It’s a coal mine, and it’s closing. But there’ll be no “just transition” or anything quite so fancy for the remaining 1,174 people employed at Tendele Coal Mining’s Somkhele mine on the border of the Hluhluwe game reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Their jobs end today, just as Tendele has repeatedly warned mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe they would, as they petitioned him for help to keep the mine open.
Mantashe has not moved a muscle in response. And now arguably SA’s best source of the low-sulphur anthracite essential to the production of ferrochrome and ferromanganese, which are themselves used in the production of stainless and other steels, is simply no more.
It was a valuable resource, and without it SA’s two big ferrochrome producers, Glencore and Samancor, may have to import the necessary anthracite, triggering import duties that could make them uncompetitive and threaten even more jobs.
It’s a mess, difficult to capture. Essentially, an environmental lawyer, Kirsten Youens, has campaigned relentlessly for the closure of the mine. She argues that it contaminates the environment and ruins lives. Supported by a range of environmental non-governmental organisations, she has also been indirectly funded by the wealthy Raith Foundation.
“My clients would like the mine to close,” she told reporters in 2020, “and land that has been destroyed rehabilitated so that trees and indigenous vegetation can grow again, and the water restored to its original levels. If that’s not possible, at the very least we need to stop the mine’s expansion. It cannot ruin any more lives.”
Today she wins. Let’s hope those trees get growing quickly and feed the 20,000 or so people directly dependent on the mine — employees and their families, local contractors and suppliers on top of that. Unemployment in the area, says Tendele CEO Jan du Preez, is already 72%. What do these arriviste jobless eat tomorrow?
This is all happening in the municipality of Mtubatuba, one of the most remote parts of the country. No-one can hear you scream from there
Well, she sort of wins. With the mine now officially closed and SA’s deindustrialisation up another notch, Du Preez is taking a gamble. He shut the mine because Youens successfully challenged the consultation process he used in 2016 to expand Somkhele after 10 profitable years. Without the expansion he cannot raise the finance to continue operating. Starting on July 1 and 2 he will announce the start of a new consultative process, seeking the levels of consent he hopes the courts and Mantashe can live with.
For a start, he is asking for a much smaller extension, abandoning about 195km² of the original 212km² expansion application claim, to about 8% of the original. Second, he does seem to have some pretty solid support on the ground for expanding the mine, including all the affected unions, traditional leadership and the local municipality. To expand even in the smaller area, 143 families would need to consent to move.
At the time of writing 133 had done so, with the 10 households still holding out represented by the formidable public interest lawyer Richard Spoor. But this is no Xolobeni, where the local community has emphatically rejected the sale of mineral sands mining rights along the Pondoland coast despite intense pressure from Mantashe to relent and allow the mining to go ahead.
Du Preez, provided he does his consulting by the book, has a fair chance of success. If he gets the expansion he needs to keep producing, he reckons he can put back about R4bn into the community over 10 years, in salaries and local procurement — empowerment dividends that get paid whether the company is profitable or not. PAYE tax would be R2.4bn and exports would earn SA about $640m in forex. He says the mine’s rehabilitation fund, a mixture of cash and bank guarantees, is intact.
Clarify numbers
But mine rehabilitation funds are posted with provincial outposts of the department of mineral resources & energy. If Du Preez doesn’t get his extension, good luck to the environmentalists getting that money out of Mantashe’s department and flowing into rehabilitation.
Still, this is a space to watch. Du Preez claims the people Youens represents, the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation (MCEJO), number about 150. She told reporters a few years ago they were 4,000 strong. A new round of consultation might clarify the numbers.
Both sides in this dispute need to take the greatest care in the coming weeks though. Already one activist against the mine has been shot dead. This is all happening in the municipality of Mtubatuba, one of the most remote parts of the country. No-one can hear you scream from there.
But what is happening at Somkhele is instructive for us all as we prepare the country for a much wider shutdown of coal mines in our transition to renewable energy. Livelihoods — indeed lives — are at stake. Nerves are already strained to unimaginable limits. The dangers of violence, of mistakes, are also infinite.
There’s nothing pretty or even romantic about an opencast mine, as many coal mines are. And Somkhele is a particularly ugly scar on the land. But if you want to shut down a coal mine, you have to come up with a credible alternative, ready to run. For the people, you see. Building hiking trails and planting new trees won’t cut it.
• Bruce is a former editor of Business Day and the Financial Mail.
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