[Originally published in 2014] In the following powerful opinion piece Richard Bryant, Chairman of the Kommetjie Heritage Society, takes a critical look at some of the City of Cape Town's development policies and how they are impacting the Cape Floral Region Protected Areas (World Heritage Site). He argues that not only is the Word Heritage Site at risk but people's lives and properties as well.
Many Capetonians risked their all in fighting the recent wildfires that devastated much of the southern Cape Peninsula. They were “heroes”, the Western Cape Premier Helen Zille noted. It was, she added, a term “entirely appropriate in this context”.
One of those “heroes”, Hendrik “Bees” Marais, paid the ultimate price: he was the helicopter pilot who lost his life when he crash-landed in the Cape Point section of the Table Mountain National Park.
Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille echoed many of our sentiments when she said of Marais, “We salute him and pay tribute to him for the contribution that he made in saving lives and protecting property.”
But what Zille and De Lille have neglected to mention – and this is indeed a terrible irony – is that it was Cape Town’s own developmental policies that put those lives and property at risk in the first place.
The fires raised important issues about the management of the city where it abuts both the acclaimed national park and the protective buffer zone surrounding it.
This is an area that in 2004 was proclaimed by Unesco as...
