Villagers near Africa’s biggest copper mine have taken a
legal battle against Vedanta/KCM to London and tell of blighted lives and a
looming catastrophe. If you pump a glass of water from the borehole outside the
little church in Shimulala, you will see it is bright yellow, smells of sulphur
and tastes vile. Mining giant Vedanta’s subsidiary company KCM drilled the
borehole in 2010 for the village after the Mushishima stream was turned into a
river of acid when mining chemicals spilled into it. A leaked company letter
says that chemists who tested borehole water there in 2011 found it tainted
with copper residues, acid and minerals, and said it was unfit for consumption.
The villagers say acid spills and contaminated water in
their streams, rivers and boreholes are getting worse. “The frequency and
severity of spills is higher and more consistent. Before we could not smell
[the pollution] but now we can. The ground is contaminated, our crop yield has
dropped, the maize crop is about half what it was,” said Leo Moulenga of
Shimulala. “When there is a spill, the air is very acidic. Last week they
spilled a lot. It was awful. In the future we don’t think people will be able
to live here. It is becoming uninhabitable. The pollution has been incremental.
Now it’s getting worse.”
Floribert Kappa, of Hippo Pool, said: “I used to go to the
Kafue river to draw water and started drinking it as normal. I saw that fish
had died and were floating on the river. We ate the fish and soon everyone
started crying with stomach pains. I was given some medicine, but the pains got
worse. I collapsed and was taken to a hospital. The diagnosis was that I had
drunk or eaten something acidic which had caused damage to my chest and
intestines. I was told the damage was permanent. Now I live on painkillers.
Everyone here has been affected in some way. We all use the same water. We have
tried chlorinating and boiling the water but it still smells acidic.”
Last year Vedanta/KCM made up to £320m profit from the mine
but engineers who have worked there say that its pollution treatment works have
been pushed beyond their limits by the company to maximise output.
“The feed in … has been increased to over 50,000 tonnes per
day. They were designed to handle 30,000 tonnes,” said one engineer. “Degraded
equipment like leaking pumps, pipes, and settling ponds have given to excessive
spillages and water overflowing into the Mushishima stream and subsequently the
Kafue river. It poses a possible environmental catastrophe. Power failures and
deficient pumps frequently result in slurry spills and effluent containing
sulphuric acid, lead, zinc, iron and mercury being dumped into rivers.”
The mine has a long history of pollution from its tailing
dams, processing plants and old pipes. In 2011, the high court in Lusaka
ordered Vedanta/ KCM to pay about £1.3m to 2,000 residents of Chingola after
sulphuric acid and other chemicals were discharged into a tributary of the
Kafue in 2006.
The judge said Zambians “should not be dehumanised by greed
and crude capitalism which put profit above human life. KCM was reckless and
had no regard for human, animal and plant life. Chingola residents were guinea
pigs.”
Vedanta later appealed to the supreme court, claiming that
it was not responsible for the pollution. The verdict was upheld, but the
supreme court reduced compensation to people affected by the spillage to
virtually nothing.
Much of the infrastructure of the present mine is more than
40 years old. The copper is now worked largely underground but the deep,
opencast pit is one of the biggest in Africa – more than four miles long, a
mile wide and 1,600ft deep. Mine waste, which is being reworked to extract
copper residues, now rises in miles of 300ft hills stretching around the town
of Chingola. Large-scale mining led by global companies listed on the London
stock exchange has expanded dramatically in the past decade. Chinese and Indian
growth and the rising price of metals has led to the exploitation of new areas
of the resource-rich Amazon, India, Indonesia southern Africa and the
Philippines. But the boom has been accompanied by evictions, land grabs, human
rights violations and damage to water supplies, say development and human
rights groups.
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