The Destruction of the Highveld Digging Coal the Groundwork Report 2016
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The Destruction of the Highveld Digging Coal The groundWork Report 2016 The Destruction of the Highveld Part 1: Digging Coal Written by David Hallowes and Victor Munnik November 2016 ISBN 978-0-620-73393-9 Published by groundWork P O Box 2375, Pietermaritzburg, 3200, South Africa Tel: +27 (0)33 342 5662 Fax: +27 (0)33 342 5665 e-mail: [email protected] Web: www.groundwork.org.za Cover Credit: groundWork Layout and cover design by Boutique Books Printed and bound by Arrow Print, Pietermaritzburg Contents 1 Coal’s assault on people and environments .............................................. 13 Smoke, dust and dynamite ............................................................................................15 Making impunity ...............................................................................................................20 2 Land, minerals and labour .............................................................................. 28 Hierarchy of work .............................................................................................................33 Cheap coal barons ............................................................................................................37 Coal export boom ..............................................................................................................41 In a free land ........................................................................................................................50 3 Corporate coal on the Highveld .................................................................... 72 Coal majors ..........................................................................................................................74 Coal juniors .........................................................................................................................92 4 The catchments – poisoned at source ......................................................... 96 Komati ................................................................................................................................. 103 Olifants ................................................................................................................................ 138 Trashing the Vaal ............................................................................................................ 168 5 Of the future ......................................................................................................184 Messing with Strategic Water Sources ................................................................. 186 Rebellions against coal ............................................................................................... 195 Part I: Digging Coal - groundWork - 1 - Acronyms AMD Acid Mine Drainage CER Centre for Environmental Rights DEA Department of Environmental Affairs DMR Department of Mineral Resources DWA Department of Water Affairs DWS Department of Water and Sanitation EEPOG Escarpment Environmental Protection Group EMP Environmental Management Plan EMPR Environmental Management Programme FEPA Freshwater Ecosystem Priority Areas FSE Federation for a Sustainable Environment IDC Industrial Development Corporation DARDLEA Mpumalanga Department of Agriculture, Rural Development, Land and Environmental Affairs MEC Minerals-energy complex MPRDA Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act MTPA Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency NEMA National Environmental Management Act PAIA Promotion of Access to Information Act, 2000 SLP Social and labour plan Unfamiliar words Catchment The land area that gives rise to a river and its tributaries. Dragline Very large mining machine that look like a crane. It drags a huge ‘bucket’ to scoop up and move earth. Randlord Gold mine bosses in the early years of the Johannesburg mining boom. Run-of-mine Production before coal washing. Saleable product after washing may be a third or more less. Uitlanders Afrikaans word for ‘foreigners’ or ‘outsiders’, used to describe the mainly British mining community in boom town Johannesburg. Zama-Zama Informal mineworkers. - 2 - groundWork - The Destruction of the Highveld Foreword Foreword “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it – if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass …” (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860) How could we know the earth, if we have no earth to know? If all we have of our childhood memories are disused mines, grey and matted overburden, smouldering discard coal dumps, lakes of acid mine drainage and the foul, of Africa knew in the past. It is not the earth people still know in places such asacrid Xolobeni stench where of coal people fires? Thisare defending poisoned earththeir landis not from the mining.earth that the people The groundWork Reports explore the state of environmental justice in South Africa. This year, and in 2017, we view the state of environmental justice through the lens of the Mpumalanga Highveld and its destruction through the extraction and burning of coal. Sadly, what we see is environmental injustice, not environmental justice. On the Highveld, people are not empowered through democratic participation. They do not enjoy the fruits of freedom, equality or solidarity. The post-apartheid government together with the 1% keep the majority extremely impoverished. They create poverty to make their health at the altar of the coal mines and to live in places where the soil is dead,people the desperate water is for acid any and work the thatair is might pungent be thrown with sulphur, their way, benzene even to and sacrifice other pollutants. As people here do not see equality and solidarity, they live with the degradedMuch of the environments Highveld resembles created bythe mining post-apocalyptic and corporate nightmare profit. of an already dead and dying land. While people work to save what’s left, the powers that be are hell-bent on pulling it apart and violating it, all in the name of the poor Part I: Digging Coal - groundWork - 3 - Foreword but actually for the enrichment of a few. Well, the poor need jobs – regardless of what those jobs are – so that the elite can make their ever-growing fortunes. wasted by mining, it is also being wasted by climate change. What we knew asThe children, same flowers we will will not not experience come up every as adults. spring So for, why besides should the the earth youth being of Mpumalanga consider the earth differently? With love? There is no joy in the wasteland that they experience, so maintaining a world that for them does not really exist is impossible. Activities such as mining, which will entrench the death of their earth, might be considered their only hope of getting away from seeds of another world. this doom. It is only through the work of imagination that they can find the What is alarming in this year’s groundWork Report, is the evidence that in the era of democracy things have got worse rather than better. Sadly, our democratic leadership lacks the creative imagination to think beyond the apartheid-created minerals-energy complex that depended on cheap black labour in polluting coal mines to produce cheap energy for the extractive Now there is a tinge of colour to those elites! industries to accumulate profits for a white local and global corporate elite. In the 1990s, when environmental justice emerged as a narrative in South Africa, it was in hotspots such as Mpumalanga where people stood up and raised their concern about the destruction of their lives as they lived above old burning coal mines. I heard these stories when I worked for the then eminent environmental movement, the Environmental Justice Networking Forum. But during my three years there I never had the opportunity to visit these burning mines and so never understood the reality from a personal perspective. Then, feltin August the heat 2015, of it forfor themyself. first Thistime is I visitednot unusual the area in the to bearglobal witness South. –India along is with also a group of parliamentarians. The fires were still burning. I saw it, smelt it and Health of Mother Earth Foundation, refers to burning coal mines. I also went undergroundknown for its wherehell fires local – peopleas Nigerian dig for anti-oil coal to activist have some Nnimmo form ofBassey, subsistence of the after mine owners absconded and left the people with abandoned, burning and collapsing coal mines. Underground, I crouched and crawled to the working - 4 - groundWork - The Destruction of the Highveld Foreword coalface in this murky underground world lit by old headlamps and, believe it or not, candles. People are desperate. The story concludes with the reality that mining seeks to extract and then of jobs and riches for the locals is nothing more than a mirage or blurred hope offload the costs of its profits onto the environment and people and the promise but with no good air to breathe, no land to till and no water for crops. in the smog filled, polluted Highveld morning. People are left not with wealth The brutality of mining is shared with all in this groundWork Report. It pulls no punches. It recognises that mining is a doomed venture and that it has a history that does not allow us to have faith in its promise of delivery of jobs and development for the people. There has always been a debate about sustainable mining, but the pipedream fades in the light of reality. Around the world people