Stefaans Brmmer
When asked about his daughter’s death, Captain Ntlele produces a map depicting each smallholding in the area west of Iscor’s Vanderbijlpark steel plant. His own plot is marked blue, which carries the legend: “Exceeds standard. Possible Iscor source.”
His wife, Tina Ntlele, takes up the story: “Brenda got sick in May 1997. She just started to swell and swell and swell.” Kidney failure killed Brenda Ntlele in November 1998 at the age of 21. Both parents believe it was more than coincidence: their tenant gardener died the same agonising death exactly a year earlier.
The Ntleles’ battle with Iscor, who they believe poisoned their borehole water with industrial effluent, is not unique. The Vaal Triangle, which they call home, is South Africa’s industrial heartland and most polluted area. Just breathing the air – or sometimes drinking the water – is a serious health risk to the Vaal’s two-million inhabitants. Now the battle is on to get industry to admit its role and clean up its act.
Some time before Brenda Ntlele’s death, Iscor officials told the family to stop drinking water from their borehole and started trucking fresh water to scores of smallholders who relied on groundwater for home use. A “responsible” gesture perhaps, but Iscor has always publicly denied responsibility for the chemical and organic pollution that poisoned the water and the lives of its residential neighbours.
But much evidence, some of which became public during a high-profile court challenge last week, points to Iscor’s awareness, spanning about 25 years, that dangerous substances from its plant fed an ever-growing plume of water pollution.
Ntlele presents the map – on which his plot and many others are marked in blue to show that water safety standards were exceeded – as more proof that Iscor knew. He says it was composed by Iscor officials and he obtained it only because he serves on the Vaal River Representative Council. He would still like to see justice done, but ironically the fresh water trucked by Iscor “erased” the chemical fingerprint that would have served as proof.
Says Ntlele: “It was a clear case of kidney failure. The problem is by the time Brenda died Iscor had already told us to stop drinking borehole water. [A pathologist] said that since she had been drinking fresh water for some time, he can’t trace the chemicals anymore.”
The Vaal Triangle is tucked in the Vaal River basin where it spans parts of Gauteng and the Free State. It houses metallurgical, chemical and petrochemical industry, a large Eskom power station and several open-cast mines.
The main towns are Vereeniging, Vanderbijlpark, Sasolburg and Meyerton, but the majority of people live in townships including Sebokeng, Sharpeville, Boipatong, Bophelong and Zamdela. Quite a few of the townships earned the epithet “massacre” in apartheid days: evidence of residents’ resolve and the old regime’s brutal response.
Drive along the Golden Highway on an early evening and the last sun will highlight banks of seemingly impenetrable smog. Or visit Zamdela township at Sasolburg where you will smell the sulphur thick in the air, feel your eyes sting and hear a hundred coughs from people who have long forgotten what is normal. Talk to Rand Water and ask about the millions they spend scrubbing Gauteng’s water to acceptable drinking levels. You need no scientist to tell you there is a problem.
But what the scientists can do is put some figures to the obvious conclusion that health is at risk. About a decade ago the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the Medical Research Council and others embarked on an ambitious project they called Vaps, the Vaal Triangle Air Pollution Health Study. Four years into a planned 10-year study they stopped gathering data when “such convincing adverse impacts” on health became apparent that they decided action, rather than more research, should be prioritised.
The Vaps report, finally released in 1998, found average levels of particle pollution in the Vaal Triangle air to be two-and-a-half times the acceptable level, and found among other ailments that Vaal children were 103% more prone to chronic coughing than in a relatively unpolluted area. The report identifies industry, alongside domestic coal burning for cooking and heating, as the major sources of the pollution.
But a series of events and legislative changes means the tide may be turning. Industry has been taken on in high-profile cases by residents, environmental organisations and to an extent by the government, and significant compromises have been secured.
At Vanderbijlpark, Iscor was forced last week to settle a huge lawsuit by residents’ organisations. Lawyers acting for the residents had collected enough of Iscor’s own documentation – where Iscor’s own experts warned already in the mid-1970s of poison seeping into the soil – to force the company’s hand. While the residents’ Johannesburg High Court application asked for an estimated R1- billion clean-up, they got what they actually wanted: to be bought out by Iscor so they could move to greener pastures.
Apart from its own legal expenses, the exercise cost Iscor R34-million: a contribution to the residents’ legal fees as well as the price tag to buy out about 110 property owners. Earlier this year, in what may well be construed as tacit acknowledgement Iscor knew it was in the wrong, the company had spent many more millions voluntarily buying out 140 more property owners.
The Iscor case has been a lesson to all industry in the area that pollution does not pay. In spite of the settlement, Iscor is not relieved of its duty to clean up its act, having promised to do so in its own court affidavits.
The downside is to be found in the story of Piet Ndlovu, a poor bachelor now living in an old army-issue tent on another man’s land, in the shadow of the Iscor plant. He says that a few weeks ago his landlady, one of the smallholders whom Iscor had voluntarily made an offer, woke him up early and threw his belongings from his hovel. Workmen moved in and reduced his home to ruins. He slept in the open for two weeks before the local African National Congress got him a tent.
Not only is Ndlovu homeless; he shares a predicament with many others who were tenants and labourers on the smallholdings: as the buy-out campaign gained momentum, so the entire community has died a slow death, and along with it jobs have disappeared. Property owners got enough from Iscor to start their lives elsewhere, but Ndlovu and other tenants had their future pulled like a rug from under their feet.
In nearby Sasolburg, a more co- operative approach resulted in an agreement that will allow a major polluter, the Natref oil refinery owned by Sasol and Total, to expand its operations while many environmental demands will also be met.
Natref is the smallest of the country’s four refineries, but it also sports the highest figure for sulphur dioxide emissions from its smokestacks – presently more than 65 tons a day. It also pumps into the air significant levels of volatile organic compounds, which include substances causing cancer, developmental and reproductive problems as well as genetic damage.
When Natref applied to the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism last year to expand its operations by 22% and increase sulphur emissions to 78 tons daily, all hell broke loose. The Group for Environmental Monitoring (GEM), an environmental NGO, instructed the Legal Resources Centre to oppose the permit application.
Natref balked at first, but late last year joined round-table discussions to start working on a compromise. It resulted this week in GEM withdrawing its objection in exchange for a detailed Natref commitment to reduce emissions while it expands production. At a significant cost, Natref will engineer solutions at its plant diminishing all major pollutants. Instead of sulphur dioxide increasing, as originally envisaged, it will now fall to 32 tons by 2007.
The Legal Resources Centre’s Ellen Nicol said the agreement had been structured in a way not to preclude other organisations pressing Natref for even greater improvements, but GEM felt the compromise was worth it.
Parallel to challenges by civil society, the Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism has recently adopted a tougher stance – partly as a result of pressure from environmental organisations, including the Legal Resources Centre and GEM. Last November they filed a complaint under the new National Environmental Management Act, demanding the government acts to clean up the Vaal.
The result has included the launch of “co-operative agreements” between the authorities and polluters. These aim to put proper moni-toring mechanisms in place, to establish a database to identify pollution sources, trends and targets, and to eventually review permits to bring industry players into line.
Underscoring the government’s new resolve, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa slammed the “rampant lawlessness among industrial polluters” in a recent speech to Parliament. “Our intention is to put industrial polluters on terms this year.”