4. The perspective of local communities on water use

a large number of poor, rural and often female headed households who use small amounts of groundwater, which can disappear, as it did in Mudimeli with even small disturbances to a groundwater level. It also includes irrigation farmers, small and large scale, who produce food and provide jobs, and are important to the national economy. There is also a substantial danger that these plans could be partially implemented with detrimental effects, which will disturb current water supply arrangements on irrigation scheme, municipal, farm and rural household scale.

Debates around water for the EMSEZ show a remarkably thorough scanning of water resources that may become available in the region. Old ideas and practices – for example storing Limpopo river water in off-channel dams – are also recycled in various forms. But it leaves us with a better understanding of what these resources are. They also show a typical refusal to accept the realities of a closed catchment – a catchment in which all available water resources are already allocated to users. It is typically in these conditions that water governance, through cooperation between water users in the catchment, in which they understand and accommodate each other, becomes an urgent priority. In fact, the DWS has recognised this principle, which was enshrined in the Water Act of 1998, by declaring that it is moving forward with the establishment of a Catchment Management Agency for the Limpopo. This important development will be taken up below.

This section focuses on cultural and religious significance of water and nature, and how that could influence debates on water aspects of the EMSEZ. It also focuses on the stakeholders physically closest to the proposed development, the Malumbwane clan. It is based on interviews in early 2021, plus documentation that became available since May 2020. Community perspectives often refer to a sacred bond between people of the Soutpansberg and the area they live in, particularly people of Venda descent. In the practice of vhoMphatheleni Makaulele of the Dzomo la Mupo (Voice of Nature) Foundation, for example, this is expressed in an original, indigenous knowledge of and relationship to nature.

In perhaps more immediate terms, the Malumbwane community is struggling to keep hold of the land which their Communal Property Association has won back through a process of land 31