for the DA with a majority of 83%.

The DA maintains that DAFF's approach, which is to grant fishing rights to communities by way of community representatives rather than to individual fisherman, is politically tainted, and has led to tremendous hardship in coastal communities. “DAFF often unilaterally appoints community representatives, people who are ANC-aligned. The biggest problem with this, is the manner in which interim lists are being manipulated to include ANC cadres and exclude some traditional fishermen,” says Zelda Jongbloed, a former Naspers journalist who is now the DA's Deputy Shadow Minister for Agriculture.

“Interim relief, licenses and quotas remain a source of bitter discontent in communities, with traditional fishers complaining that they have been excluded on the whims of so called community reps and people with the right political credentials and no history in the industry, having been included. The problems will continue as long as the interim relief system is in place and names are dropped and included willy-nilly and often illegally,” says Jongbloed.

The DA Fisheries spokesperson explains that DAFF’s approach of granting fishing rights to communities by way of community representatives rather than to individual fisherman has led to tremendous hardship in coastal communities. “DAFF, often unilaterally, appoints community representatives - people who are ANC aligned. The biggest problem with this, is the manner in which interim lists are being manipulated to include ANC cadres and exclude some traditional fishermen. Fishermen not aligned to the ANC complain about their struggles to get access to the names on the list.”

Shaheen Moolla, chief executive of the fisheries advisory company, Feike, explains how cadre deployment is diminishing fishers’ quotas. “In the name of broadening access to the fisheries sectors over the years since 1994, Government sliced the fishing ‘pie’ into smaller and smaller quotas – in 1994 there were some 400 fishing rights compared to the more than 3000 today, excluding the 2,000 interim relief lobster quotas. During the early 2000’s, government began a deliberate attempt of expanding the number of fisheries and identified 12 new possible fisheries to be opened between 2004 and 2008,” he says.

“Unfortunately, none of this has been done, but unsustainable and populist policies has meant granting more and more people access to fisheries. It is this that has caused the collapse of every single one of our nearshore fisheries, from abalone, lobster, the trek net fisheries and the oldest fishery in the country – traditional linefish,” says Moolla, adding: “Fisheries is in a mess… Fisheries management in SA has imploded, and I don’t say that lightly,” stresses Moolla.

Fishing quotas were chaotically and quickly pushed through by DAFF on 30 December 2013 (when fishing quotas that were in place for 8 years were to expire the next day, on the 31st). Amid an outcry and protests, Cape fishing communities said then Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, Tina Joemat-Pettersson, was sentencing them to starvation; the SA Commercial Linefish Association took out an urgent interdict against DAFF; while trade union federation Cosatu said: “old apartheid beneficiaries and black lawyers and teachers, who received rights after apartheid and had no links to the industry,” had benefitted.

“Thousands of jobs were lost in the rights allocation debacle – quotas were allocated to people who don’t know how to fish, who have no boats, who are based in Johannesburg, or who are political relatives of the ANC,” says Moolla, who adds that ANC Speaker for the Cape Agulhas Municipality, Eve Martinus, and her family were awarded line fishing rights. The Sunday Times reported that former Cape Flats 28s gang boss Ernie ‘Lastig’ Solomon was also controversially allocated line fishing rights.

Joemat-Pettersson responded by offering a period to appeal the process, and embarked on what was called ‘a listening tour’ to hear the concerns of communities before the appeals process commenced. In mid-May 2014 an independent investigation found that the rights allocation process was flawed, and would never withstand judicial review.

Led by legal expert Prof Halton Cheadle and Harris Nupen Molebatsi Attorneys, the audit found that DAFF’s key decision-maker and acting director deputy director general, Desmond Stevens, refused to explain how he came to allocate fishing rights to applicants. There were no records of minutes of meetings where applications were discussed. The report never revealed evidence of unlawful decision making, corruption, or irregularities in the rights allocation process for eight fisheries managed by DAFF, but the report stated that allegations were referred to an unspecified higher authority.

Some fishers share cars, which are vital to their work, and are for the most part very old and in poor shape.

The woman known as ‘the teacher’, Louise Hendricks was approached by DAFF to assist with organising fishers in her community in the early 2000’s. She lives in one of the better houses on the block, three fishing boats are parked on the property and workers are busy building on in the yard. A youth working with the builders jumps over the fence and walks up to our vehicle, and sticks his head in the window.

“What are you doing here, what do you want? Have you come for the kreef [the crayfish],” he asks. “Write my story. Everyone must know about my living conditions,” he demands and starts shouting for Hendricks who walks out and scowls at him.

Inside, we sit around the dining room table where Hendricks relays her family history. “My ancestors were the pioneers of the net trekkers on the coast near Glencairn and Simonstown,” says Hendricks. “Since the age of three years old we have been involved in selling fish, and trying to stay alive. But when my grandfather became ill and died we lost the rights of the beach,” she says.

Hendricks’s family were forcibly resettled in Ocean View in 1967. “We were the first lot of people that were moved from Klein Vishoek on the trucks to Ocean View. I was about three at the time. In Ocean View everything was different. There was a bus that would take our mothers to go and work as domestic servants, and we had to go to the rocks to survive. We would take mussels and see if we can get fish in plastic packets. We would pick sour figs. So we know what it is like to struggle to survive. That is why I don’t want anyone to tell me I have got no right to be in this industry,” Hendricks says emphatically.

“My mother died and all of them died without fishing rights and I said to myself: I am going to make sure that this will not be a repeat where my whole family loses everything. There is a new generation and all our family is involved in the fishing. It is their heritage and they have the right to be involved in the fishing industry, so I don’t care what Charles America said,” she says in response to America’s allegations.

Hendricks explains that DAFF came to Ocean View and that when fishers didn’t know how to apply for rights, she was asked to help. “The fisherman didn’t know how to apply for the fishing rights. DAFF called me. They came out to see me and they said can’t I establish an association and then I can assist them to apply for their permit? That was years ago, shortly after democracy. I assisted most of the fishers, even though they won’t acknowledge it, but it was through me that they got their permits. I am not taking credit for it because for me it was a calling; I feel good that I could help make a difference to people’s lives and help put food on their tables,” Hendricks explains.

“I am a representative and a community leader. I am representing my community and my fishers. But my name is not on the list. I am only the caretaker of the permits. The fishers voted me in because they have faith in me, and this is what Charles America doesn’t like,” says Hendricks, adding that she was instrumental in obtaining boats from the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) to help set up co-ops for those who weren’t able to afford their own vessels.

“I am on the beach when they go to the sea to see how many kilos they offload, to see that they don’t overcatch, and to make sure that everybody takes out his rightful allocations. I report to the monitors on the beach and also to DAFF,” says Hendricks explaining how community-based permits for small scale fishers work. Hendricks isn’t paid for doing this; she says she does it to “empower” her community, but her husband is a fisher as are most of her family members.

Moenieba Isaacs lives in Glencairn. She is a southern Cape Peninsula fisheries research expert, who grew up in Ocean View. She is a senior researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) and points out that the quota system has benefited what she calls ‘local elites’ in Ocean View.

Louise Hendricks in orange on the right, offered us crayfish. Ocean View fishers call her "the teacher".

“Louise was a teacher so she had more skills to put rights applications together, to put groups together. She was seen as a leader in Ocean View, positioned to help the fishers, and then it became a matter of my brother, my children, my sister and her children. Ultimately it became about (Louise Hendricks) developing her family,” says Isaacs.

“I question the notion of democracy here because so much is about literacy and who can talk in meetings. I have been to those meetings. People will elect you because you are literate,” Isaacs explains. “You need to be able to read and write to be able to know what is going on and to take control, but there is a big literacy gap in Ocean View. This is what disables fishers from fully realising opportunities and taking advantage of the process,” she says.

“What I see is that people use a combination of political, social and literacy skills to get fishing rights,” says Isaacs. This means, she explains, that the local elite within the community get the best benefit and the power. “People who are shop owners or teachers took the rights, and in effect became rights-grabbers. Let’s face it: these people have grabbed the rights from people who are (and who were) fishing for a livelihood. That is what I think is unfair,” Isaacs says.

Asked to respond to the allegations of cadre deployment and using marine resources as a means of welfare for votes, Fisheries spokesperson, Lionel Ardendorf says, “To date, DAFF has not received any official complaint about the credentials of any particular right-holder and we have not been furnished with any proof to this claim and have only learnt about this through media reports.”

“DAFF does not elect the representative(s) of a fishing community but instead, DAFF assists communities by facilitating meetings and by holding elections for representatives. Representatives are elected and vetted by DAFF on a simple majority vote of the fishers. The political affiliation of the representative is of no significance or consequence to DAFF,” states Adendorf.

But the Witsand fishers say that Adendorf is speaking nonsense. “Money is the biggest evil in the world,” says an older fisher who doesn’t want his name to be given. He points to the concrete ramp that fishers use to access the sea. “Louise Hendricks and her family built that ramp, and it is too narrow. The fishers struggle to get in and out of the sea. If she was truly from a fishing family she would have known what she was doing,” he says bitterly.

A DAFF official writes a warning for a captain who failed to inform the chief inspector that his boat was going out to sea.

A boat associated with Louise Hendricks comes in from the sea. On board is a catch of crayfish destined for a local processing factory based in Witsand. DAFF monitors approach the vessel and scold the captain for not informing the chief inspector that the boat was going to sea, as was required by law. An official warning is written out and issued. As this goes down, refrigerated trucks drive in to load the lobster. All the catches are destined for big companies and export. No locals will be eating from these catches tonight.

Hendricks pulls two crayfish from the boat and offers it to the GroundUp reporters. “Do you want two?” she asks. We decline. That’s when a man in a pair of wet tracksuit pants approaches Hendricks. He’s been swimming out to the boats and helping to try guide them in, his pants often falling off during the task.

He’s now knotted the pant’s waistband in an attempt to keep them up. “Teacher, teacher, what about me?” he screams. “Come on teacher. Give us a chance. Give me a try. I need something, teacher.” Like the Rastas and other locals without permits he hangs around the fringes of Witsand hoping for a quick job or a handout, or anything that will put fish on the table.