South Africa’s Blue Economy threats to – and counter-threats from – society and ecology

Forthcoming in the Journal of Political Ecology, March 2019

By Patrick Bond1

Abstract
South Africa hosts Africa’s most advanced form of the new ‘Blue Economy’ cottage industry,
named ‘Operation Phakisa: Oceans.’ The McKinsey-designed project was formally launched
by now-disgraced President Jacob Zuma in 2014 with vibrant state and corporate fanfare.
Financially, its most important elements are anticipated to come from corporations
promoting vast shipping investments, a new generation of offshore oil and gas extraction
projects and seabed mining. However, these already conflict with underlying capitalist crisis
tendencies associated with overaccumulation, uneven development, commodity price
volatility and excessive extraction of resources – a metabolic intensification of capital-nature
relations – leaving Africa unable to afford further infrastructure investment. In opposition,
critics are demanding a greater state commitment to Marine Protected Areas, to sustainable
subsistence fishing and to post-fossil energy and transport infrastructure. In addition to
growing social opposition, South Africa has recently faced the ecological contradictions of
the Blue Economy, including extreme coastal weather events, ocean warming and
acidification (with threats to coral reefs and marine life), sea-level rise and plastic infestation
of water bodies and the shoreline. These processes already are in conflict with advocates of
eco-tourism as well as traditional elite and mass-market seaside tourism. Climate change is a
new factor on vulnerable coasts, and the use of climate-related argumentation against
rubber-stamped Environmental Impact Assessments is increasing, including against the main
Oceans Phakisa investor, state-owned Transnet and its funders in the China Development
Bank and Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa New Development Bank. All these
developments place even more weight upon civic action groups which desire a bottom-up
Blue Economy centred on sustainable coastal preservation, improved basic livelihoods, and a
‘Just Transition’ away from the fossil fuel complex. The combination of carbon-intensive
mega-projects, Blue Economy extractivism, and overaccumulation crisis tendencies
represent South African capitalism’s main threat to ocean and shoreline life in short- and
longer-term respects – and vice versa as climate damage rises. It is the interplay of these
top-down and bottom-up processes that will in coming years shape the Blue Economy
narrative, giving it either legitimacy, or the kind of illegitimacy already experienced in so
much South African resource-centric capitalism.

1
Wits School of Governance, Johannesburg, South Africa. A shorter version of this much-updated argument
was published as Masie, D. and P. Bond 2018. ‘Eco-capitalist crises in the ‘Blue Economy’: Operation Phakisa’s
small, slow failures,’ in V.Satgar (Ed), The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist
Alternatives, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2018.

1
1. Introduction

African coastlines show new signs of stress from an increasingly carbon- and plastic-
saturated ocean, but this pressure also offers local and global capitalism dangerous new
accumulation strategies. Pollution of the seas – one of nature’s main forms of sequestering
carbon dioxide (though less so as saturation points are reached) – has resulted in dangerous
levels of acidification, rising temperatures (hence more intense hurricanes and typhoons),
coral reef bleaching and loss of marine micro species. The dumping and leaching of plastics
and other pollutants that make their way to the ocean have become so prolific as to
threaten many species’ reproduction and the marine food chain. And as secondary plastics –
such as water bottles – fragment (due to ultraviolet rays) into microbial pieces of less than
five millimeters, they are then ingested by zooplankton and fish, responsible for a fifth of the
world’s protein consumption. As oceans become increasingly polluted, their economic
services in terms of fishing and tourism will fade, to be replaced by ever more extreme forms
of fossil fuel extraction and underwater mining.

As argued in the second section, below, blame can mainly be attributed to an extractivist,
hyper-speculative, debt-driven, mercantilist, eco-externality-riddled and climate-chaotic
economy now on the verge of a major crisis of overaccumulated capital. One recent
symptom of this (starting well before Donald Trump’s trade wards) is ‘deglobalisation,’ not
unlike prior episodes in the 1880s and 1930s. The most obvious evidence comes from the
collapsed Baltic Dry Index measuring the cost of international container shipping. One of the
main sites of dispute is South Durban, both because of oil and gas exploration by several of
the world’s largest oil companies, but also because of existing port expansion and the
prospect of a brand new port. South Durban already suffered from the impacts of unplanned
container growth and the demise of rail-based transport in favour of trucking – a major
threat in the once-residential (and now logistics-centred) neighbourhood of Clairwood.
Moreover, in 2017 extensive Transnet corruption was revealed involving a Chinese supplier
of container-lifting cranes and locomotives, funded (through a $5 billion credit) by the China
Development Bank. In mid-2018, just as Transnet’s chief executive was losing his job for
Chinese- and Indian-related corruption, the parastatal gained a $200 million loan from the
Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa New Development Bank for further expansion.
Transnet began preparing the harbour for a new wave of massive ships, even though
container volumes had been steady at around 2.5 million units annually for many years.

All of these features of inappropriate ocean-based mega-project development were justified

starting in 2014 by then President Jacob Zuma’s “Operation Phakisa: Ocean Economy”
project. It became clear that the state’s urge to capitalise on emerging ‘Blue Economy’
rhetoric to attract multinational corporate investment soon became central to these
problems. For example, the seductive character of massive ocean-based trade and
investment was on display at Durban’s oldest local country club on November 10, 2016. It
was a slick event, by no means a tawdry sales pitch, yet the lines of argument made by the
host were identical to those trotted out mindlessly in similar settings: investor-seeking port
cities across the African continent and world. China’s map of the ‘One Belt One Road,’ ends
in East Africa.2 Yet the spectre of massive new Beijing-subsidised port construction up and

2
That strategy highlights Djibouti, site of China’s new army base and export rail line stretching to Addis Ababa;
Lamu and Mombasa in Kenya which are generating hot controversies over heritage destruction, carbon-
2
down the Indian and Atlantic Oceans – in Maputo, Mozambique; Richards Bay and Nelson
Mandela Bay, South Africa; and Walvis Bay in Namibia – petrifies Durban’s elites, fearful of
losing out – and not shy about using these threats to serve their own interests. Repeated
events of this sort in port cities suggest an excessive commitment to what David Harvey
(1989) terms “interurban entrepreneurial competition.”

Figure 1: South Durban port-petrochemical complex expansion plans

Source: Transnet

At the country club, the KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) provincial leader, Willies Mchunu (2016),
wined and dined 21 European and Asian ambassadors and embassy officials, and leading
business representatives. In spite of growing criticism from environmentalists, corruption
critics and South Durban residents, Mchunu (2016) spoke glowingly of Durban’s port
expansion (Figure 1):

The estimated $18 billion plan is aimed at meeting the rapid need for shipping container
capacity at Durban port, which services most of the country. The development and
expansion of the ports are of national importance and a key pillar of the Presidential
Infrastructure Coordinating Commission’s Strategic Infrastructure Project Two, and also
part of the National Planning Commission’s National Development Plan (NDP), which
looks forward to 2030. Durban’s port can accommodate 2.9 million containers, but its

intensity and foreign debt; and Bagamoyo in Tanzania, where a $12 billion planned investment could become
Africa’s largest container port, if Chinese marketing is to be believed. See Figure 6
3
 expansion and a new excavated port would increase its capacity to more than 20 million.
Transnet, the agency responsible for the ports, is predicting that at an 8 percent annual
growth rate in containers coming through the port, the existing infrastructure will reach
its limit in 2019 and a lack of container capacity will hamper economic growth.

Mchunu’s pitch and indeed the NDP’s underlying logic were profoundly flawed.3 As shown
below, not only is there is absolutely no chance to raise annual goods traffic in Durban from
2.5 million at present to 20 million containers by 2040. To the contrary, a broader process of
‘deglobalisation’ is setting in as the ratio of trade to economic growth declines, negating the
city’s vision for future mercantilist prosperity (Bond 2017). Still, Mchunu’s appeal for foreign
direct investment (FDI) in a port-petrochemical complex today dominated by Shell, BP and
the Malaysian-owned Engen is fanciful, but also dangerous.

The Durban mega-project joins another $55 billion NDP plan to rehabilitate rail lines and
expand the coal terminal at the main port north of Durban, Richards Bay, already one of the
world’s largest, with 90 million tons annual capacity. The primary aim of that project – the
first priority of the NDP’s Presidential Infrastructure Coordinating Committee (PICC) – is to
export 18 billion tons of coal, of which currently nearly three quarters go to India and East
Asia, and a quarter to Europe. Local officials are offering sweetheart deals to transnational
corporate players in conjunction with Operation Phakisa: Oceans Economy. Phakisa –
meaning ‘hurry up’ in the local Sesotho language – is the nickname for a new South African
narrative: foreign firms will readily invest in the Blue Economy, seeking out sea-side
opportunities for capital accumulation (Masie and Bond 2018) (Figure 2).

Indeed, the extractivist mind-set was also evident at Phakisa’s 2014 birth in Durban’s
Riverside Hotel, just across the Umgeni River from the Durban Country Club. There, in an
unusual burst of bureaucratic planning over a six-week period, a ‘big fast results’
methodology gave birth to Phakisa. Zuma’s 2013 visit to Malaysia had introduced the
nomenclature, process and strategy to South Africa, and the international consultancy
McKinsey was chosen to manage the process.4 Zuma’s (2014) stated objectives of ‘growing’
ocean-related business activities focused primarily on shipping and offshore fossil fuel
exploration, as well as seabed mining and factory fishing (Republic of South Africa 2014). But
Phakisa strategies are running afoul of extremely volatile global economics. The conversion

3 The main problem with the NDP – which from 2009-14 was managed by former Finance Minister Trevor
Manuel and Cyril Ramaphosa (Zuma’s replacement as president) – was its fetish for corporate-led ‘extractivist’
growth. If natural assets are mainly considered useful for exploitation and consumption, a problem amplified
by Operation Oceans Phakisa, then “natural capital accounting” should be applied, as promised by South
African environment minister Edna Molewa in 2012 when she signed the Gaborone Declaration for
Sustainability in Africa (2012: 1). That document aims to “integrate the value of natural capital into national
accounting and corporate planning and reporting processes, policies, and programmes.” Since 2012, no efforts
have been taken to adjust the NDP or enforce the counting of resource depletion – because as argued below,
the results would militate against most South African and African extractive systems on economic grounds.
4
Within three years that firm came under attack because of its links to the notorious Gupta brothers, Indian
immigrants who had arranged scores of apparently corrupt deals with Zuma and his family. The opposition
centre-right Democratic Alliance filed a lawsuit against McKinsey for fraud, racketeering and collusion. The
kickback allegations were drawn from leaks within a damning Gupta-related email cache which is understood
to be genuine, and which by early 2018 appeared to have destroyed the three brothers’ South African financial
empire and led to Zuma’s premature firing by his own party, the African National Congress By early 2018, as
Zuma was pushed out of the presidency by Ramaphosa, the prosecutions of the network began in earnest.
4
of nature into capital and attempts at ‘deriving value’ (Zuma 2014) from ecosystem services
are also under increasing threat from climate change.

Figure 2: Scenes from Operation Phakisa: Oceans

Source: Operation Phakisa: Oceans (in mid-2014 the exchange rate was R11/$)

Instead of Operation Phakisa, a ‘Just Transition’ approach to decarbonising the ocean and
coastline is needed, against the neo-liberal, mercantilist, and climate-catastrophic mode of
Blue Economy capital accumulation in South Africa. Social resistance and environmental
barriers to Blue Economy accumulation are considered in the conclusion, following an
exploration of three aspects of capitalist contradictions: port investments during an era of
capital ‘overaccumulation,’ commodity price volatility and climate change. By way of
context, consider the essential problem for capital in the context of sustained
overproduction: deglobalisation, i.e., the retreat of of trade, cross-border finance and direct
investment as a result of having extended too far during the globalisation era. Then the first
question is whether the top priority Phakisa project – expanding shipping capacity – will
continue to disappoint.
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2. Overproduction, deglobalisation and shrinking shipping

One driving force behind corporate ocean-grabbing in Africa is the need for a ‘spatial fix’ to
address the generalized problem of overaccumulated capital, to use David Harvey’s (1982)
framework. As capital’s organic composition (ratio of machines to workers) rises due to the
inexorable pressure to become more productive, there is a tendency towards
overproduction (gluts of output, as well as labour and machinery, and the rate of profit
tends to decline. This in turn incentivizes the shift from producers’ profits into more
speculative activities, in the financial circuit of capital. But as for the spatial fix – the
territorial expansion of capital’s reach so as to – the ocean fix might be seen akin to ‘land-
grabbing’ in poor countries. That phenomenon was understood as mainly based on
agriculture, mining and petroleum extraction purposes during the commodity super-cycle
(Ferrando 2013) but after its 2011-15 peak, fell sharply and by 2016 had drawn to a close
(IMF 2018, 115).5

The problem of overaccumulated capital at the global scale appears mainly to be emanating
from two sources: real economy overproduction especially driven from China, and financial
economy over-indebtedness and speculation, found in nearly all the world’s stock and credit
markets. The latter may be the most important barrier, ultimately, to arranging the levels of
financing required for ocean-related infrastructure development, including new ports.
Remarked conservative journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (2018), “The world has never
been so leveraged, and therefore so sensitive to a monetary squeeze. The Institute of
International Finance says world debt reached 318 percent of GDP at the end of 2017, 48
percentage points higher than the pre-Lehman peak. Emerging market debt has jumped
from 145 percent to 210 percent.” Not only did Wall Street continue to hit unprecedented
highs, so too did stock markets bubble the BRICS: especially in South Africa (reaching a 2017
level of share value to GDP 90 percent higher than in 2010), India (70 percent) and Russia
(50 percent). China’s stock exchanges were in the same league, but just as the yuan was
made an IMF-acceptable global currency reserve in 2015, the mainland Chinese markets lost
more than $5 trillion in two share bubble bursts. Stabilising these markets required intense
reregulation of capital markets and other investment controls, an omen for the rest of the
worlds markets, especially given that the Trump tax cuts were not translating into higher
fixed investment but instead corporate stock buybacks and share price inflation.

But the underlying problem, the IMF (2017, 18) recorded, was China’s productive-sector
overcapacity: more than 30 percent in coal, non-ferrous metals, cement and chemicals by
2015; in each, China is responsible for 45-60 percent of world production. In attempting to
displace this capital, Chinese outward FDI rose by 21 percent in 2016 to $2.1 trillion

5
After the 2008 and 2011 peaks of the commodity super-cycle and subsequent price crashes (e.g. coal from
$170 to $60/ton in 2008, up to $120 in 2011 and down to $50/ton in 2016 before reviving to $100 in 2018), it
became evident that South Africa and too many of the continent’s other economies depend on mineral and oil
deposits whose extraction is dominated by transnational corporations and whose prices have been on a roller-
coaster since 2002. Even the ongoing drop in the value of the rand and nearly all other African currencies failed
to generate renewed competitiveness, business confidence or TNC investment in commodities; in 2017, South
African FDI fell 41 percent from 2016 levels (UNCTAD 2018: xiii). As for the oil price collapse, from $145 to
$26/barrel from 2008-16, it not only caused spectacular devaluation of capital and job losses for oil firms, it
also placed oil-dependent economies under immense stress, resulting in austerity.
6
(UNCTAD 2017, 18), as China became a net outward direct investor and indeed the second
largest global investor (after the U.S.), accounting for $183 billion in Chinese FDI. As the UN
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 2017, 14) put it, “Chinese multinational
enterprises invested abroad to gain access to new markets and to acquire assets that
generated revenue streams in foreign currency.” However, while OBOR presented
opportunities for the Chinese “Going Out” strategy, the rest of the world began suffering
deglobalisation, partly witnessed declining rates of foreign profits and the consolidation of
FDI, according to the UNCTAD 2018 World Investment Report. In 2017 there was a global FDI
decline of 23 percent, to $1.43 trillion (UNCTAD 2018, 1). New annual FDI had peaked at 5.3
percent of world GDP in 2007, and fell to just 2.4 percent in 2017, due, according to
UNCTAD, falling profits: “A decrease in rates of return is a key contributor to the investment
downturn. The global average return on foreign investment is now at 6.7 per cent, down
from 8.1 percent in 2012. Return on investment is in decline across all regions, with the
sharpest drops in Africa” (UNCTAD 2018: xii) (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Declining Foreign Direct Investment and cross-border finance (share of GDP)

Source: UNCTAD (2018)

Another reflection was declining rates of trade, which had peaked at 61 percent of world
GDP in 2012 and fell steadily to 2017’s 56 percent. Here, the BRICS suffered faster declines in
relative trade than the world as a whole. Russia peaked first at a 69 percent trade/GDP ratio
in 1999, and then fell steadily to 47 percent by 2017. Brazil peaked at 30 percent in 2004 and
bell to 28 percent in 2017. China peaked at 66 percent in 2006 and plummeted to 34
percent. South Africa peaked in 2008 with 73 percent and is now 58 percent, and India
peaked last, in 2012 with 56 percent, and is now down to 41 percent (World Bank 2018)
(Figure 4).

The Baltic Dry Index reflects this contraction, with adverse implications for Blue Economy
investments in port infrastruture. As the most reliable measure of container shipping
capacity and pricing, its movements are closely watched. At its worst, the Baltic Dry Index
7
decline exceeded ninety percent within six months, and the level of nearly 12,000 in 2008
fell to below 300 by early 2016. Vast shipping overcapacity came on line, forcing the 2016
scrapping of more than 1,400 dry bulk ships, 15 percent of the world fleet. The Index
subsequently rose back to the 1000 level but new capacity continued to threaten industry
upheaval, especially involuntary mergers and acquisitions.

Figure 4: Rise and fall of world and BRICS trade (imports and exports), 1997-2017:
High point ratio and 2017 ratio, as percent of GDP
75 South Africa; 73%
Russia; 69%

China; 64%
65 South Africa,
World; 61%
58 percent

India; 56%
55 World; 56%

Russia; 47%
45
India; 41%

35 China; 38%
Brazil; 30%

25 Brazil; 24%

15
1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017
Source: World Bank Data Catalogue

So-called ‘post-Panamax’ ships – carrying more than 5 000 containers (until 2015 the limits
of the size that fit through the Panama Canal) – came to dominate world shipping, to the
point that vessels with more than 10 000 containers were flooding the market; such
robotised ships carried only 13 crew. As these processes unfolded, Africa stood increasingly
exposed because relatively shallow berths characterise many of the continent’s ports .6 Bulk
shipping of commodities behaved similarly and indeed there is a close correlation between
Baltic Dry Index and commodity-heavy share price movements (Figure 5).

6
These shallow ports include South Africa’s largest – Durban – as well as the next three main port cities: East
London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. There are only three deep-water ports in South Africa that can
potentially handle the newer Supramax and Capesize ships (some now carrying 21,000 containers): Richards
Bay, Coega and Saldanha (all far from the major markets) (Pieterse et al. 2016). The shake-out of excess
capacity ahead will invariably be uneven, and create havoc for massive port construction projects that Chinese
state capital had promoted along its Maritime Silk Road. Globally, fifty ports have annual container throughput
of more than a million twenty-foot equivalent units, many of which are on the Chinese coast.
8
Figure 5: Baltic Dry Index (000s) and Standard&Poors Commodity Index, 2003-18

Source: Thompson Reuters

There is no hope of a decisive upturn, despite hype surrounding China’s ‘One Belt One Road’
(OBOR) mega-infrastructure projects (Figure 6). OBOR is touted for restoring some market
demand for construction-related commodities. However, at a deeper structural level, China
suffers from the apparent exhaustion of prior sources of profitability. These had included
“an expanding external market, a relatively large reserve army of labour, and a low debt-
income ratio,” according to Hao Qi (2017). The prior (2009-12) spatial fix of massive urban
infrastructure and housing construction was also soon exhausted, leaving exposed the
Chinese phenomenon known as Ghost Cities. The OBOR appears as a potential multi-trillion
dollar mirage, and one that may in the process even crack the BRICS, in the event the
Kashmir OBOR routing continues to cause extreme alienation between Xi Jinping and
Narendra Modi.

As Xin Zhang (2016) explained, “Although there is an element of US-China competition for
global hegemony behind the OBOR, the main driving force is the pressure from
overaccumulation in a typical capitalist economy when it approaches the end of a major
cycle of capitalist cyclic change.” As a result, remarks Zhang (2016), “there is also an ongoing
debate about whether it is economically rational to pour such huge amounts of money into
low-return projects and high-risk countries, especially in the case of massive infrastructural
projects.” While a major Sri Lankan port that suffered Chinese foreclosure is the main
example, there are similar stressful East African links to OBOR.7 Mega-projects that follow

7
These include a $5 billion Lamu port construction in Kenya now underway not far from the Somalia border.
The rail line will ostensibly link to South Sudan’s oil fields, but between civil war there and Al-Shabaab’s attacks
on Kenya (including kidnapping a top official when she was unveiling Lamu’s spatial plan in July), the project is
extremely risky. Indeed 2017 also witnessed widespread community protest by the groups Save Lamu, Cordio
East Africa and Muslims for Human Rights. Their targets included a $2 billion coal fired power plant, on grounds
of both local ecological damage and climate change (Business Daily Africa 2017). A bit further south, a $3.2
billion Nairobi-Mombasa rail line was recently built by China but dramatically raised both Kenya’s public debt
9
from such capital export – whether BRICS or Western in origin – are especially vulnerable
not only to such overinvestment and then cancellation, but also to corruption.

Figure 6: China’s One Belt One Road Initiative

Source: The Economist

3. South Africa’s vulnerability to Blue Economy exploitation

Phakisa is, we will observe, not worth the hype invested in its job creation or investment
potential, for reasons largely associated with global capitalist contradictions, but also local
South African resistance. Still, although FDI and trade-related capital might be scarce, thus
making it harder for investors to justify the Blue Economy ocean-grab, there is nevertheless
a countervailing force: increasing desperation associated with what might be considered the
quickening extractivist ‘metabolism,’ as Joan Martinez-Alier (2002) describes the neoliberal
era’s relations between global capital, local ruling classes, society and nature.

Just as neoliberalism began, the ocean-extractive sensibility was fostered in the 1982 United
Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, giving priority to capital’s geopolitical and

and foreign debt. A $3.6 billion Uganda-Tanzania oil pipeline is planned, and Ethiopian sweat-shop
manufacturing (also Chinese-financed) can now be exported directly via a $4 billion Addis Ababa-Djibouti
railroad. Also in Tanzania in October 2017, China’s main port builder – China Merchants Holdings International
– took over project ownership and financing responsibility for the $12 billion Bagamoyo port and Industrial
Development Zone, once the Tanzanian president had pulled back on his predecessor’s support due to
austerity (Kangethe 2017). Once complete, the port will handle ten times more containers than nearby Dar es
Salaam harbor, allegedly becoming Africa’s largest (Shepard 2017). Similar rail lines from ports to mines are
planned, along with refurbishment of the Chinese TanZam rail line dating back a half-century. In Mozambique,
there are major Chinese and Indian investments in Maputo and Beira (the latter mainly for coal exports), while
South Africa has vast Chinese port and rail investments in Richards Bay (also for coal) and Durban. On the
Atlantic Coast, there are another ten major port expansions, though their economic sustainability remains
questionable.
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property-right imperatives. Dating to the 17th century’s ‘freedom of the seas’, inter-state
agreements on the extension of sovereign territorial coastline rose from three nautical miles
(4.8 km, a cannon shot’s distance) to today’s twelve nautical miles (22.2 km). Nearly all
national states with coastlines made attempts to colonise ocean areas for the sake of fish
stocks and engaging in minerals exploitation, reaching out from the shoreline a full 200
nautical miles (370 km), where countries claim control over all marine resources, oil, gas and
minerals.

South Africa’s reach extends beyond immediate mainland borders into an area 1.5 million
square kilometres large (including loosely-affiliated distant islands). The Petroleum Agency
of South Africa acknowledges that “much of the extended claim is in very deep water, more
than 2.5 km, where hydrocarbon, gas hydrates, minerals and placer deposits are thought to
exist” (SA Info 2006). The very depths of the terrain include trenches four kilometers below
the treacherous Agulhas Current offshore Durban. Rumoured to be full of oil and gas, like
much of the rest of the nearly 3 000 kilometre long coastline, these new opportunities are
being assessed by the world’s largest oil companies, in this case the US climate-denialist-
funding corporation ExxonMobil and Norway’s Statoil in one block, and next door in another,
Italy’s ENI and the formerly South African (now New York-centric) oil-from-gas producer
Sasol. In early 2019, Total discovered deposits of oil and gas with an estimated $80 billion
value. According to Phakisa planners, “South Africa has possible resources of 9 billion barrels
oil and 11 billion barrels of oil equivalent of gas” amounting to 40 and 375 years,
respectively, of local consumption (Republic of South Africa, 2014: 1, 11) (Figure 7).

Figure 7: South Africa’s fossil fuel reserves including offshore oil and gas exploration blocks

Source: PetroSA

In Durban, lending and locomotive acquisition (both from China) implicating the South
African parastatal Transnet in mark-ups to cronies of Zuma. The same corrupt nexus
emerged from the Gupta brothers (three Indian immigrants) was responsible for the mid-
2017 collapse of London public relations firm Bell Pottinger due to its unethical practices,
followed by unprecedented pressure on the South African offices of McKinsey and KPMG
11
once their Gupta-related corruption was uncovered in a leaked email cache. From the
standpoint of the Blue Economy, this is an important dimension because a $5 billion loan
was granted to Transnet by the China Development Bank at the 2013 Durban BRICS summit.
With these funds, the parastatal systematically overpaid (by US$1.3 billion) on several
hundred Chinese-made locomotives for both coal and general freight use, thanks to an
apparently brazen backhander (of US$400 million) to the corruption-riddled Gupta network.
Many of the Chinese-made locomotives did not comply with localisation components within
the train’s own construction requirements. A similar deal was done within the Chinese sale
of seven container cranes to Transnet for the Durban port, worth $92 million, of which $12
million was a kickback (amaBhungane and Scorpio 2017).

As the main driver of Phakisa, Transnet’s role leaves much to be desired. Durban and the
three other main container ports in South Africa are increasingly uncompetitive as the
platforms for ‘gateway to Africa’ trade, because they charge nearly twice as much per unit
for handling containers as do average ports in the rich countries (Pieterse et al 2016) (Figure
8). Durban’s 2.5 million containers a year represent the largest such facility in Africa, but the
NDP projected an increase in Durban’s container processing to twenty million annually by
2040. This estimate is far out of line (by 150 percent) with even the most optimistic growth
figures generated by the shipping industry (National Planning Commission 2012).

Figure 8: South African port inefficiency: cost to export 20-foot container, 2015 (US$)

Source: Pieterse et al 2016

It appears that internecine competition between ports is now a major factor in new
investment planning. Durban remains a high priority not only for a regional politician like
Mchunu (2016) trying to impress European diplomats and investors. In addition, Toyota
South Africa CEO Johan van Zyl insisted in 2012, “Durban as a brand is not strong enough to
simply say ‘come and invest in Durban’. What it needs to attract investors are big projects.
Durban needs to keep ahead of the competition. China is building ports they don’t even
know when they will use. If return on investment is the line of thinking we may never see
the infrastructure” (Naidoo 2012). In the same spirit three years later, Transnet official Zeph
Ndlovu, who is also head of the Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry announced:

12
 We have to press ahead, and if we are to unseat our competitors up north, we can’t win
this battle if we pull back every now and then and look at accounting principles… Nigeria
has five active ports and they have two other ports under construction, likely to increase
their capacity from one million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units to 3.5 million TEUs. Namibia
is also expanding, and in all these examples, China is actively funding and building
infrastructure… We postpone the plans at our peril (Comins 2015).

In his 2016 budget speech, then Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan (2016) was supportive of
Transnet’s expansion: “Building on the Phakisa oceans economy initiative, a $700 million
investment in rig repair and maintenance facilities at Saldanha Bay is planned, and work has
begun on a new gas terminal and oil and ship repair facilities at Durban. Transport and
logistics infrastructure accounts for nearly $22 billion over the next three years.” Gordhan
continued, “Transnet is acquiring 232 diesel locomotives for its general freight business and
100 locomotives for its coal lines.”

Aside from the notorious locomotive procurement corruption already evident in the 2010-16
period even before the Guptas’ incriminating emails were leaked, the central question that
Gordhan begged was, whether there would be sufficient economic demand for either
container traffic moving from road to rail, or coal exports. The former dilemma reflected a
1990s deregulation of container shipments which moved from rail to road (hence adding
flexibility in destinations), followed by the construction of new warehousing and logistics
facilities along the main Durban highways. There, the imported containers were unpacked
and repacked in the wholesale trade. This happens far from the rail lines and there is not
much prospect of a return to past container transport geographies, no matter how desirable
a road-to-rail strategy is for many reasons (especially safety, since thousands of truck
accidents occur in Durban each year). The second concern about demand fluctuation is
worth considering in more detail because so much of the anticipated Blue Economy
transport and port investment relies upon high prices for commodity exports.

In that respect, one additional factor would make full-cost accounting of commodity exports
highly undesirable to advocates of commodity exports: the non-renewable resource
depletion that occurs without compensating reinvestment. This process has caused the
continent’s wealth (measured to include ‘natural capital’) to fall rapidly since 2001; even the
World Bank (2014, vii) admits that 88 percent of Sub-Saharan African countries suffered net
negative wealth accumulation in 2010. In absolute terms, the bank also acknowledges that
this depletion of wealth amounted to 12 percent of the sub-continent’s $1.36 trillion GDP in
2010 alone, i.e. $163 billion (and far more if the major North African oil-rich countries are
included). The Bank’s The Changing Wealth of Nations 2018 (Lange et al 2018) revealed
similar declines. Even without incorporating platinum and diamond markets, or North
African petroleum depletion, the bank revealed that when measuring Adjusted Net Savings
(ANS) so as to correct for natural capital depletion, Sub-Saharan Africa was “the only region
with periods of negative levels —averaging negative 3 percent of GNI over the past decade
—suggesting that its development policies are not yet sufficiently promoting sustainable
economic growth” (Lange et al 2018, Bond 2018).

Estimates of how rapidly natural wealth is depleting should be central to assessing the
extractive industries whether onshore or offshore, and in many cases such a calculation
would make the case that until countries achieve local control of their own resources,
13
minerals and oil should be left in the soil, or under the ocean bed. (For example, grassroots
activists critical of diamond extraction in eastern Zimbabwe, oil in Nigeria, and coal,
platinum, and titanium in South Africa regularly insist on leaving resources in the ground.)
For oil, the compensation due from the North – as a down-payment on “climate debt” owed
Africa – simply on grounds of climate change mitigation would be substantial. 8

4. Phakisa and climate chaos

In late 2013 in an unusual turn of events, Transnet’s port-deepening Environmental Impact

Assessment (EIA) was rejected by South Africa’s national environment staff on grounds the
parastatal company had neither properly assessed the damage that would be done to the
harbor sandbank – with its vital role in ecosystem maintenance (including bird and sealife
spawning grounds, due to a complaint by the NGO Birdlife South Africa) – or the impact of
sea-level rise and severe storms (Paton 2014). These could swamp and would maybe destroy
the $480 million investment in the first stage of the port’s expansion, according to Transnet
critics in the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) and Centre for Civil
Society. In mid-2014, SDCEA researchers used another EIA challenge to flesh out the sea level
rise threat. Transnet’s previous filings downplayed rising waters and extreme storm damage,
even though the firm’s own Durban infrastructure was badly damaged in 2012 when big
waves – caused in part by the harbour entrance’s deepening and widening – pushed a ship
into cranes. Amid suggestions that Transnet was ‘climate denialist’ (Paton 2014), the
parastatal continued to file EIAs with 2060 estimates of only 0.58 meters sea level rise, in
spite of rising evidence that there could be a runaway ice melting in the Antarctica, Arctic
and Greenland that would raise the sea level by far more.

It was not the first time Transnet had been challenged on climate change. In a 2008 EIA for
the doubling of pumping capacity through the Durban-Johannesburg oil pipeline, SDCEA
accused Transnet of ignoring the implications for climate change, as well as siting the line in
an environmentally-racist manner insensitive to the damage the South Durban refineries
were doing to society and local ecology (Bond 2017). Transnet had detoured the new
pipeline hundreds of kilometers through South Durban and Umbumbulu instead of the
traditional direct route to Johannesburg that passes through wealthy white-dominated
residential, equestrian and farming areas. Speaking frankly when describing that project,
former public enterprises minister Malusi Gigaba (2012) conceded “systemic failings…
Transnet Capital Projects lacked sufficient capacity and depth of experience for the client
overview of a megaproject of this complexity. There was an inadequate analysis of risks.” As
Gigaba admitted, “Transnet’s obligations on the project such as securing authorisations –
EIAs, land acquisition for right of way, water and wetland permits – were not pursued with
sufficient foresight and vigour.”

Further EIA filings by SDCEA and other enviromental groups and lawyers increasingly
stressed climate change damage, especially against Transnet and the national electricity
supplier Eskom’s coal-fired power plants. With resistance rising, Phakisa planners admitted

8
Such a strategy was attempted in the Ecuadoran Yasuni National Park, and while it did not succeed in the
short run (2007–13), it is in the process of being revitalised, as a means of compensating historically-exploited
fossil fuel-rich countries.
14
the obvious contradictions associated with “potential real and perceived environmental
risks,” namely. They listed

concerns about the negative impact of offshore oil and gas exploration and exploitation
of the environment; concerns about our capacity to manage and mitigate the impacts of
major oil spills; doncerns that our identified endangered offshore marine ecosystems are
not formally protected; concerns about our capacity to manage and mitigate the
environmental impacts of offshore oil and gas exploration and exploitation; general public
perception that oil and gas exploration and exploitation has an unregulated and/or
significant negative impact on the environment; uncertainty about the oil- and gas-
related environmental governance regime; general lack of knowledge of industry,
technology, norms, standards and/or practise; major oil and gas incidents are usually high
profile and high impact; concerns about the apparent policy conflict in terms of a
transition to a lowcarbon economy; concerns about our capacity and will to implement an
effective oil and gas environmental governance regime; and lack of understanding and/or
suspicion of governance systems (Republic of South Africa, 2014: 275)

However, the Phakisa team left these without sufficient resolution, pledging only weak post-
pollution initiatives: “Conduct emergency response drills also as industry to initiate the
creation of a world-class oil spill response capacity in South Africa; make the International
Oil Pollution and Compensation Fund operational” (Republic of South Africa 2017: 31).
Meanwhile the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement confirmed Africa’s victimization. There, the
BRICS countries allied with the historically dominant greenhouse gas emitters, especially the
United States and European Union. The deal was celebrated by polluters, given that the
(weak) emission-cut commitments are non-binding (with no legal accountability for
violations), and also that there is no longer a prospect of legal liability (the “climate debt”)
against the wealthy countries for their role in what are likely to be 200 million additional
African deaths this century due to extreme weather, droughts, and increased temperatures
(Bond 2016).

Mainstream conservationists as well as progressive environmentalists – e.g. the new Oceans

not Oil (2018) movement – hoped that declaring at least 5 percent of the coastal waters as
Marine Protected Areas would begin an organic resistance process as parts of the shoreline
could heal, especially once an unusually high number of whale carcasses appeared not long
after the oil companies’ seismic testing began along the KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape
coasts. But from the grassroots a more expansive strategy was emerging.

5. ‘Just Transition’ strategies against climate change and Blue Economy exploitation

What kind of Just Transition is being conceptualised, in response? Although the term is
thrown around in increasingly frivolous ways, e.g. by South African Energy Minister Jeff
Radebe (2018) in mid-2018 – while projecting an increase in fossil fuel-supplied energy from
2018 levels of 30,000MW to 46,000MW by 2030 – there are more rigorous formulations
associated with eco-social justice groups such as the Alternative Information and
Development Centre’s (2017) Million Climate Jobs campaign. Jacklyn Cock (2013) defines the
Just Transition as “an alternative growth path and new ways of producing and consuming.”

15
That richer sense is being explored by at least three different kinds of forces that have
relevance to a post-Phakisa treatment of oceans: radical environmentalists, affected
communities (including fisherfolk) who become militant once the opportunities of standard
‘stakeholder participation’ are exhausted, and the most advanced forces in labour. Although
they mostly operate in separate silos, the defence of South Africa’s oceans and coastal land
will necessarily bring together a wide variety of these forces as logical allies in coming
decades. The environmentalists will probably be of higher income levels and have greater
sophistication in demanding that Operation Phakisa not disrupt the coastlines or marine life,
perhaps better utilising the near-exhausted EIA process and other legal strategies, and
reminding that anthropomorphic climate change is a central cause of the ocean’s traumas.
Some of the coastal communities will be ferocious in defending their terrain, as examples
from South Durban and Xolobeni show, even while declining fishing stocks make sea-side
village economies less viable. And organised labour will slowly adapt to shifting coastal
economies that, for the sake of new jobs, enhance wind, wave and tidal energy production,
as well as the myriad of sea-level rise adaptation and infrastructure rehabilitation
opportunities associated with climate change.

The latter jobs have not yet been scoped out by Million Climate Jobs researchers, but
parallel British campaigners believe that 270 000 annual jobs can be created merely on the
electricity generation work associated with wind, tidal and wave energy (representing more
than half Britain’s post-carbon grid within two decades):

About half of the jobs in offshore wind will be the same as onshore wind – at first mainly
in factory jobs. The other half, though, will be in assembling the turbines, taking them out
to sea, and putting them in place. There are also more maintenance jobs offshore.
Turbines break down more often at sea... a new technology called ‘floating wind’ now
makes it possible to go out to depths of 1,000 metres – a turbine rises from a broader
platform that is anchored to the ocean floor by cables… We will have to combine this with
other kinds of renewable electricity… [including] wave and tidal power. There are always
waves around Britain, although the strength varies. Tides move in and out at different
times as you go round the coast, and are of reliable strength. Wave energy can be tapped
using floating buoys, or via hinged flap systems, or by turbines. (Alternative Information
and Development Centre 2017)

As for communities, consider cases representing alternatives to Phakisa-logic on the Eastern

Cape’s Wild Coast and in South Durban. In the former, a campaign has been waged since
2008 by the peasant-dominated Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) and allies in the green
network Sustaining the Wild Coast, against coastal mineral extraction in Xolobeni; while in
the latter, untrammeled South Durban port and petrochemical expansion has since 2010
threatened intensified displacement and amplified pollution. The two communities’
successes to date were in part due to the Just Transition framing adopted by advanced
activists as they withstood extractive and expansion attacks.

In Xolobeni, the Australian mining firm Mineral Commodities Ltd, seeks to displace 500-1000
residents from 2900 hectares of beachfront land containing 9.3 million tonnes of titanium at
the world’s 10th largest deposit. The ACC is, in contrast, promoting Wild Coast eco-tourism
and traditional farming against ‘development’ imposed by the state: “How can we be poor
when we have land? We grow maize, sweet potatoes, taro, potatoes, onions, spinach,
16
carrots, lemons and guavas, and we sell some of it to the market. We eat fish, eggs and
chicken. This agriculture is what should be developed here” (Washinyira 2016).The ACC
(2016) and its lawyers argued in court that titanium mining would destroy “the biomeand
ethnobotanical elements of the area. This includes reliance on the ocean,and the socio-
cultural and economic value derived from the land and ocean.” The ACC (2016) expressed
concern that mining would disrupt plants used in traditional medicine, destroy water
sources and grazing land, anddisturbscores of burial sites – hence “breaking of links with
ancestors” – and delimit “self-sufficient development… Financial compensation and the
provision of alternative housing for those whoare physically displaced cannot adequately
compensate for the destruction of acommunity, its culture and traditions and its members’
way of life.”

As for their vision, the ACC’s desired Just Transition was articulated in these terms:
“Development strategies in keeping with these principles will include the utilisation of the
natural beauty of our environment,fertile land and good rainfall, integrating tourism,
enhanced agricultural production and the necessary infrastructure includinghealth,
education, road access and services.” Higher levels of social grants would help (current child
grants are just $28/month), as would decommodified access to clean water, electricity, a
clinic, better roads and expanded conservation zoning, including a Marine Protected Area
(Bennie 2010). While grassroots battles with the South African mining minister, the
Australian firm and its local proxies continued, the main judicial battleground in 2018 was
over whether a community with collective land tenure rights would have the legal power to
turn down mining licence applications. A victory there would confirm sufficient security to
expand alternative strategies consistent with a Just Transition to local autonomy,
preservation of indigenous values, and expansion of society-nature values.

A more expansive eco-socialist project is required in the second case, where SDCEA has
made various post-carbon development demands for the South Durban Basin (SDCEA 2008,
SDCEA 2011, Bond 2016). Defensively, SDCEA would reverse the liberalised zoning that
currently allows freight transport to creep into historic Clairwood, displacing thousands of
black households. It would also defend and generate more green space in the toxic-
saturated industrial and petrochemical areas. As an antidote to Operation Phakisa, SDCEA’s
(2008) 30-page Spatial and Development Vision includes demands such as “a halt to the
privatisation of ocean, Bay and shore resources that belong to all the people of this
country.” A lengthy follow-up statement just prior to SDCEA’s co-hosting of the counter-
summit to the UN climate summit in 2011 – “Feeling the heat in Durban” – included this
language:

First, the central organising principle should be sustainable development founded on

economic, social and environmental justice. This means a commitment to growing human
solidarity and equality and that people recognise themselves as a living part of earth’s
ecology. To destroy the environment is, finally, to destroy the people. Second, localisation
is essential to any serious programme of mitigation and requires that national resources
should be focused on supporting people’s capacities to direct local development. Third,
the energy system must be transformed as a matter of urgency. This is not only about
choosing renewable technologies. It is about what energy is for and who controls it. We
call for people’s energy sovereignty founded on democratic and local control.

17
Third, are there potentials for post-capitalist perspectives from labour, for example, as
articulated by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) (Cock and
Wainwright 2015, Satgar 2015)? The 2010-15 Numsa strategy was as visionary as that of any
labour movement, yet its most important advocacy experts and campaigners are no longer
with the organisation, and in 2018 Numsa battled both the state and Greenpeace which
(mistakenly) supported a dramatic increase in privatised solar power plants. But Numsa was
(mistakenly) intent on saving jobs at the coal-fired powerplants due to be shuttered as a
result of their old age. Nevertheless, at a 2015 Electricity Crisis Conference, Numsa and its
allies (2015) declared, “The electricity crisis poses the opportunity to mitigate against global
warming and move away from fossil fuel to renewable energy.” Numsa et al’s (2015)
arguments allow scoping of renewable ocean and coastline energy with these features: “The
renewable energy sector that we are demanding must be socially-owned; meaning a mix of
publicly-owned energy entities, energy co-operatives, community-owned enterprises and
municipal-owned energy entities.” As for more equitable energy consumption, the
conference also made demands to shift the load-shedding (black-out) burden to wealthier
(high-consumption) households, to end disconnections of poor households, and to raise
monthly Free Basic Electricity from current levels of 50 kiloWatt hours per household to 200,
with special concern about gender equity in access given women’s vital role in social
reproduction.

These kinds of decommodification demands – ranging from valorising peasant social

relations (Xolobeni) to post-pollution urbanism (South Durban) to radical red-green visions
of renewable energy production and consumption (Numsa et al) – are the basis for a politics
that replaces Oceans Phakisa with a democratic but ever more urgent eco-socialist agenda.
The coalitions and alliances required to achieve this are not simply on the horizon; they must
be carefully constructed, especially if climate change is an all-encompassing link issue (Klein
2014, Bond 2012). The struggle against projects such as Oceans Phakisa will be won not by
default thanks to conditions of worsening capitalist crisis, nor in dazzling technicist
argumentation, and nor because of activists’ defensive critiques alone. A Just Transition that
could turn the Blue Economy much greener and redder will occur only with visionary
ambition and ideological clarity about what is at stake, forged in ever more intense eco-
social struggle, as tinkering-type reforms fall flat and radical openings necessarily emerge.
These are the counter-threats to Operation Phakisa: not only the social and environmental
defenders of ocean life, but also the self-inflicted damage of capitalist economics and the
worsening impacts of climate change on the vulnerable coastlines.

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