KAROO NEWS - These days, watch out for the news.
Uranium mining may hit the headlines, as the Australian miners are heading for a mining license in a small and seemingly insignificant “Kareepoort Block” in the Eastern Cape. What used to be a quiet backwater off the main road has become the premier battleground for a decisive stage in the battle against uranium mining in the Karoo. But not is all lost yet.
Faced with strong opposition in places like Prince Albert, the miners have backed out of their prospecting license there, also from Laingsburg.Now, quietly, they have also abandoned Fraserburg and Loxton, of course without informing the Interested and Affected Parties.The withdrawal came to light only in a quarterly report published earlier for the Australian Stock Exchange. The same argument was used again: they want to concentrate on the seemingly most promising properties in Ryst Kuil and Quaggasfontein just outside Beaufort West.
That “channel” extends – fortunately, or unfortunately – into the Eastern Cape. The miners sought permission to synchronise the two applications, as mineral rights are primarily a provincial function and must be applied separately per province. They failed. It turns out – perhaps by design – that this was perhaps to their advantage: in a series of applications, now the Kareepoort Block in the Aberdeen district is the first one to have a complete Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), for the smallest and mostly insignificant portion of their mining proposal.
It looks as if that is now to their advantage, as the due diligence and environmental management capacity of the Eastern Cape Provincial Government is a far cry from that of the Western Cape, where the juicier part of the proposition lie, their real targets. If the EC administration can be bullied into submission, it will be much easier to convince or bypass the Western Cape government, which in the past has shown some great strength in questioning shoddy science and poor documentation in EIAs. After all, the Eastern Cape hopes for a “uranium road” to be constructed via Rietbron into Coega, their preferred port of export of the dreaded yellow cake.
But they had seriously underestimated the resilience and dedication of a small group of local farmers that are hell-bent on stopping an industry that is set to destroy their livelihood, contamination or not. The mere thought of a uranium mine at their doorstep darkens their very existence, drives down property prices and scares investment away. Good-bye to the new money-maker agritourism. Their campaign to send 1000 emails to the DMR meets with enthusiastic support from their peers. They do not rely on NGOs or foreign funders, they just do it.
Right now, they have discovered that perhaps the tiniest of their weapons may hold the best chance of success. One of the local farmers, an avid botanist, found - first on his own property and then on the proposed mine premises - an entirely new species of a succulent “rock flower” Nananthus. The company’s specialists, of course, overlooked it when they did a superficial survey, as they some “overlooked” some other 120 plant species there. If this tiny “rock flower”, only a few millimetre big, makes into the list of endangered species, it will change the rules of the games.
The company has then from the end of April until July to respond to the hundreds of objections from different quarters, to present all this material to the DMR which will have to make a decision, after the minister has “applied his mind”. Hold your breath, we do not know even which minister that will be. If Zuma falls, Zwane must go as well.
By Dr Stefan Cramer, SAFCEIs Science Advisor
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