Way of the peaceful warrior

Mashile Phalane is a simple, determined man from Tzaneen with a loud voice. He only realised how loud when the government threatened anti-panic legislation to stop people like him from terrifying the public.

Phalane is a key figure in Earthlife Africa’s anti-nuclear efforts. He calls himself a ‘great challenger”.

President Thabo Mbeki accused the environmental NGO of recklessness after Phalane highlighted an unsecured radioactive calibration site 1km from the Pelindaba nuclear facility.

Rather than a panic-monger, Phalane styles himself a ‘whistle-blower” and ‘red-tape cutter”. ‘The government wants to regulate and promote, referee and play, at the same time. To challenge that, active alternative organisations must ask the important questions.”

It is mainly down to Phalane that hundreds of former Pelindaba workers living in Atteridgeville have come forward with suspected radiation diseases. Earthlife has appointed a doctor to examine them.

Since last July it has received more than 250 requests to see the doctor. Medical records of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa are incomplete, so the doctor must do physical tests — at Earthlife’s expense.

‘We received 23 medical records and examined 14 people. Of these, 10 were diagnosed with occupational radiation diseases. Seven people have died,” says Phalane.

The 36-year-old father moved from his home in Batlhabine, Tzaneen, to work as a messenger in Johannesburg’s Park Lane Clinic in the mid-1990s.

While studying through Wits University and Unisa, he started volunteer work for NGOs and forged ties with donor bodies. He set up a development trust for Batlhabine and raised funds for classrooms, capacity-training, an ecotourism and cultural village, and to electrify thousands of households. ‘At home everyone recognises me. I’m a hero there.”

He also stirred things in Tzaneen by being a ‘big challenger” to local politicians, councillors, ‘unproductive” ward managers and tribal officials. ‘I want development, but I don’t like bureaucracy.”

Phalane started grappling with environmental issues while attending energy and mining-related courses at Wits and at Johannesburg’s Mineral and Energy Training Institute. In 2003 Earthlife researcher Victor Munnik invited him to a nuclear energy workshop in Broederstroom.

Earthlife had launched a court case challenging government approval for the development of the pebble bed modular reactor (PBMR). Using his network in Atteridgville and Diepsloot, he organised a busload of councillors and others to attend court hearings in Pretoria.

In June that year he joined Earthlife and took time out to study the nuclear industry.

Phalane wears an Earthlife T-shirt proclaiming that Eskom’s nuclear plans are an ‘apartheid hangover”. In 1994 the ANC government wanted to dismantle the nuclear industry, he explains, without realising Eskom had plans for nuclear energy. Now apartheid-era nuclear scientists and managers influence the ruling party.

‘Most nuclear scientists who were at Pelindaba or Eskom are now in the minerals department, writing nuclear energy laws and strategies.”

Phalane hurls the accusation of ‘panic-monger” back at Mbeki’s advisers. ‘All the mineral department’s directors favour nuclear energy, so they can’t understand us.”

He says the NGO may call on Mbeki to apologise for branding it reckless. ‘The president was misinformed; he bases his information on media reports, not what we say. The government’s aim is to defend PBMR and ensure it is built.”

Phalane’s believes the government regards Earthlife as a threat because it won the PBMR court case. The Cape High Court last year set aside the environmental approval for the project, ruling the process flawed.

Phalane has come to fear for his safety after receiving two death threats. An ex-worker with prostate cancer claims he was offered a R20 000 bribe to finger him as an ‘instigator”.

‘Any time I could be poisoned. But if I die now, I know I’ll go to heaven,” he grins.