For a Living Limpopo
Coal threatens Limpopo’s future.
The Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone is a Chinese-South African state-backed industrial mega-project that is intended to drive the strip-mining of Vhembe Biosphere Reserve for coal - laying waste to the visionary plan to create a landscape-scale conservation area in this wild but fragile region, along with its prospects for sustainable growth and jobs creation.
The future can still be changed.
Coal and the Musina-Makhado SEZ
Photo from a series by Kevin Frayer, China, 2016
The MM-SEZ is a US$22 billion steel-manufacturing juggernaut planned for a sprawling Chinese-controlled “Special Economic Zone” in the northern Vhembe District of South Africa’s Limpopo Province, between the towns of Musina and Makhado - the biggest such industrial development in South Africa’s history.
It is the undergirding of an ambitious coal-based industrialisation plan for the region and is openly intended to support 12 new open-cast coal mines in the unexploited Greater Soutpansberg Coalfields.
The whole scheme is high-risk and will come at a terrible cost to:
1) the sensitive environment, 2) the Limpopo River and the region’s scarce water resources, 3) vulnerable rural communities, 4) other local industries from farming to tourism, as well as 5) the debt-burdened public purse - none of which will be borne by the coal mining company or the backers of the Special Economic Zone.
The jobs promises balloon with each telling, but are backed by nothing.
An alternate future
Limpopo River confluence with the Shashe River, Mapungubwe National Park
There is another, viable path to sustainable growth in the far northern reaches of Limpopo.
Not without irony, government has already mapped the way to build a thriving and inclusive biodiversity-based economy around the Vhembe’s extensive protected areas network by creating a vast new landscape-scale conservation area between the Great Mapungubwe and Great Limpopo Trans-Frontier Conservation Areas and Soutpansberg Mountains.
Compared with the exploitation of coal and other minerals, the nature-based development plan utilising renewable natural resources will deliver high returns in jobs and small business opportunities for the immediate benefit of local communities - and won’t cost the earth!
With the intrusion of the industrial development plan for the primary benefit of coal mining and foreign interests however, implementation has stalled.
The campaign
Living Limpopo is a voice for the many who stand against the destruction of the Vhembe area - a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve - the plunder of the Limpopo River, and the sacrifice of the real promise of the nature-based economy to a dirty, industrial-scale lie.
We campaign to raise awareness of this ruinous coal mining and coal-fuelled industrial development plan, to broadcast the work of the many organisations opposing it and to mobilise the growing opposition to unleash the wild growth potential of the Great Vhembe Conservation Area and the development of the Biodiversity Economy in the Vhembe region.
We stand for a Living Limpopo.
Stand with us.
We stand for a Living Limpopo. Stand with us.