Cuba, Canada and the quest for mining dominance in Namibia

My maternal grandmother was born in Windhoek in what was then German South West Africa.  She grew up speaking German on a dusty farm until the farm failed and she was orphaned and she went to an English-speaking refuge in South Africa.  She told me once of the time when South Africa invaded her land and Jannie Smuts encamped on the farm with his soldiers in full pursuit of the rebels. 

Then some twenty years ago, with my son, I wondered around a military base in Pretoria where we were shown mangled tanks retrieved from the theater of war between South Africa and the Cuban-supported Angolans.  Ever mindful of the kindness of my host, I looked at the messed metal in silence.  My son, with typical American bluntness, blurted to our host, an army Colonel: “The Cubans sure whipped your butt in that fight.”  The silence was stunning. 

But the fact is that the land of that desert has been fought over by many from the Hottentot, the Bushman, the Blacks, the Germans, the South Africans, the Cubans, the Canadian miners, and now the American idealists.   All drawn hither by riches in the mines.                                       

I suppose we can be grateful the battle is no longer between Cuban-supported terrorists and a white South African military.  I suppose we can be glad the battle is now between American NGOs and Canadian miners.   I suppose we can be glad the land is now Namibia and no longer German South West.  And I suppose we can be glad the Canadians are looking for uranium and there is no longer a search for rebels. 

Of course the rush for Namibia is still as silly and greedy as it has been for centuries.  The players may have changed, but their idealism and crassness remains the same.  For example, here is a perfect example of the gushing ignorance and burning passions of somebody who should perhaps have stayed back in Los Angles to fix things at home before going wondering around Africa posturing as the White Queen turning on the wicked Canadians amongst the savage blacks .  I quote from Mining for Scoundrels:

Ever since I came to Namibia in February, I have been working with the Legal Assistance Centre(my favorite NGO in Namibia) to develop a project to report on the abusive practices of multinational corporations who come to strip the land of minerals, leaving the environment forever ruined and the Namibian people without any benefit whatsoever.  The goal of our project is to develop a system that takes into account the true impact on the environment, including the loss of potential future income from the fast-growing industry of ecotourism, which becomes impossible once the land has been destroyed by mining.  Additionally, under the ideal system, the Namibian people would reap the benefits of mining on their lands as opposed to the current system, where the multinational mining companies gain billions of dollars while Namibians get nothing in return. 

One important component of the mining process is water, a huge scarcity in Namibia.  When we arrived, the Legal Assistance Centre quickly tasked with assisting on an emergency injunction to bring a halt to a group of Canadian speculators who had conned the Ministry of the Environment into granting them a license to extract 1000 m³ of water/day (or the amount of water in just 3 months that the Namibian farmers use in over 36 years).

I am now more excited than ever about the opportunity to work with the Namibian Government to develop an environmental policy that rewards corporate responsibility among multinational corporations that seek to engage in mining in Namibia.  If done properly, it will be the people who will benefit from the extraction of minerals from their land, as they justly should.   It is my hope that by the time we are done here, the only people who will be seeing dollar signs are the Namibians.

Seems that for the time being, nobody will see any money.  In a report from Mineweb, we are told:

Namibia’s High Court has ruled as invalid permits allowing Forsys Metals Corp.to extract groundwater in the Namib Desert, disrupting the Canadian company’s plans to construct a uranium mine. Forsys announced on Feb. 12 that Namibia’s agriculture, water and forestry ministry had granted it permits to drill and extract up to 1,000 cubic litres of water per day for the construction of its Valencia mine.  It said the permits would be valid during the 18 months required to build the mine. But in a ruling issued on Friday, High Court Judge Collins Parker said the permits were technically invalid.  “As I say, as far as this court is concerned, the legal reality is that the aforementioned permits do not exist. It is as if they had not been issued at all,” Parker wrote in response to an application to block Forsys from extracting the water. The owners of two farms near the mine site had argued that allowing the company to tap groundwater in the arid Namib Desert would be environmentally unsound.

I have no way of determining if there is any link between these two stories.  I do know that Rossing Uranium Mine has been going forever; well at least as long as I can recall.   And I suspect that the scrap for the riches of the desert will continue.  We can predict the Chinese will soon be there and they will seek to pacify the land as in Tibet, and who are we to say they are wrong for this is but another tiny sliver of human striving in the far silent deserts of southern Africa.