On the 30-minute drive from Somkhele mine to the northern KwaZulu-Natal town of Mtubatuba, the fruits of the open-pit anthracite operation are evident: expensive houses line the hillsides around the mine, and there are spaza shops, a clinic, a brickyard and a health research institute.
Look closer, though, and the signs of dilapidation are starting to show. The grass at the health institute is uncut, the shelves of the spaza shops are half-empty, the brickyard is devoid of any bricks.
It’s a slide that has coincided with the downscaling of Somkhele as its anthracite reserves have dried up. The problem is, with the mining company having been unable to get approvals to open a new site to keep the business alive — in the face of legal threats, administrative bungling and (justifiable) angst over the continued use of coal — the local economy is fast drying up too.
To the west of Mtubatuba, in the village of Mpukunyoni, the situation is worse. About 80% of Somkhele’s 1,600 workers come from the local community. But with only 22 people on site at the mine these days, residents feel their livelihoods have been torpedoed.
“This is a poverty-stricken area,” Mpukunyoni Business Association secretary Sicelo Shandu tells the FM. “Business opportunities were created by the mine. If the mine closes down permanently, these opportunities will be lost.”
Some of the local residents blame South Africa’s just energy transition (JET) for their plight.
It’s a touchy subject: the JET’s focus, globally, is about helping countries reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 by shifting economies gradually from high-emissions assets (coal mines, for example) to lower-carbon technologies such as renewable energy.
In November 2021, South Africa was given $8.5bn by a group of developed countries to ease this transition and “end our dependence on coal” — but, practically, little work seems to have been done to prepare communities for this.
“They’re making us puppets [in the JET],” says Ivan Bhengu, secretary of the local branch of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). “The intention is very far from the reality.”
But to blame the JET for the community’s plight wouldn’t be entirely accurate, and it illustrates the minefield of misinformation likely to arise in all sorts of unlikely places.
In this particular case, this is a battle between environmentalists and the owner of the Somkhele mine, Tendele. The miner is in one corner, supported by the local traditional council, labour unions and — initially at least — the Ingonyama Trust. In the other is the Mfolozi Community Environmental Justice Organisation (MCEJO), represented by environmental law firm All Rise, and the MCEJO’s funder, the Global Environmental Trust (GET).
At its heart, this dispute revolves around environmental legislation and the impact of mining operations on the environment and on local communities. And in that sense, it is about the transition away from environmentally damaging fossil fuels.
“The just transition has to happen,” All Rise founding member Kirsten Youens tells the FM. “It isn’t happening fast enough.” And until something is done, she says, her firm’s clients “are bearing the brunt of opencast mining”.
But Somkhele is about so much more than just a fight over legislation. It’s a glimpse into the tensions inherent in the JET; the propaganda war that will be fought at hundreds of South African coal mines that have to be closed; and that thin line where poverty meets environmental necessity.
‘The fossil’
It’s clear on which side of the fence mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe sits.
“If you listen to the environmentalists, you will kill development,” he says in an interview with the FM. “Our environmentalists here are foreign-funded and they are anti-development and therefore you are not going to see any development.”
Factually, it’s a flawed argument, and the $8.5bn given to South Africa precisely to develop a renewable industry suggests as much.
But, to make his case, Mantashe invokes that old bogeyman, the Soros foundation — “American money” generally — as “flowing to [local environmental organisations] to stop development in South Africa”.
Of course, Mantashe would take this position.
As a former coal miner and unionist, he has consistently stood in the way of the move towards renewable energy in South Africa — an intransigent force for the status quo.
Three weeks ago he refused to attend a signing of a $1bn green hydrogen agreement with the Netherlands and Denmark, claiming he hadn’t seen the memorandum of understanding. Embarrassingly, international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor had to sign in his stead.
Last November, even as President Cyril Ramaphosa was being fêted for his just transition plan at the COP27 climate talks in Egypt, Mantashe told parliament that the people of South Africa should be shielded from the “dire consequences” of the JET, including job losses in carbon-intensive industries.
“Coal will continue to play a critical part in our just energy transition,” he said. Which, needless to say, seems fundamentally contradictory of the JET’s raison d’être.
When asked about the Tendele issue, Mantashe tells the FM this is but one instance of environmentalists meddling in energy affairs. He refers, too, to the successful legal challenges to government-supported seismic surveys in the Western and Eastern Cape “where we were not even doing exploration, it was stopped by the courts”.
Ominously, Mantashe argues that the country’s laws are simply “too liberal”. “Now, if the courts are buying into an anti-development programme, we are in trouble.”
In the case he refers to, multinational Shell was blocked from conducting seismic surveys off the coast by the Makhanda high court in September last year. But there, the courts didn’t stop the blasting just because of “environmental meddling”; rather, judge president Selby Mfanelo Mbenenge said it was “demonstrably clear that the decisions were not preceded by a fair procedure; the decision-maker failed to take relevant considerations into account and to comply with relevant legal prescripts”.
Making a scapegoat of the JET
Tendele is definitely a legal issue — and to treat it as anything else would be “misinformation”, says Crispian Olver, executive director of the presidential climate commission. “There is a very specific challenge to environmental legislation that has been mounted there.”
Nonetheless, Olver tells the FM, there is an obligation on the government to apply “just transition principles” to any mine closure. “You want to make sure that workers have social protection and minimise job losses, so all of that should be looked at once the matter is resolved.”
To understand the root of this issue, we must go back five years, to the origin of the dispute.
In 2018, Tendele found itself in a bind: with Somkhele almost depleted, the company’s survival depended on a new site. However, the MCEJO and the GET immediately opposed Tendele’s digging at so-called areas 4 and 5.
Though the company had obtained mining rights for those sites before the implementation of environmental legislation in 2014, which regulated how environmental impact assessments should be done, the appellants argued that Tendele should comply with the new requirements.
Over the next few years, the case wound its way through the KZN high court, appeals court and Constitutional Court, with each finding that the trust’s arguments weren’t specific enough to adjudicate the matter. Nonetheless, Tendele’s new operations remained shuttered during this period — not even a road could be built for the new dig.
At the same time, the MCEJO and the GET asked the Pretoria high court to set aside the mining right for the new dig because it hadn’t followed the required consultation process when its environmental management plan was drawn up under the old legislation.
In May last year, that court opted not to cancel the mining right. In her ruling, judge Noluntu Bam found the traditional council’s lack of record-keeping — including the 2013 decision by the late inkosi Mzokhulayo Mkhwanazi to grant the mining right — to be a violation of the council’s own governance structure.
“It was a fundamental breach of the law with regard to public participation,” she said.
Still, Bam said: “This is a case that calls for pragmatism. It seems to me that an order referring the matter back to the minister will strike the correct balance of various competing interests.”
So she sent the matter back to Mantashe to reconsider after wide consultation with interested and affected parties. After that process, Tendele again got the go-ahead.
In May, Tendele issued a 21-day notice to local communities of its intention to start mining the new sites — a process the MCEJO and the GET have again sought to interdict in court. (Judgment on that interdict still hasn’t been delivered.)
All Rise’s Youens is adamant that this isn’t about shuttering Tendele’s operations.
“Our purpose is not to close down the mine. [It is] to get the mine to comply with the law. The fact that the mine is battling to do that is the mine’s fault,” she says. Complying with legislation “could have been done by now. For some reason they’ve dragged it out forever.”
This, of course, is not how Tendele sees things. “We have never been stopped by the department of mineral resources for contravening environmental laws,” says Nathi Kunene, the company’s community development manager. “We have social and labour plans in place that we have delivered on in the past.”
There’s also value for the community in keeping this alive, Kunene adds. Even without producing meaningful income, the mine supplies water to about 500 households on the site. And it’s constructed a maternity ward at the nearby clinic.
Tendele CEO Jan du Preez points to the goodwill that such actions have engendered. “When the [July 2021] riots started, I received a call from the Somkhele mine’s security head saying there were 38 trucks on their way to the site,” he says.
“We feared the worst … but when the trucks arrived, miners and local community members started to guard the mine while others ensured everyone was fed during that time.”
A community at war
Meanwhile, as the legal tussle wends its way through the courts, tensions in the community are rising.
“Violence decreased after the mine opened [in 2006]” as communities started working together at the mine, says Mandla Sibiya, portfolio head of mining at the Mpukunyoni traditional council.
Now, says NUM’s Bhengu, levels of violence are high due to the scaling down of mining operations. “If someone doesn’t work and earn money, violence and crime follow,” he says.
That area is no stranger to violence — particularly political killings.
In late 2020 MCEJO member Fikile Ntshangase was gunned down outside her home; earlier that year local councillor Philip Mkhwanazi died in a hail of bullets outside his home; and this month another councillor, Innocent “Killer” Mkhwanazi, was killed in an ambush.
If nothing else, the situation has deepened the distrust between he MCEJO and the rest of the local community. The traditional council and business association claims that the MCEJO won’t attend any of the meetings to find a solution to the problem.
Rather bizarrely (and echoing the views of Mantashe), local businessman Sipho Mathunjwa attributes this to the MCEJO and the GET being “funded by global funders”. Quite who, he doesn’t say.
Youens is sanguine about this criticism. “I’ve heard it all before,” she says, adding: “The traditional council gets paid by Tendele; they get a stipend. They obviously want to see the mine continue.”
Still, as long as the community remains in limbo, things are unlikely to change — even though people are getting impatient. “People constantly ask me when will the court cases ever end,” says Tendele’s Kunene.
Or, as Bhengu puts it: “The longer the process is drawn out, the more harm is created … We are crying as a community about the mine’s closure, while the people fighting us don’t live here or know the community.”
As for Tendele, CEO Du Preez is at his wits’ end about the mine. But he isn’t oblivious to the imperative to cut back on fossil fuels — he just argues that it must be done in a carefully phased way. “I see the JET as a gradual replacement of coal as a fuel,” he says. “You cannot immediately switch off the country’s coal plants. It will plunge the economy into darkness.”
The need for justice and transition
Du Preez’s view is echoed by Olver, who also talks of a “managed exit from coal”.
“South Africa will sell coal as long as the coal market exists,” says Olver, though he quickly adds a caveat: “The mines themselves must account for the emissions where they burn.”
By the climate commission’s estimate, demand for coal will drop off between 2030 and 2040, before drying up completely in the 2050s. So “mine closures will be dictated by the markets, and we have to prepare in the meantime”.
To that end, the commission is working behind the scenes, planning for the years ahead, when the pace of the transition is set to quicken.
Komati has recently been decommissioned and is something of a test case for the government’s JET plans.
The plant is being repurposed as a “renewable generation site” powered with 150MW of solar, 70MW of wind and 150MW of storage batteries.
Olver says that as Komati neared the end of its life as a coal-fired plant, it couldn’t be relied on to provide energy efficiently, so the idea was to use that site in other ways.
The same fate awaits other plants in Eskom’s ageing fleet — bar new plants Medupi and Kusile. So when, say, Grootvlei, Hendrina and Duvha reach their sell-by date, they, too, will be repurposed.
That may still be some way off, given current discussions about extending their lifespans to mitigate South Africa’s energy crisis. But, says Olver, it is in any event not a rapid process — an overnight shutdown and the destruction of the coal mining ecosystem.
On Friday, a delegation that included the presidential climate commission, along with Eskom leadership and various government officials visited Komati to assess the impact of the move to cleaner energy sources.
Opening the event, public enterprises minister Pravin Gordhan said: “Komati … is in reality the area where South Africa’s JET is going to be tested and prepared for. Komati is the place where, as we say colloquially, the tyre hits the road.”
That process may “zigzag” depending on events such as “wars and other forms of disruption”, he said, referencing how European countries have had to rethink their own clean energy strategies in the face of the Russia-Ukraine war. But, he stressed, the “just” in the energy is “absolutely crucial”.
Mantashe, and the community living around Komati, may disagree. Here, the concerns of the community mirror those of the people in Mpukunyoni, near the Tendele mine.
But can we create new jobs?
In a report titled “Contested Transition: State and Capital Against Community”, environmental NGO groundWork reported that the Komati community were “worried about the shutdown and how they would find work and earn money to sustain themselves ‘after coal’”.
The report said people were losing their jobs and “were not convinced that it was necessary to shut down coal — this transition was the agenda of overseas forces, they argued”.
One resident, a Mr Shabangu, was quoted by groundWork as saying he had “a Bible full of questions” about what was happening at the power station: “Is the just transition just? You only took care of Eskom employees when you closed the power station, why? Why are institutions of just transition and reskilling not here? Why are you only now planning for decommissioning? What if this meeting says we don’t want the decommissioning? … Our economy is in tatters. The coal mines are closed already. The [JET] is lying when they say local people will benefit.”
These are critical questions, which put the spotlight firmly on whether the planning for the JET began early enough. While the idea is to retrain employees of coal mines for new careers, many critics feel this process has been left too late — or forgotten altogether.
The delegation of political heavyweights who visited Komati last week heard something similar to the concerns recorded by groundWork.
As Olver tells the FM, the commission heard from local government representatives — two municipal mayors and one district mayor — as well as the community. What they heard was sobering. The community felt they hadn’t been adequately consulted and, where they were, this felt like a box-ticking exercise carried out by consultants.
Though Komati’s last unit was taken offline last year, “economic diversification” started only this year.
“The sequencing was completely wrong,” says Olver. The consultations should have taken place before the first closures, he says, and the economic diversification programme should have started ahead of this. And, he adds, the fact that most workers were moved to other power stations created a situation that was far from ideal.
“It is probably better to build out a proper economic programme instead of moving [the Eskom workers] … the entire town was affected by this,” he says.
Olver is clear that his first impression of the Komati experience — after listening to various constituencies and ahead of discussions within the commission — is that South Africa is “not thinking big enough”. “We don’t seem to have enough of an economic strategy,” he says.
But economically, there are plenty of other challenges too.
Olver says that the $8.5bn that South Africa has secured in loans to finance its JET is “a drop in the ocean”. By his estimate, $100bn is a more realistic option — and for a cash-strapped country with a thousand other priorities, that’s a big number.
Beyond just reskilling workers, Olver points to the need for the government to explore how it could draw in economic sectors with maximum employment potential to replace the coal value chain. There is already work under way to set up a JET office in Mpumalanga towards this end, he says.
Alex Benkenstein, head of the climate & natural resources programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs, says our policymakers have a “responsibility to acknowledge the anxiety, and the fact that there are real social and economic costs, that come with the transition”.
And, he says, they need to step away from creating “unrealistic expectations” of how easy it will be to create alternative jobs.
“The presidential climate commission is making sincere efforts to facilitate a kind of societal dialogue on the transition. This is a priority for them, and they have certainly been trying to reach out to engage and listen to communities. This is a model that other countries in the world are very interested in and are watching closely,” he says.
But will it be enough? That’s debatable. Benkenstein says there will obviously be winners and losers in this process, and “there is going to be a degree where you are never going to satisfy everyone”.
Whether this wrenching transition ultimately works, however, will depend on how successfully the government can manage this process — and South Africa’s government departments are not known for their easy relations with each other. Ramaphosa’s ideals for a cleaner, greener country could be undermined by his own administrators.
“The government departments seem to be at odds with each other,” says Youens. “Our department of mineral resources [and] our department of environmental affairs seem to be going in two different directions. Our department of mineral resources seems hellbent on getting as much fossil fuel out of the ground as possible, in complete contravention to what we want to achieve in our climate promises we have made internationally.”
And, in the unlikely event that the government can find a way to co-operate, can it build a cohesive strategy around the JET? One that includes practical guidance for communities, and clear messages to the fossil fuel industry and environmentalists with valid concerns about the country’s pollution records?
In short, the government needs to manage the immense expectations of all those affected by the JET. How will contractors to mines and employees be compensated for the loss of income? Will some of the funds promised by developed nations actually be used to retrain workers? How, practically, can a moribund economy absorb reskilled workers? And how can these new industries be located close enough to the mines that need to close to provide tangible support for these communities?
It is a Bible full of questions indeed.
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