Helter skelter Coega ferro-manganese smelter February 9, 2007
Posted by Andreas in "The Economy", Coega, South Africa, rant.6 comments
Oh joy of joys, my favourite industrial development zone, Coega (near Port Elizabeth) has secured yet another major investor.
Earlier this year I bemoaned the impact that the recently announced Alcan aluminium smelter at Coega will have. Now it’s a ferro-manganese smelter. Sorry, let me rephrase that, it’s a multi-billion rand ferro-manganese smelter!
Plans are to build
[...] a 1,5-million ton per annum manganese mine and sinter plant in the Kuruman area of the Northern Cape [...] and a ferro-manganese alloy production facility in Coega.
Also,
[t]his project will almost certainly mean a speedy upgrade of the railway link between Coega and the Northern Cape.
Sounds great, hey!? Jobs, investment, infra-structure and “a women-led broad-based black empowerment company” (Kalahari Resources).
Take a closer look and things don’t look quite so rosy. For one, it turns out that occupational manganese exposure can be quite nasty:
Chronic exposure to manganese can result in symptoms similar to Parkinson’s Disease, a serious and progressive impairment or deterioration of nerve cells in the brain. Common characteristics of manganism, the chronic exposure to high levels of manganese, can include:
- Slow movements
- Weakness
- Fatigue
- Tremors
- Leg cramps
- Poor balance
- Rigidity
- Walking problems
And it’s not even like we have no experience with these sorts of health risks in South Africa. On Wednesday, Tony Carnie reported in The Mercury that
[t]he labour department is investigating the death of a foreman and about 20 suspected cases of manganese metal poisoning among factory workers in Cato Ridge, north of Durban.
The investigation follows the death of 49-year-old father of three Freddy Wright, and the discovery of least five cases of a highly debilitating brain and nerve system illness among staff at the Assmang ferromanganese smelter.
[...]
Occupational health and injury attorney Richard Spoor believes the manganese poisoning cases discovered so far may be the tip of an iceberg of illnesses [...]
Great, lets have more of that. I did mention the jobs and the multi-billion rand investment, didn’t I.
[Why do the media report on related issues as though there is no connection? Here's another recent example.]
When I look at Coega (and Richards Bay and Saldanha Bay and Mozal…), what I see are coastal draining points connected to the inland via sophisticated infra-structure from which valuable resources are extracted and injected into the world-wide corporate matrix.
From the land to the multi-national companies. From “the people” to the multi-millionaire “entrepreneurs”.
It’s called globalisation. It used to be called colonialism.
Movie Review: The Iron Wall February 7, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Israel and Palestine, Movie Reviews, Politics.2 comments
I’m part of a small, Cape Town-based non-profit collective called While You Were Sleeping. We organise public screenings of progressive documentary films with topics that address what we think are important social, political and environmental issues.
The screenings are always followed by a facilitated audience discussion and the whole idea behind these events is to raise awareness in our communities, to encourage open and honest debate about these issues and to help people connect and “network”.
“Our” next movie is called The Iron Wall and it’ll be showing at the Bo-Kaap museum next Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (see our website for details).
The Iron Wall documents the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, paying particular attention to the continued existence and expansion of Israeli settlements in the Palestinian West Bank and the massive wall that is being build between the West Bank and Israel.
The movie was released last year and is therefore still quite current.
I found the The Iron Wall, which was directed by Mohammed Alatar who grew up as a Palestinian refugee in Jordan, surprisingly balanced. I had half expected shrill, passionate and irreconcilable viewpoints from two sides who will seemingly be separated by mutual animosity and hatred for eternity.
What the film does contain, apart from scenes of events happening on the ground, is a series of very insightful interviews in which Israeli and Palestinian commentators (including politicians, ex-soldiers, NGO workers and an Israeli woman living in a West Bank settlement) describe the situation in a very factual and level-headed fashion.
One of the things that struck me when I was watching The Iron Wall for the first time was the disjunction between my own personal image of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the realities as depicted in the film.
I consider myself a reasonably well-informed individual who is familiar with the issues at stake and felt that I was approaching media-overload as far as the Crisis in the Middle EastTM was concerned. Watching The Iron Wall, however, was quite an eye-opener.
If you are even vaguely interested in this long-standing conflict, no matter where your allegiances lie, I highly recommend that you watch this film – I guarantee that you will come away with a new understanding of the crisis.
(For loads of up to date reports and commentary on the Israel-Palestine conflict, check out ZNet’s Israel-Palestine Watch.)
Nuclear Schmuclear – another Koeberg is on the way February 6, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Cape Town, Nuclear Power, South Africa.add a comment
Last year, Alec Erwin, South Africa’s Minister of Public Enterprises, was quoted in the press as having announced that the country was considering building another nuclear power plant at Koeberg, the site of Africa’s only commercial atomic energy facility.
Erwin wasn’t talking about the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) which has been in the news a fair amount and a demonstration model of which is planned for the same location at Koeberg. No, he meant an new conventional nuclear plant with two reactors similar to the existing ones.
The public reaction to this announcement was not even luke-warm, it was practically non-existent. The local press has been equally silent about the issue.
I am concerned about another nuclear power plant being built a mere 30-odd kilometers from my home (I’m also concerned by the PBMR issue, but that’s another story). Why does nobody else seem to give a hoot?
Even if you don’t care about where your electricity comes from, the R16 billion price tag should surely make you start asking questions. Even if you’re an absolute nuclear fanatic, surely you would want to know when you can go on a pilgrimage to the next marvel of modern technology to hit our shores.
For the whole of January, I religiously (sic) monitored the local newspapers. I read the Cape Times, the Cape Argus (including Saturday and Weekend), Die Burger, the Business Day, the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Independent. I may have missed Die Burger once or twice and one edition of the Sunday Independent, but that was about it.
So what did my survey of the local press reveal (other than the fact that reading all of the newspapers is really quite expensive and leads to immense stacks of paper and perpetually blackened printer’s ink fingers)?
Well, with all the power cuts and load-shedding, electricity generation and such were in the news on a daily basis, but other than one or two general, fairly throw-away comments, there was no specific reference to a new conventional nuclear plant that may be in the offing for Koeberg. Oh yes, and Max Du Preez told us that we need to build more nuclear power stations, or maybe not.
I finally sent an email to Erwin’s government department and was told very swiftly and efficiently that
At the moment a feasibility study of building a new conventional nuclear plant is underway, no decision has been taken as yet.
An announcement is expected to be made between March and May 2007, where all the necessary information will be divulged.
Judging from previous experience and considering the enthusiasm government has displayed with regards to atomic energy, I predict that we should expect an “announcement” telling us that construction of a new nuclear power station will commence at Koeberg shortly. And unless Capetonians finally start giving a damn about what goes on in their own backyard, that’s exactly what will happen.
I hate traffic February 5, 2007
Posted by Andreas in Cape Town, Life, Society, Work.2 comments
Every morning when I wake up I can hear its low pitched hum outside my window, like a billion tenor bumble-bees grumbling in the distance.
Every morning I strap myself into my metal escape pod and flee my real life, the good life. I pour myself into the thin stream that runs past my front door, a drop into a suburban rivulet that merges with a bigger tributary that merges with a broad river until I enter the main artery, a viscous flow of steal that makes its way towards town at a sluggish near-pedestrian pace.
I sit in my box of steel, rubber, plastic and glass staring at the black piece of tarmac ahead, surrounded on all sides by other individuals (two at a time is a rarity) in their own contraptions staring ahead. Our only means of communication is via hand-signals (friendly waves and the occasional middle-finger), mouthed obscenities and the odd canned hoot.
Stale air and entertainment strokes past our faces – modern life support systems: piped and conditioned air and music.
We are pathetic symbols of our atomised world, isolated humans individually metal-wrapped and suspended in a slow-motion steel avalanche that will eventually excrete each one of us at our sad destinations – office farms, cement grey parking garages, all-day CBD vehicle dormitories.
In small, medium, large, huge and gigantic towns and cities around the globe, every hour of the planetary day, fetid sewage pulses through asphalt causeways sapping our life’s vigour and creativity out of each one of us.
Ivan Illich was right about the absurd counter-productive anti-logic of modern technology: medical science that makes us sick, education that dumbs us down and modes of transportation that trap us in logjams for hours.
I hate traffic.
