International Commission on Large Dams

I do not want to end the tale of my career in the water field without dealing with my involvement with the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD). The latter is an organisation with (at the time) some 80 member countries with head office in Paris, France. It was established in 1928 with English and French as working languages. It is an association of professional engineers and promotes the planning, design, construction and maintenance of large dams. Every year there is an Executive Committee meeting and every third year a Congress. There are also a number of technical committees which study certain subjects and produces reports about them. One could say that dam engineering as it is to-day, has been developed by these congresses and technical committees. The organisation is led by a President, elected for three years and six Deputy-Presidents – two from Europe and one each of Asia, America and Africa-Australasia. There is also a so-called sixth post in order to supply a measure of flexibility. Countries are represented by their national committees. South Africa became a member in 1964, just at the time when I returned to head-office from my stint with Construction. Jacques Kriel was secretary of the South African National Committee on Large Dams (SANCOLD) at the time. As his assistant, I was closely involved with the steps required to become a member country of the organisation. I was probably chosen as his assistant because of my knowledge of French! In those days ICOLD was very strict on its bilingualism. The first Chairman of SANCOLD was JM Jordaan, then the Secretary for Water Affairs. Other members at the time that I can remember were Ninham Shand, Des Midgley, Clifford Harris, Günther Denkhaus and Mr Stallebras of the DWA. As assistant secretary I had to keep the Minutes of every SANCOLD meeting and all other donkey work such as correspondence. When I resigned from Water Affairs, Tony Becker took over these duties. Later, when he was transferred to construction, I took over again. Kriel was then Chairman and Roger Phélines the secretary. When the latter was appointed Chairman of the newly established Umgeni Water Board, I took his place as Secretary. After the retirement of Johan du Plessis, who succeeded Kriel as Chairman, I was given the post, more or less ex-officio. Dodo Claassens, who succeeded du Plessis a Director-general of Water Affairs, was not interested in the chairmanship, otherwise he would have claimed it.

The first meeting of ICOLD that I attended was in 1974 in Athens. The other delegates were Jacques Kriel (with wife Hilda), Des Midgley (with Lesley), Henry Olivier and Roger Phélines (with Joan). (I would have liked to have attended the Congress in Madrid the previous year and even wrote a paper for it, but At Rabie was chosen to attend. I could not understand that, because he had no involvement with ICOLD, while I did all the work as assistant-secretary, while he did not even deliver a paper.) That meeting and the study tour through Greece and Cyprus afterwards was agreeable and informative. During that study tour I was seated next to the Chairman of the organising committee of the next congress in Mexico. I noticed that there were always lots of Spanish speakers at ICOLD meetings. With my knowledge of French, I always threatened to understand them, but could not. Because I hoped to attend the Mexico congress, I told the Mexicans that I would speak Spanish to them the following year at the Exco in Iran. On my return, I started learning Spanish and could, after a year, conduct a reasonable conversation. I even took audio-visual lessons together with the Foreign Affairs cadets. Because I did this voluntarily and did not consider it as work, I advanced much faster than they did. I also practised on the bus on my way to work with Juan Montes and Willy Schulz-Rodrigues, two Chilean engineers who also worked for WA. Unfortunately, political reasons in the end prevented us from attending the Congress. An interesting incident took place during our tour through Greece when we had a rest day in a hotel at Olympia. Dick Harza, of the well-known Chicago firm bearing his name, decided to play some tennis with borrowed (and twisted) rackets. During dinner that evening, Vice President Milton Speedy of Australia said in his speech, illustrating the agreeable spirit between member-countries: “This afternoon, from my balcony in the hotel, I saw the United States play South Africa at tennis, umpired by Russia.” Indeed, Borovoi, the leader of the Russian delegation, stood at the net as umpire. That was in the middle of the cold war and of Apartheid! After the tour through Cyprus I and some other participants were invited to the house of Hugh Dixon (from consulting engineers Halcrow) in Kyrenia. Shortly after this visit, Turkey invaded that part of Cyprus, which to-day is still under Turkish control. The next year, I attended the Exco in Iran, which also experienced a dramatic change shortly after, when the Shah was overthrown! Fortunately, Austria did not experience something similar when we attended the 1977 Exco in Salzburg. This was largely in preparation of the following year’s meeting in Cape Town. That meeting was held in the Mount Nelson hotel. Unfortunately, for political reasons, only 29 member countries took part. We went out of our way to make it agreeable and interesting for them. One evening, all the participants and their companions were invited by local hosts, which was something not experienced before at ICOLD. The study tours were prepared with extreme care. I was the leader of Tour B, which visited first the Orange River Project and from there via Bethulie and the Eastern Free State to the Tugela-Vaal/Drakensberg Project. From there through Natal to Durban. Tour B was along the Garden Route, followed by the ORP. There was also a tour to the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumalanga).

SANCOLD’s invitation to hold the 62^nd Executive Meeting and 18^th Congress in the year 1994 in Durban was accepted by ICOLD. The invitation was issued during the 1991 Exco in Vienna. That was a time of great insecurity in South Africa, where the Government was negotiating with the liberation movements. We had to spend substantial amounts of money in preparation, without any certainty that the country would be in peace by 1994. We requested a guarantee from the then Government, which we obtained. During the Exco in Granada, Spain, in 1992, I was elected as Vice-President for the zone Africa-Australasia. The host country for a Congress always gets a Vice-Presidency. After the successful April 1994 election, as then Director-general of the Department of Public Works, I had to show the President-elect, Mr Nelson Mandela, the “Presidensie” where he would move in shortly. I made use of the occasion to ask him whether he would be prepared to open the coming ICOLD Congress later that year in November. He agreed immediately and told me to contact his assistant, Jessie Duarte. From then on we all held thumbs because his diary would soon fill up! I wrote the draft of his speech at the opening, which his staff used largely without change. Needless to stress the enthusiasm with which the 4000 odd participants and accompanying persons received the news of his participation at the opening! The whole Congress was a roaring success! Although I was Chairman of the Organising Committee and as DG of Public Works had little spare time, much of the organising work fell to Paul Roberts, who was secretary of this Committee and to James Perkins, chairman of the local Durban sub-committee. They did sterling work. At the Executive Meeting preceding the Congress, I was elected as President of the Commission. The other candidate was Mr Aisiks of Argentina. Maybe it was good fortune for ICOLD that he was not elected, because he died not long afterwards and there was no provision in the Constitution to deal with such eventuality. Immediately after the Congress, my three year term as President started. Before I made myself available as a candidate for that post, I had written a letter to the then Minister of Public Works, Jeff Radebe, requesting the State’s financial support. I would have to travel extensively during my term of office, which I obviously could not pay for on a public service salary. He gave the necessary guarantee in writing. However, after chairing my first meeting in Oslo, Norway, I was dismissed from the public service, as were more or less all other departmental heads and he reneged on his undertaking. Fortunately, SANCOLD had made a handsome profit from the Congress and agreed to assist. It was the custom at ICOLD that the President’s spouse would accompany him to the meetings. After Oslo, we had the privilege to take part in a study tour to dams in Norway, ending as far North as North Cape, where we did not see the midnight sun because of the clouds. The following year, I chaired the meeting in Santiago, Chile, followed by a study tour that went as far South as the Street of Magellan. On our way to Chile, we travelled in Brazil, visiting  Itaipú, then the largest hydro-electric project in the world. The last occasion in my Presidency was the Exco and Congress in Florence, Italy. Apart from these formal occasions, I got invitations to symposia etc. There was the roller-compacted concrete symposium in Santander, Spain. The Spanish National Committee heard that I wanted to visit the Pyrenees afterwards and insisted to put a guide at my disposal. The guide arrived with a driver and a secretary! When the Spaniards do something, they do it in style. They were very appreciative for the trouble I took to learn their language! The Polish National Committee made use of an occasion when I had to visit the ICOLD Head Office to invite me to deliver a paper at a symposium in Zakopane, a ski resort in the Tatra Mountains. My paper was even translated in Polish! In March 1997, I represented ICOLD at the first “World Water Forum”, held in Marrakech, Morocco.  In the last year of my Presidency I received an invitation from the World Bank and the IUCN (The World Conservation Union) to attend a workshop in Gland, Switzerland at the latter’s head office. A confidential report by the bank would be discussed. The report dealt with the pros and cons of 50 dams with which the Bank was involved. A spectrum of supporters and opponents of dams were invited. Here I must first mention that already a few years before my Presidency, vicious attacks on dams had been launched by authors such as Hildyard & Goldsmith and later Patrick McCulley. The latter is the Executive Director of the “International Rivers Network”, which keeps itself practically exclusively busy with attacks on large dams and organisations such as the World Bank which are involved with them. Apart from the IRN, there are other organisations such as the “Berne Declaration” and “Narmada Bachao Andola” which are busy with similar campaigns. Notwithstanding the fact that the Bank’s already mentioned report was marked confidential, the coalition of the mentioned organisations rejected it and attacked it in public. When I learned about that, I immediately wrote to the organisers of the Workshop that, in the light of so much prejudice, it would be of no use to attend the Workshop. Switzerland.  Surprisingly, the Workshop resulted in an agreement that made provision for the establishment of the “World Commission on Dams”.  An interim committee would recommend membership to the Gland-group. There was immediately a crisis when the proposed composition was rejected by the anti-dam lobby. One of the candidates they objected to was Kaare Hoeg, my successor as ICOLD President. They also insisted that Medha Paktar, the leader of Narmada Bachao Andola, known in her country as an extremist activist, serve on the Commission. They also insisted that Lakshmi Chand Jain from India, who shared their opinions, be appointed Vice President instead of the proposed Judy Henderson of Australia. I was of the opinion that the originally proposed composition was already skewed and that their demands would exacerbate this. A special meeting was called in Cape Town by the chairman-elect, the SA Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, Kader Asmal. There again, but contrary to my own better judgement, I gave in to their demands with the thought that “truth will be out”. The alternative would be to withdraw ICOLD altogether from the exercise. Kader Asmal had been selected for that function by the World Bank and because by that time he already should have had a good insight in the role of dams in South Africa, I was of the opinion that, as chairman, he would have a strong moderating influence. In the place of Hoeg, Jan Veltrop, ex-president of ICOLD was appointed on the Committee. I think that he defended our organisation very weakly and in this feeling was supported by most national committees. The original participants of the Gland meeting, now called the Reference Group, supplemented by a number of other stake holder organisations selected by the WCD and called the “Forum”, would be the sounding board for the Commission. Because the latter would explicitly be responsible for their work neither to the World Bank nor the IUCN, I was of the opinion that they should be responsible to the Gland Reference Group, who called them into being. Therefore I considered it inappropriate that the Commission had selected the other members of the Forum themselves. In the end, the Commission declared that they were only responsible to Humanity! The Forum was only convened twice and each time without allowing opportunities to study draft reports and comment meaningfully. The first meeting was in Prague, Czech Republic and the second one at Spier, Stellenbosch, where the report of the Commission was already available. There, I launched a hefty attack on the past happenings and saying more or less what I wrote above. In his closing speech, Asmal almost exclusively reacted to my attack and in the process lied when he denied that Henderson had been his original choice for Vice-President, notwithstanding that I had written proof! I compared the report with the original brief of the Commission and said that it had not been discharged. On behalf of ICOLD, I withdrew any further cooperation with a proposed form of continuation of the workings of the Commission. I was subsequently called a fundamentalist by the McCulley of the IRN. Inevitably, they and their ilk were taken up with the contents and the recommendations of the Commission.

As is the custom at ICOLD, I was nominated an Honorary President after the end of my term of office. For a number of years, I continued attending functions, even if it became financially difficult to do so. All in all, I attended the following Exco’s and Congresses:

• 1974  Athens
• 1975 Tehera
• 1977 Salzburg
• 1978 Cape Town
• 1980 Rome
• 1983 London
• 1985 Lausanne (Exco and Congress)
• 1988 San Francisco
• 1990 Sydney
• 1991 Vienna (Exco and Congress)
• 1992 Granada
• 1993 Cairo
• 1994 Durban
• 1995 Oslo
• 1996 Santiago
• 1997 Florence (Exco and Congress)
• 1998 New Delhi
• 1999 Antalya
• 2000 Beijing (Exco and Congress)
• 2001 Dresden
• 2006 Barcelona (Exco and Congress)
• SANCOLD was denied access by the Governments of the following countries: Mexico (1976), Sweden (1981), Brazil (1982), Indonesia (1986), China (1987) and Denmark (1989).

After my retirement from Water Affairs, I joined Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners from Reading, England for about two years. During that time, I received an invitation of the World Bank, in my capacity of President of ICOLD, to attend a Water Seminar in the Westfield International Conference Centre in Virginia, USA. At that occasion, I also attended an Interim Council Meeting of the World Water Council, representing ICOLD. In September 1995, I attended the IWSA Congress in Durban. In March 1996, I visited the ICOLD Head Office in Paris in connection with problems experienced with the transition of one Secretary General to his successor. From there, I travelled to Marseille for the first meeting of the World Water Council, chaired by Abu Zeid from Egypt. In September 1996, at the invitation of the British Dam Society (the British national committee), I gave the Geoffrey Binnie Memorial lecture during their Symposium at the University of York. From there, I travelled to Cairo to attend the Board Meeting of the WWC, held to coincide with the Congress of the International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage. During that time, I was asked to chair a Dispute Review Board in connection with the Letsibogo Dam under construction by a Brazilian Contractor in Botswana.

I gained a lot of knowledge from my association with ICOLD, especially from visiting dams and other water works during the study tours following the meetings. I also made life-long friends with colleagues from other countries.