[miningmx.com] – South Africa is expected to respond
to comments at a UN meeting of its World Heritage Committee in Russia on
Thursday, which expressed surprise the government had issued so many permits to
energy prospectors in the Mapungubwe area of the Limpopo province.
UN World Heritage officials said they were also surprised to find Coal of Africa’s
(CoAL’s) Vele mine was 95% complete, believing that mining had been halted. They
subsequently concluded there was no means of controlling mining in the region and
that steps should be taken to impose a moratorium on future operations there.
Lazare Eloundou, Chief of the African Unit of the UN’s World Heritage Centre, and
Dag Avango, a history researcher from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology,
were part of a monitoring team, according to the Independent Group’s
Mercury newspaper, which published news of the World Heritage Centre
meeting online. The officials said CoAL represented a major threat to the integrity of
Mapungubwe and could result in “. unacceptable and irreversible damage’ to huge
strips of land in the vicinity.
CoAL said the report at the committee meeting was uninformed. “There’s no risk to
the mine being closed,’ said John Wallington, CEO of CoAL, who added he had
recently hosted Unesco members at the mine. “There’s also no risk to the park. The
feedback that we have received has been positive.’
It’s thought the Department of Environmental Affairs will be making its own
comment on the World Heritage Committee meeting findings.
However, the Mercury reported that Eloundou and Avango had been handed
protest notes from cultural groups at Mapungubwe which said they hadn’t been
properly consulted. Vhangora Cultural Movement members said it was ironic an
Australian company [CoAL was founded there] was ignoring their rights. “If we were
to go to Australia to go mining Ayer’s Rock [Uluru] when the people objected to this,
should we clam them down by saying that we are going to create lots of jobs for the
Aborigines, give their children bursaries and pay some royalties to their trust
funds?,’ the group reportedly said.
If the matter escalates beyond the committee, as speculated, it will represent
another blow in the back-and-forth that has characterised the building of the Vele
mine. Currently, CoAL is in the final stages of completing a memorandum of
agreement with Save the Mapungubwe Coalition, a grouping of environmental
activists, setting down terms by which Vele can mine for coal in the region.
Wallington said the memorandum would be completed imminently. “There were a
few outstanding issues that required independent studies. It’s just taken longer than
we thought, but we are almost complete,’ he said.
The northern reaches of the Limpopo province are rich in coking coal, with CoAL and
other companies such as Universal Coal, another Australian-listed firm, digging for
coal. Development of the industry would help economically develop one of South
Africa’s poorest provinces.
