There are 114 mining related applications for coalmining on farms in an area encompassing Dullstroom, Kwaggaskop, Belfast, Dalmanuta, Wonderfontein, Carolina, Warburton, Chrissiesmeer, Breyton, Lothair, Ermelo, Holbank, and Sheepmoor. On average the farms are 2000 hectares each. The total area with mining applications on them, excluding the surrounding areas, is approximately 22,000 hectares. This area contains extensive interconnected and interdependent wetlands and peat lands including the unique and irreplaceable Mpumalanga Lakes Area and the 11 600 year Lakenvlei peat lands.

If all the coal from all these proposed small mines was given to Eskom, it would only provide power enough for the country for one year. Unless Minister Buyelwa Sonjika  has the foresight and political will to stop the DME from granting all these licenses, we will lose all of this and more for just one years worth of low grade coal that is not even worth exporting.

Valuable agricultural land is still being farmed here successfully in a country that is losing its agricultural potential. Thanks to tourism and its related industries, permanent healthy and long term jobs are being created in this area that far exceeds anything in quantity and quality of work that the coal mines can offer. One large hotel and leisure estate can offer as many as 500 permanent jobs requiring a broad mix of skills, and the demand for this kind of development is in this area is growing apace. Coal mining here will destroy this.

The coal mines that want to mine here are mostly small operations with a short lifespan of 4 to 6 years that can at best offer the surrounding communities only 50 or so new short term jobs apiece, mostly as low paid sweepers working a miserable and unhealthy job. The existing mines have so far not even bothered to do social and labour plans because they can offer so little. Coal mining here is not only completely unsustainable, it is irresponsible, and without any merit at all. Not one government department besides the DME sees any good coming from, or supports, coal mining in this area.  It will be destructive of agriculture, tourism and jobs, and a richly unique environment, and it will contribute nothing but a legacy of acid mine drainage, impoverished land areas and social unrest.

The contemplated comprehensive and wholesale destruction of this area by the DME, is largely driven by Eskom. This ill considered and illegal destruction of thousands of hectares of wetlands and good agricultural land will be for no better reason than the coal underneath is near to Eskom power stations and they can get it cheaply. Much of this coal is not even economically viable to mine unless Eskom buys it.

There can be absolutely no justification by the DME for the granting of new coal mining licenses that will result in even more acid mine drainage when we are already at a crisis point in this regard with more than 800 un rehabilitated mines already on its database, and an estimated cleanup bill of R100 billion, and water quality in our rivers and dams is deteriorating, and when 70% of the coal mined in this country is currently being exported through Richards Bay, and we have an estimated 300 years worth of coal left still to be mined. There is no shortage of coal, there may just be a shortage of very cheap coal.

 We are supporting an insupportable burden of electricity subsidies to the mining and industrial sector. If the coal market is” tight” for Eskom, it is because it is reluctant to pay the export price for coal or to charge industry more. The ultimate price for this short sighted penny pinching, so that mining companies and industries can have their cut price electricity, is the environment, in particular our water resources.. Mining companies and industries are evidently encouraged to stay where they can exploit a cheap operating environment. This faultless argument allows them to expatriate large profits with minimal restraints. Cheap electricity production in this country is being exported along with our cheap water and cheap South African labour, notwithstanding the government’s feeble efforts at beneficiation and 25% royalties. What beneficiation or “royalties” can you get from coal?

Many of the companies that have mining applications on these farms already have signed contracts from Eskom without even having embarked on the process of obtaining a mining license or even in some cases a prospecting license! What we appear to be facing here are done deals between Eskom and the mines with the DME obediently rubber stamping these through as fast as they can while trying to maintain a façade of legality.

What makes all of this possible despite objections from virtually every government department that has a mandate in the many and various laws to protect us from this kind of environmental desecration and harm, is the MPRDA (The Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act). This appallingly unconstitutional piece of legislation neatly succeeds in putting the actions and decisions of the DME almost completely out of the reach of just about all other legislation in the land.

Under the MPRDA, environmental legislation has been hijacked, internalized, and tailored specifically to the requirements of the DME to serve the sole interests of the mining industry. Under the MPRDA it is very easy for a mine to have its Environmental Management Plan approved. All it basically needs to show is that its impact can be mitigated in some way. Environmental consultants are contracted to the mines specifically to manage this “mitigation”. Under the MPRDA each mine need only consider its own impact, so it is easy to say in its EMP that its impact will be minimal and will be mitigated. It is not required to mitigate or consider anything beyond its own footprint.

The impact of the applicant mine is never considered in relation to its contribution to the cumulative impacts many mines in the same area can have. This is not a requirement of an EMP for a mine.  Concerns regarding the strategic damage that many mines can have on catchments, rivers or dams are also not a requirement of an individual mines EMP, and a mine gets a license based on its EMP. It is left to the officers of the DWAF, DALA, DEAT, the MTPA and other such government departments who have a strategic understanding of the bigger picture to raise objections in this regard. However their objections mean little to the DME, and they are able to enforce nothing under the MPRDA..  
   
When approval is sought for an EMP on which approval, a mining license is granted, and objections are submitted regarding any aspect of the proposed mining from any other government department, these objections are referred to the DME’s own internal environmental forum under the MPRDA, the RMDEC. (Regional Mining Development Environmental Committee).  The objections brought to this forum by “outside” departments are effectively devalued to the level of a “comment” when aspects of, or mining, is opposed by them, and no consensus can be reached. These objections are then submitted to the Minister of the DME for her “consideration”. This is complete concentration of power in the hands of the Minister of the DME who under its own environmental legislation need not obey any other.
 
Even the DWAF who may have retained a little residual power in being able to refuse to grant a water use license can be overruled by something called the Cooperative Governance Agreement. When Patrice Motsepes flagship Goedgevonden Coal Mine at Ogies was refused a Water Use License for wanting to mine in and dispose of dirty water on nearly 900 hectares of pristine wetlands, this regional decision was overturned by DWAF head office in Pretoria. No explanation was provided to anyone. It appears that the DME and the Minister herself, is not beholden to explain its actions or decisions to anyone.

The Minister herself has not yet, as far as we know, responded to a High Court ruling ordering her to set out her reasons for the granting of a mining license to Black Gold Mining Estates. This mine was successfully interdicted by private citizens at great expense, from mining next to the Tevredepan, the largest reeded pan in the Southern Hemisphere. Opaque, concealed and absent mining records and decisions appear to characterize this industry. Not even the DWAF seems able to protect our water resources and catchments against the onslaught of these many small and worthless but nevertheless category ( A ) mines. When the mining companies arrogantly state that they are operating within the law, what they mean is that they are operating under what they can get away with under the MPRDA.

Despite its protestations to the contrary, Onverdacht Colliery is illegally operating with a surface use general water abstraction agreement only, it does not yet have a Water Use License from the DWAF and may not even be given one, which it is required to have as it is a category ( A ) mine which is subject to special water use requirements. The refusal by DWAF to issue a Water Use License may also have been overturned by head office but as far as we know, no Water Use License has been given to them by the DWAF.

The only recourse against these arrogant and illegal actions of the mines and the DME and in this case Eskom too, is through private citizens appealing for relief through the courts. And as each and every case may be, we are forced to fight each and every application granted by the DME. The mines know this and are sitting smugly under the umbrella of the MPRDA and fondly in the lap of the Minister of the DME, and do not find themselves subject to the legislation of NEMA or any other environmental legislation. Even the requirements of Water Act need not apply to them!

The way this department has set itself up under the MPRDA, is illegal under the Constitution because it effectively denies other government departments their duty to exercise their mandates in the protection of our natural resources, and prevents them specifically in exercising these mandates. Under the provisions of the MPRDA the DME is wide open to corruption and abuse of power which is a situation that warrants immediate scrutiny and corrective action by the Constitutional Court.

We cannot have a situation where one government minister, in one department, has the power to wreak such wholesale destruction, wittingly or unwittingly, on an area as large as this and no other government departments, ministers, or any other laws are able to prevent it without recourse to the courts for each and every mining application.

It is deeply shocking and very upsetting when private citizens are driven to fence off conservation worthy areas in a forced and costly war against the mines because the officials that are supposed to protect these areas can do nothing. Most of these mines are still in the prospecting phase and the Minister could with complete justification, and based on good socio economic and strategically important environmental grounds, still stop these miners from getting their mining licenses if she so wishes.

Change of land use legislation does not apply to miners who can simply walk onto a piece of land and claim its use. No assessment is ever undertaken to determine if such mining is sustainable or in the national best interest or if it is damaging to the national interest, and the DME seems to have little interest in the nations resources that does not concern mining. WESSA Lowveld appeals to the officials of each and every government department in this province, in particular the DWAF, to vigorously object to each and every one of these completely worthless and frivolous applications as they arise, with every bit of ammunition that that can justifiably be brought against them, and publish these objections directly to the office of Dr. Garth Batchelor, for the province, and the national office of The Minister of Environmental Affairs, Mr.Martinus van Skalkwyk.

WESSA Lowveld also appeals to any one who has any legal standing and expertise to work to restore environmental constraints on mining to our national environmental legislation under all government departments. The “use it or lose it” clauses in the MPRDA designed to put everybody under pressure, not least the environment, should be scrapped altogether and something like a nationally acceptable  Sustainable Mining Development Planning Framework developed, that does not have the affect of the current unplanned and chaotic Wild West  free for all.
(By Marina Caird, WESSA Lowveld, Environmental affairs, 19/07/2007). 
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