Poverty-stricken workers in the Northern Province are living in the shadow of defunct – but still deadly – asbestos mines. Jim Day reports
A LONG-STANDING feud between a traditional leader and civic groups has halted aid for thousands of people suffering from lung diseases caused by asbestos exposure in the remote Northern Province community of Mafefe, 70km south-east of Pietersburg.
The region first leaped into prominence 13 years ago with a “dumps of death” expos in the Rand Daily Mail. The newspaper reported that British and American multi-national companies had literally abandoned dumps of lethal asbestos fibres that were killing local people.
Some limited remedial action has since been taken. But in January this year, a local chief, Godfrey Thobejane, confiscated several bakkies and equipment used to test people for lung diseases and to supply some of the region’s 33 villages with uncontaminated water.
The equipment, as well as hundreds of kilos of mielie meal, is locked up at the nearby Malipsdrift police station while locals and the donors who paid for it clamour for it to be released so they can get on with their work.
The dispute stems from conflict between two community factions – one aligned with tribal leaders and the other with activists who formed committees to deal with problems created by the asbestos mines that operated in the area from early this century until the late 1970s.
Without their bakkie, members of the Mafefe Health Committee – founded by the activists in the late 1980s – cannot carry out their monthly shuttle of 10 former asbestos miners to the Groothoek hospital 80km away. There they undergo tests that show about half of them suffer from asbestosis and other untreatable lung diseases caused by exposure to asbestos fibres. Those with the disease are eligible for an average lump compensation of R10 000; the payment can go as high as R70 000, depending on the extent of the disease.
“The fact that an ambulance can be held in a police station for four months is too much,” said Zach Mabiletja, a Mafefe community leader. “Effectively, taking people for x-rays so they can be compensated for chest-related illnesses has stopped.”
The four-month shutdown of the programme has so far cost residents of Mafefe an estimated R200 000 in lost compensation. This is in a community that one doctor who has worked in the area has described as one of “the poorest communities in the poorest province in South Africa”. The annual per capita income in the province is about R700, but it is far lower in Mafefe.
The struggle between community groups and the tribal leaders has also prevented members of the Mafefe Water Committee from carrying out projects to provide clean water to surrounding villages. Without clean water sources, women and children continue to wash their clothes in streams contaminated by the asbestos mines scarring the hillsides.
“If they brought [the equipment] today, we would drop this work and begin on water projects,” said William Rapulana, the deputy chair of the water committee, as he did some private contract work along a Mafefe road.
Neither Thobejane nor the local police would discuss why the equipment, as well as the Mafefe Community Centre, was under lock and key. But local politicians, civic leaders and members of donor organisations blamed the problem on a power battle between the royal kraal and local development committees formed in the late 1980s.
The chief’s opponents say he sees the committees and their work as a threat to his influence. They say the conflict grew worse after some civic group leaders opposed Thobejane’s succession to the chieftainship in 1991.
Asbestos and the lung diseases it causes are part of life in Mafefe and other former mining communities nestled in the Strydpoortberge between Pietersburg and Burgersfort. Blue-grey tailings from mines pockmark the lush hillsides. When the sun dries clothing washed in the mountain streams you can see asbestos fibres from the polluted water clinging to the cloth.
Dust kicked up by passing donkey carts carries the particles. Homes are built of asbestos bricks, and if you look closely at the ground in front of the Mahlatjane Primary School, where 600 pupils study, you can see chunks of the fibres hidden in the sandy soil.
There has been some improvement since the media’s 1984 expos of the health hazards. A programme directed by Potchefstroom University covered the most dangerous of the dumps with grass and bushes. Education through the civic groups has persuaded people not to build with asbestos bricks and parents tell their children not to play around the mines or exposed dumps.
But the problem still exists. In areas where asbestos fibres are not visible to the eye, asbestos levels are twice as high as acceptable standards in the United States; in the many areas where you can see asbestos, it is 20 times higher. Studies have shown that children, who play on the ground, have the highest exposure of any age group.
Overall, a study in 1987 by Dr Marianne Felix of the National Centre for Occupational Health showed that 41% of Mafefe’s 12 000 residents had signs of lung damage from asbestos. Older people had a higher incidence of disease, implying that the problem builds up with long-term exposure.
And in people over 60, almost no difference in disease rates were found among those who worked in the mines and those who did not, proving that the dangers of environmental exposure are real.
People who did not work for the mines are not eligible for compensation when they develop lung diseases. None of the former mines have ever offered to clean up or pay compensation. The government has no plans for further cleaning-up or greater compensation.
Sitting in the shade of a tree outside the locked community centre in Mafefe, health committee members say they are doing what they can to ease the pain of the mining past. But until they can resolve their political problems and get their bakkie back, they can’t even shuttle a few sick old miners to the hospital to enable them to qualify to receive their pittance.