NEIL OVERY: Host communities still shoulder mining burden

On May 15 G20 SA Task Force 1 on “Inclusive Economic Growth, Industrialisation, Employment & Reduced Inequality” discussed the first draft of a critical minerals framework for the G20 international forum.

On the same day the SA cabinet approved the Critical Minerals & Metals Strategy for SA. Mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe stated that the strategy was designed “to foster investment into exploration, beneficiation, building resilient local value chains, research & development, skills development and strengthening regional integration and international partnerships to position the country as a major player in the global critical minerals market”.  

Its publication received comparatively little media attention, which is a pity because there are two remarkable aspects of the strategy that once again demonstrate how Mantashe is determined to ignore international trends and best practice in favour of ploughing his own furrow no matter the harm this causes SA.   

First, his department has decided that coal is a critical mineral. The strategy justifies this by noting that because we have 200 years’ worth of coal reserves and we use coal for most electricity generation it must be considered critical, as if viable alternatives do not exist and that the deadly pollution from coal is irrelevant.

The only nod to the apparently unimportant issues of climate change, deadly pollution and the just transition is the strategy’s recognition that “carbon capture and storage” and “clean coal” technologies will be necessary in future. Carbon capture and storage is fantastically expensive, and its long-term viability is entirely unproven while there is no such thing as “clean coal”.  The term “clean coal” is nothing more than an advertising slogan made up by R&R Partners, a public relations firm that worked for the American mining industry in the late 2000s. 

Mantashe may want to the reflect on the fact that the only other country that recognises coal as a critical mineral is Donald Trump’s America. In April Trump issued an executive order entitled “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry”. While they may have little else in common, Mantashe and Trump clearly share an archaic and wholly damaging addiction to coal. 

The second remarkable aspects of the strategy is its almost complete disregard for the opinions or concerns of host communities that live and work around sites where critical minerals are extracted or are to be extracted in future. While the strategy mentions other stakeholders such as the private sector, universities and state institutions at length, aside from a couple of typically vague platitudes about the need to “safeguard communities”, the only direct reference to host communities is the threat they are said to present to investors.

The strategy states that “social strife in host communities poses political and socioeconomic instability risks for potential investors”, without offering any analysis of what causes this “social strife”, let alone how to address it.     

The strategy’s failure to acknowledge the need to meaningfully engage with host communities implies that the pursuit of critical minerals will be “business as usual” in the SA mining sector. This reality flies in the face of international best practice when it comes to the global rush for critical minerals as both the UN and the AU have made it clear that the boom for critical minerals cannot simply reproduce the serious social and environmental problems of current mining practices.

The UN secretary-general’s Panel on Critical Energy Transition Minerals states that “resourcing the energy transition requires a new paradigm rooted in equity and justice”, observing that “the race to net zero cannot trample over the poor”. Crucially, it notes that “states shall consult and co-operate in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned, through their own representative institutions, in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources”, thus entrenching the principles of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) from host communities with communal, informal and customary rights.  

While disappointingly shying away from directly championing FPIC, the AU’s African Green Minerals Strategy nonetheless explicitly states that “equitable resource-based industrialisation” via critical minerals will only take place if a new “sustainable development licence to operate” with human rights at its core is forged with host communities.  

That the newly published Critical Minerals & Metals Strategy fails to reflect on these global calls for the respect for human rights is an act of deliberate omission on the part of the SA government, which continues to view host communities as little more than an impediment to extraction rather than as critical rights-holders.

As it stands, the strategy seems set to replicate the “social strife in host communities” that it is so quick to identify but is so reluctant to address. Until the principles of FPIC are entrenched into law, host communities will sadly continue to shoulder the social and environmental burdens of the extractive industry in SA.

• Dr Overy, a freelance researcher, writer and photographer, is a research associate at Environmental Humanities South, University of Cape Town.