By James Hall
PIGG'S PEAK, Swaziland, Apr 10 2002 (IPS)

This week when South Africa’s Deputy President Jacob Zuma placed his hand on a control switch with Swazi King Mswati III, the pressure they exerted on the lever sent a thunderous release of water cascading out of the new Maguga Dam.

The act symbolised a mutual effort that made possible the kingdom’s largest public works project, which will benefit both nations.

Zuma is the second highest-ranking official of a democratically elected government, while King Mswati is in the 16th year of his reign as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy.

The large and populous South Africa, the region’s economic powerhouse, and tiny landlocked Swaziland, a peaceful traditional kingdom where two-thirds of a population of less than one million persons live in poverty, are quite different places.

But as South Africa’s trade minister Alec Erwin says, “We cannot think of improving South Africa’s economy unless this is within the context of a more prosperous region.”

King Mswati’s government knows that a small nation with limited resources must align itself with regional and international organisations, from the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) to the United Nations, to obtain development aid and trade agreements aimed at poverty alleviation.

The Maguga Dam is all about jobs. The project will directly benefit 450,000 people by providing irrigation water for agricultural schemes, create employment in tourism initiatives centred around a 1042-hectare fresh water lake, and more jobs at a hydro-generation power plant.

Said Zuma, “Many developing countries are facing a dilemma of balancing the issues of preserving our beautiful ecosystem with the demands made by our people who live in abject poverty.”

King Mswati noted the weather was consistent with traditional beliefs that the ancestors bless an undertaking by a show of rain: “At our ceremony to launch the construction it rained heavily and we all wore overcoats, and now the sun is shining brightly.”

He then urged Swazis to use the dam opportunity to become entrepreneurs.

Downstream in the Lubombo District, a dozen farmers’ cooperatives have been formed to receive the 83 million cubic metres of irrigation water the dam will provide.

Government hopes these cooperatives, in which peasant homesteads combine their small landholdings for sugar cane and vegetable cultivation for the export market, will turn impoverished farmers into business people.

The Maguga is the first of four projected dams intended to harness the Komati River, which flows into Swaziland’s northwest sector from South Africa and exits the kingdom, returning to South Africa, in the eastern lowveld.

Although the river is lined by thousands of peasant farms, it has not been tapped for its irrigation potential, and crops, principally the national staple food maize, depend on rain. When rains do not fall, as happened mid-summer this year, the resulting crop failures can lead to the current food shortage crisis.

South Africa, which raised 60 percent of the R1.1 billion (around 96 million U.S. dollars) project, will receive the remainder of the dam’s 332 million cubic metre storage capacity.

To conserve as much of that water as possible from disappearing through evaporation, which is a common problem for large dams, the Maguga reservoir has been designed to have a narrow surface area. Rising 115 metres, the 870 metre-long dam is the fourth largest dam in the Southern Africa region.

South Africa has the three largest dams – the Driekoppies, Vaal and Bloemhof. Of the four, water waste through evaporation will be less at the Maguga.

Construction of the dam gave a temporary reprieve to Swaziland’s moribund mining industry by requiring 150,000 cubic tones of crushed stone from local quarries. The 2000 construction jobs for Swazis were significant in a nation with a 45 percent unemployment rate. Government hopes temporary construction jobs are replaced by permanent employment in tourism and agriculture.

Immediately benefiting from the dam will be the impoverished northern Hhohho region, a neglected backwater since the end of gold mining there a century ago. 70 percent of area farms illegally cultivate high-grade marijuana that is in demand in Johannesburg and in European countries like Holland.

Agriculture ministry field workers are instructing small landholders how to use the new supply of irrigation water to raise cash crops that are an alternative to illegal drug cultivation.

At the dam dedication, Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini says the dam’s hydroelectric generating capacity can meet 50 percent of Swaziland’s electricity needs. This would lessen Swaziland’s dependency on South Africa, where 90 percent of Swaziland’s electricity is imported from the power utility ESKOM. But first the plant has to be constructed.

Some residents close to the dam are feeling some insecurity over the project. “Conservative people like Swazis can be superstitious,” says Mfanakhona Nsibandze, whose family homestead was relocated before the area was flooded for the dam. “People are afraid the dam will be a home for a big monster called the Seven-headed Snake.”

As rumours of the monster’s arrival were reported in the Swazi press, the Komati Basin Water Authority that constructed the dam assured residences that no evidence of the snake, said to be the size of a tanker truck, has surfaced.

If the monster should appear, however, prospects that the Maguga dam will become a tourist draw will be considerably improved.

“It will be an African Loch Ness,” predicts Nsibandze.

Lock Ness Monster is the name given to a very large animal, supposed to live in Loch Ness – a large, very deep lake in Scotland – which people say does not look like any other animal alive today.

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