The 4u2fish campaign needs your help, especially your moral support and associated open discussions about environmental rights, duties and obligations of yourself and those around your neighborhoods.
I know we often talk of Environmental rights, but who talks about your Environmental obligations ?
Failure of our local municipalities to understand our Environmental obligations means that this important interpretation of environmental law is not discussed and considered during spatial development public participation processes meetings at local municipality levels.
Now the IWPA or iSimangaliso Wetland Park Authority falls into three of the four local municipalities of the Umkhanyakude district Municipality, which makes matters complicated, but the fact that the IWPA has influenced parliamentary stake holders into declaring a special District Management Area or DMA complicates matters even more.
The question to be asked here is "was this legal manoeuvre to separate the IWPA MANAGEMENT ISSUES from the influence of local municipality IDP processes, coz from our perspective, there was no public participation process involved in the preparation and legislative procedure involved in getting these issues through the parliamentary voting process, before being passed as laws.
To date, we are not aware of a single challenge to these rather nasty actions, which have given the IWPA much more powers than They should be allowed. Currently, the IWPA side steps many legally challenging issues, because they do not include local municipality zoning in their planning and management STRATEGIES.
The IWPA also uses these same arguments to side step district Municipality and KZN provincial planning structures. The IWPA does not even report to any national government department, but reports directly to the office of the state president. This makes planning a very difficult activity within the fishing industries associated with our natural renewable resources of Lake St. Lucia and the St. Lucia estuary systems. The St. Lucia estuary system accounts for more than 60 percent of the available estuarine fish breeding and nursery areas in South Africa.
The IWPA actually published a video discussing these issues, where they inform the world that there has been a rather serious biodiversity collapse, where the prawn fishing industry collapsed following the closure of the St. lucia nad Umfolozi estuarine mouths.
WE do need to remember that there was a two mouth policy, and what was the reason for the two mouth policy. When one investigates this just a little, one soon discovers that the two mouth policy was all about the sediment that came along with the Umfolozi Flood waters., and ensuring that the silt from the Umfolozi flood waters was drastically minimized due to the slowing down of the Umfolozi Flood waters in the Umfolozi Flood plains prior to this flood waters entering the greater St. Lucia estuarine lake systems in the northern sections of the greater St. Lucia wetlands park.
IN the post 2017 time frame, this silt reduction was eliminated because the Umfolozi flood waters then entered the northern sections of the St. Lucia lake systems at full flow speed, carrying vast volumes of silt into the northern sections of the St. Lucia lake systems. The question thus becomes where did this nasty silt drop out of the Umfolozi River Flood waters.
River silt is a strange issue, as the silt does not drop out evenly across the surface area that is flooded by the silt laden flood waters. The silt drops out at the specific location where the water slows down, and only the super fine silt moves off into the vast open spaces of the rest of the system.
This can be very confusing if one does not take just a little time to understand the issues at playhere.
Fast moving river flood waters can carry plenty of heavy silt, but slow movingving flood waters can not carry heavy silt. The color of the water is not the issue, but the volume of heavy silt deposited at the points where the water slows down is the real issue. The flood waters from the Umfolozi river flow rather fast up the St. Lucia narrows and slow down when the flood waters meet the still lake waters and then spread out and come to a very slow moving wide open space. This means that the Umfolozi Flood waters drop the heavy silt in a rather small space, and continue to drop out heavy silt in the same location as the lake level slowly raises.
The heavy silt thus produces / manufactures a silt wall where the Umfolozi Flood waters enter the lake system and fan out from a fast moving narrow stream into a very wide area where the flood water move rather sluggishly.. This continues for the duration of the incoming flood waters, for 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24 hours a day.
This silt wall has now become a nasty problem, coz the lake system now suffers an energy deficiency and can not move the rather large silt wall that remains in the system until it is mechanically removed (Dredged out / mechanically removed) this silt wall now prevents the lake system from interacting with the tidal influence of the ocean. No access for the marine species that breed within the lake systems is now impossible. Access to the ocean for prawns to migrate to their ocean based breeding grounds is also now an issue. This means that the juvenile recruitment of many different creatures is now a non issue. This means that these species that rely on the access routes to their breeding grounds have declined in numbers to such an extent that the food chain is now non functional and in dire need of human help.See this video
There are many qualified scientists who are truly ignorant and say that nature must take its course. These very stupid sceintists now need to please explain how the environment must restore or repair the serious damage caused by human interventions carried out when the GEF 2017 project connected the flood waters of the Umfolozi river to the lake system, deliberately and with criminal intent bypassing the natural filter systems in place prior to their interventions.
These same ignorant and stupid sceintific experts need tp please explain how they measured the silt volumes in the Umfolozi River flood waters, and why they ignored our requests to include this essential information in their estuary management plans.
The 4u2fish campaign needs your help to put political pressure on the IWPA to address these environmental concerns.
