Desentrañando la islamofobia queerizada

The key respondents in the OTP (responsible for ODA coordination in the Province) as well as those specific members of staff in the municipalities who are managing and working with twinning or ODA programmes agreed that they were aware of the Paris Declaration and its five principles and 12 indicators. The researcher noted with interest that in spite of this, with the exception of the actors in the OTP, most participants in the study confirmed that there had been no formal introduction of the Paris Declaration at the local level, in this case the municipalities, in the form either of workshops or one-to-one implementation and knowledge exchange. No project reports or any other municipal reports examined mentioned anything about the Paris Declaration or any of its elements.

This indicated that there had been no conscious efforts to implement the Paris Declaration or any of its elements in either of the two municipalities over the period of this study. Further, the Paris Declaration was not mentioned in any of the IDPs of the two

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municipalities since 2005. Besides the fact that there was scanty mentioning of twinning programmes and how useful they had been in some areas, there was nothing which showed that the Paris Declaration had been discussed in or during the implementation of the various projects and definitely not in any of the Urban Renewal Programmes. These findings were further proven during the group and one-on-one interaction with the various respondents in this study.

The officials in the OTP responsible for International Relations and ODA coordination in the province confirmed having some idea of the Paris Declaration, and that they had been trained on it at different levels by the IDC in Pretoria. In spite of this, they all agreed that there had been no conscious effort from their side to implement the PD either at provincial level or at the municipal/metro level. Most of the partners at provincial level other than from OTP, namely those in the Treasury and the Department of Local Government and Traditional Affairs (DLGTA), had never heard of the Paris Declaration and were not aware that such a programme existed. All staff members in the DLGTA LED section responsible for overseeing LED programmes in the municipalities who participated in this study, had never heard of this intervention and confirmed that it had not been implemented in their work areas.

At the municipal level the researcher got the impression, especially from those officers dealing with ODA in the two municipalities, that the Paris Declaration had never been established in their respective areas either, and this was very evident from the way the whole issue of ODA management was being handled during the one-to-one interviews.

These officers conceded that their activities were more to do with twinning per se. During the one-to-one sessions with those officials in the two municipalities responsible for IR and ODA it was palpable from the researcher’s position that the Paris Declaration intervention was not immediately relevant to the functioning of their offices. They felt that it should have been implemented directly in the areas where the projects are managed. The belief that twinning activities were not a necessary part of ODA is clearly entrenched in both municipalities. There is evidence to show that most of the funding flowing through twinning programmes in both municipalities was not even reported to

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the IDC in the Treasury, the unit responsible for ODA coordination in the country as a whole. It was also apparent that the Paris Declaration was not mentioned in any of the IDPs or annual reports of either of the two municipalities over the period of this study (2005–2010).

Information gathered through the interactions with community members in both municipalities as well as in the focus groups confirmed the fact that not only was the Paris Declaration not known, but that almost all of the participants in this group were not even aware that there was an international/national programme which was supposed to assist in the way projects were implemented on the ground. During one of the focus group discussions in Nelson Mandela Bay Metro’s Motherwell Urban Renewal Programme, a member of the group said:

These projects are faceless, they come with their big cheques at the initiation of a Project and this is the last time you see them.

This point is well captured in the MURP report of 2009/2010 in Buffalo City Metro where it was reported that:

In the past it has become clear that the community is not aware of whom or what is MURP! What MURP does, its mission, objectives and benefits to them. (BCM, 2009:58)

The statement above refers to the Mndatsane Urban Renewal Programme (MURP), a national project important not only in the country but also in the province. There were clear allegations of its not being known by the beneficiaries some four years after its launch, and also surprisingly shortly before it comes to an end in 2012. The MURP in Buffalo City Metro is supposed to end during 2012, and it is important to mention that MURP is an EU-sponsored project, which by its nature should have already had elements of the PD implemented in it (BCM, 2009:56-58). This finding is also mentioned in the work done by Uithaler (2008:38) in his assessment of the Motherwell Urban Renewal

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Programme in Nelson Mandela Bay Metro where he says that there was “lack of information transfer, lack of information to the public, what services MURP provides”.

The researcher went through similar experiences to the consultants tasked to write the South African Paris Declaration evaluation phase two country report in relation to the developing partners. Out of more than 12 developing partners in both municipalities, most of them made themselves unavailable either by refusing to attend to the questionnaire forwarded to them, not answering it in full, or just refusing to make an appointment. Their veiled excuse was that they were apparently always “very busy”. The unhelpful “protection” accorded to some of these development partners by the International Relations functionaries in the two municipalities also made them very inaccessible and did not make the researcher’s work any easier. Of the 12 developing partners in both municipalities, contact was made with only ten, and among these ten only five bothered to respond to the requests to assist in providing the required information. Incidentally two of these were local representatives of the Development Partners (Wood et al., 2011:1:18:18).

It was surprising to find out that among the Development Partners who participated in this study, only very few had ever heard of the Paris Declaration, and its principles. They all confirmed that the Paris Declaration had never been implemented consciously in either municipality in which they were operating. It was also noteworthy that two out of the five development partners who participated in the study were local representatives of EU programmes, specifically the MURP in Nelson Mandela Bay Metro and Sinako.

Sinako is an EU programme coordinated at the provincial level but operating in various municipalities and metros in the province. They were also not aware of the Paris Declaration and confirmed that no implementation of this intervention had ever been implemented in the programmes or projects they were party to.

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5.3.1.3 Implementation of the five elements of the Paris declaration in the two