CAPÍTULO II: WEB 2.0 Y EDUCACIÓN
II.1. Web 2.0 y Educación Obligatoria
II.1.1. Legislación educativa en TIC
As I described in the previous chapter, the SVC proposed, or ‘offered’ would be a better word in relation to a gift, the construction of a Trust to the communities. The Trust would be a joint venture-like partner of the SVC, its share and influence proportional to the donor money it would be able to attract. The figure, which was visualising the gift of the SVCT to the communities, seemed impressive because the shares were presented as being overwhelmingly in favour of the communities with 64%, and only 36% for the landowners. But the figure for the Trust was a virtual one, based on things hoped for (that is, donor money), while the figure for the landowners was based on the ‘hard currency’ of land. The SVC tried to transform the virtuality of the Trust by appointing Trustees who were considered capable of attracting the necessary donor-money. If only the status of the Trust could be based on solid donor-money, the figure would probably impress the government with the gift of the SVC to its neighbours. So while the Trust was set up to represent the communities, its priority lay in attracting the required donor funds. If donor funding proved slow in coming, the Trust would remain an empty shell and a structure on paper only. The Trustees were selected with this consideration in mind. Nine Trustees were chosen, one representative of each surrounding District and four from Harare. The four from Harare especially were chosen with an eye to attracting donor- funds. A senior manager from Delta Corporation was appointed chairman. He was the one especially charged with working in conjunction with the writer of the ‘Trust-proposal’ charming money out of donor pockets. This was an illusion as I described in my disquisition on the different routes taken to fund the restocking programme in the previous chapter. The chairman of the Trust was very active and energetically he pursued the issue of donor money for the Trust, but he was doomed to disappointment. And despite his indubitable activeness in going after donor-money, the complete Trust of nine members never met in actual fact. This means that, even if the communities would have liked to have communicated with the SVC through their representatives in the Trust, there was never an official opportunity created by the SVC, a lapel which might be considered indicative of the SVC priorities with the Trust. The same could be said for the later structure of organisational co-operation with the neighbouring communities that the SVC presented in its loan application to the IFC, in which it proposed the Joint and Working Committee. Only the Joint Committee met. The Working Committee never did. In this context it is interesting to note that the Joint Committee consisted of RDC members only, without containing any representative from the SVC. These members did come together. The Working
Committee, comprising of representatives from the communities.3 and three
members of the SVC, including the Chairman and the Vice-Chairman, never saw each other or spoke to each other in the formal context of a meeting.4 Can
this state of affairs be explained? As we have seen in the previous chapter there is a veritable sea of official written material from the SVC in which the gift of the Trust takes a prominent place. But is it attention and emphasis on paper only, which never got off the ground in real life? Is the Trust just a token-gift with no commercial promises behind it? Is the Trust no more than a make- believe decoy to put government officials and policy makers in Harare off the scent in an answer to the written answers to the Minister? Is it a form of ritual exchange between the SVC and Harare, mentioning the communities for rhetorical reasons only hoping to get a return gift from DNPWLM in the form of buffalo? Let me return to the inception of the idea of the Trust.
The (proposal to constitute a) Trust was presented to the RDCs at a work-
shop on 28-29 March 1996.5 This was the first time that the RDCs were
informed about the initiative. There had been no prior consultation about the Trust with the RDCs. Under the heading of ‘The strategic choices for local communities’, the paper plunges straight to the heart of the matter saying that ‘one strategy for the local communities [would be] to advocate that Government should designate the land occupied by the Savé Conservancy for resettlement by the local communities’. But, after considering this option, Metcalfe comes to the conclusion that neither resettlement nor designation of the land to be used for wildlife by the communities would work out and in conclusion suggests that ‘the distinction between private land and communal land remains’. He states that the division can only work out ‘if a joint venture is established which binds the two land use systems, through a mutually agreeable arrangement’.6 The
Land Question, which is so important to the identities of both black and white in Zimbabwe where land is considered inalienably theirs by the Africans, is brusquely brushed aside in this formulation. The solution to the land issue is not redistribution but co-operation, but co-operation on the conditions set by the SVC. It is slightly more nuanced than this and it would be unfair to typify the situation as the whites simply consolidating their power over land. The SVC also gives opportunities to communal landowners, that is, the RDCs, in its
3 Four out of five were the same as those on the Joint Committee, information from
interview with Liaison Officer, 22 April 1998.
4 Conversation with Liaison Officer, 28 May 1998.
5 Metcalfe, S. (1996), Benefits of the Savé Valley Conservancy to Local People,
Workshop on the Savé Valley Conservancy Trust, 28-29 March. Unpublished proceedings.
conservancy coalition. RDCs could participate by granting land-use rights to the conservancy while retaining ownership: ‘(t)he Conservancy would relocate the game fence and the community would join the Conservancy as full members’.7
The paper concludes by formulating that ‘(m)any things may be possible but little will happen without a spirit of trust and genuine commitment to a common vision for the future’.8
This first workshop in March 1996 at which the creation of the Trust was explained and rationalised, had a follow-up in April 1996. At this an initial (and as far as I know only) draft of a ‘project identification plan’ for the RDCs surrounding the SVC, in which Metcalfe formulated the ways in which the communities could benefit from the proposed Trust was tabled.9 This follow-up
was asked for by the RDCs at the workshop in Chiredzi. The draft contained a range of benefits, like direct and indirect employment opportunities, meat supply, fuel supply, technology transfer, develop managerial capacity and so on, but this April document also already pinpoints constraints laid on the social environment by the project: ‘Local communities have recently witnessed the erection of a substantial wildlife fence around the conservancy’. As I explained in the previous chapter, the fence was necessary because of veterinary regula- tions related to ‘foot and mouth’ disease and contingent isolation of buffalo, considered essential by the Conservancy, from cattle (essential to communal agriculture). ‘The fence symbolises a separation between commercial and communal, black and white ethnic groups, and between livestock and wildlife as a land use. There is minimal social interdependence between the conservancy members and the local communities’.10 In line with this observation, actually
directly after the Introduction it concludes, that ‘(i)t is the complete contrast between these two communities, the conservancy community and the neigh- bouring communities, that threatens the stability of the Conservancy’s plan [that is, to establish a form of organisational co-operation through the Trust]. The contrast in ethnicity and wealth is obvious. This combustible reality is what puts an imperative on the creation of an interdependency between these two primary stakeholders’.11 A second follow-up was given in May 1996 with a report on the
7 Ibid: 5.
8 Ibid: 6. Recollect (once again) that the Zimbabwean Government signed a document
of ‘no-interest’ in the different properties in the SVC which were put on the market in the second half of the 1980s and 1990s. With this in mind it seems like a good idea to propose a joint venture instead.
9 Metcalfe, S. (April 1996), Enhancing the Capacity of Neighbouring Communities to
Benefit from the Proposed Save Valley Conservancy Trust, Zimbabwe Trust. Unpublished report.
10 Metcalfe April 1996: 14
responses in the field, that is, of the communities surrounding the SVC, to the establishment of the Trust, written by the same consultant. This report was also specifically prepared for the RDCs, as the appropriate authorities on the communal lands and representing the communities through democratic elections at their request.12 There are a few issues which are mentioned by
nearly all respondents to this fact-finding-mission, and which directly relate to the issues raised in earlier chapters: the (location of the) fence and related to that that ‘this project cannot be seen as separate from the ‘land issue’ but as a progressive response to it’.13 This is not to say that they ‘dismissed the SVC
proposal out of hand’ but that ‘the process (...) by which the SVC proposal was formulated was flawed [and] (a)lso the conservancy fence lacked diplomacy (...)’.14 What is striking about this document is its straightforward formulations,
both by the local authorities and communities and by the consultant who wrote the report, who dared to write it all down without bothering to wrap it up in diplomatic flummery. At the RDC level, for instance, it is mentioned that the RDCs feel that they ‘have effectively been presented with what appears like a ‘blueprint’ (the proposal [to create the Trust]) e.g.:
• the conservancy is established; • the fence is sited and situated; • the SVC Trust is established;
• 5 Trustees (white) are already appointed and apparently others already approached, (whom the RDCs are assured are ‘trustworthy’);
• the SVC Trust proposal is already published in final form;
• the SVC Trust wants to fundraise as soon as possible on behalf of the beneficiaries, who are not well informed of their new status in regard to the SVC’.15
The RDCs are well aware that what the SVC proposes is in actual fact based ‘on a trade off between economic and political strengths, each party having more of
12 Metcalfe, S. (May 1996), Report on Response of Local Authorities and Neighbouring
Communities to the Proposal by Save Valley Conservancy to Establish a Community
Development Trust, Zimbabwe Trust. Unpublished report. It should be explicitly noted that
RDCs do certainly not automatically represent local community interests in general and in conservation issues in particular. The CAMPFIRE experience has made this abundantly clear particularly in relation to the distribution of communal wildlife revenues (Bird, C. & Metcalfe, S. (1995), Two Views from CAMPFIRES in Zimbabwe’s Hurungwe District.
Training and Motivation. Who Benefits and who Doesn’t? London: IIED, Wildlife and
Development Series, no. 5. See also Patel 1998). This means that although the RDC is the official representative body of the communities, and I treat them as such in my writing, I certainly do not mean to see them as synonymous.
13 Ibid: 3.
14 Ibid: 3 & 2.
one than the other’. The commercial farmers have economic power, while the communities have political power. The RDCs feel that they are being seduced with economic incentives by the SVC and they are not sure that the price, that is, the gift of the SVCT, the SVC is prepared to pay is high enough. The way the SVC handled the presentation of the Trust does not seem to indicate that it rated, literally, the communities and local authorities highly. It did not seem to deem it necessary to communicate with the communities in order to ask them what gift they would like for their goodwill. Instead it gave them a ‘take-it-or- leave-it’ offer, wrapped up, in economic development language. And the SVC did not give the RDCs time to consider their position and for that reason there was no ‘courtship ritual’ between the partners ‘to explore each other’s attitudes and motives’ on the other side of the fence.16 At the community level the major
issue was the fence and the relationship with their ‘farmer next door’. The communities do not really relate to the SVC as one organisation but have to do with the farmer whose boundary they happen to share. And ‘(n)o amount of Trust supported development will cover up for bad relations on the ground’.17
Only interaction on the ground will be able to build up a relationship of trust. This seems to be what has happened with Gunundwe, whose management has given five bulls to the neighbouring communities as ‘an offer of friendship’, not a ‘once off’ gift, but ‘hopefully the start of a ‘give and take’ relationship. In return, the ranch hopes to be able to work out ways and means to protect the ranch from poaching and general hostility’.18 Although they were not the only
one who considered the SVC creating a Trust as a gift, ‘provided the communities respect the boundary and do not poach’.19 This is how the SVC
sees the reciprocal relationship: it offers the gift of the Trust and the return gift from the communities is a priori defined and should consist of respecting boundaries and no poaching. The communities obviously do not want to reject the gift straightaway, but do have a natural suspicion accepting it because they are not sure they want to pay the expected return gift. Especially not because the communities are already paying for the SVC by their denial of access to SVC land and the fence cutting them off from their natural resources. Communities also expressed their concern that if they excepted the gift of the Trust to be like ‘manna from heaven’, they would cede any possibility of claiming the land for resettlement or other purposes.20 The difference in expectations of what a
reciprocal relationship between SVC and communities involves comes
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid: 6.
18 Ibid: 9 (Appendix I).
19 Ibid: 16.
specifically to the fore in the border area between Matsai Communal Land and the SVC. The Matsai people already stated at that particular stage of the SVC development that they wanted to settle the local land issue of the seventy-two families first before venturing any further into deeper waters with the Trust. I shall describe this Matsai case in more detail later on. The buffalo fence was generally seen as a ‘hard edge’ between the parties. Rather prophetically at the time, one participant stated that ‘we will see you coming back again’ (the business is not over)’.21 It seems obvious that the communities were not very
willing to accept the gift and its implications of a return gift straightaway, if at all. Without beating about the bush the report plainly reveals that it is not only the institutional, structural and organisational co-operation which is essential to the success of the interdependency between SVC and communities, but also, and maybe even more so, the relationship between the individual commercial farmer and his direct neighbour in the communal lands. But no matter what the relationship is between farmer and community, there has been a ‘general outcry’ over the fence line.22 Because relationships on the ground are so
important to the communal farmers, and thus for the SVCT representing them, it is worthwhile to ‘visiting’ the different hotspots around the SVC where fence wars are raging or have been part of the ongoing reciprocal exchange process.