A proposal to construct a massive new chemical plant on the central Namibian coast — the heart of the country’s coastal tourism area — has figuratively put the country between the devil and the deep blue sea, not least because of concerns over an accompanying proposal to mine phosphates from the sea and the impact this would have on the local fishing industry.
Vision Industrial Park, a proposed R12-billion investment that the Gecko Group of Companies said could save Namibia at least R5.8-billion a year in money spent on importing chemicals for the uranium-mining industry, would, on completion, be bigger than Swakopmund, the largest town on Namibia’s mostly deserted, 1 600km-long coastline.
Critics have slammed the proposal as “a dive to the bottom of the economic barrel” that could destroy a sensitive coastal ecology and, with it, Namibia’s successful fishing and tourism sectors.
But the economic and political pressures are considerable. As a result of South Africa’s 75-year-long occupation of Namibia, from 1915 to 1990, little industrial development beyond the primary economic sectors ever took place because Pretoria’s apartheid mandarins saw the country largely as a captive market for South African goods.
This caused a persistent structural unemployment problem in Namibia — now at 52% — as mining commodities were simply exported and never beneficiated to the benefit of the local economy.
Gecko and a few other companies have also identified high-grade marine phosphate deposits in off-shore areas along the central coastal area as a major, once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for Namibia.
With a looming worldwide shortage of phosphates — the most important component for boosting agricultural output — and increasing demand by the local uranium mining industry for reagent chemicals, the deposits could kick-start industrialisation and manufacturing in Namibia, Gecko’s backers believe.
The project, on completion, would create a third deep-water port linked by rail and road to the nearby uranium mines in the Namib Desert and would include a sulphuric acid plant, soda ash and bicarbonate plant, a caustic and phosphoric acid plant, and a desalination plant that could produce extra water for the parched coastline.
Gecko’s director for exploration, Oliver Krappmann, emphasised that the proposal was a scoping exercise and, in effect, was a “worst-case” scenario to address every possible concern before the project proceeded through its design phases to a final bankable feasibility study that would include far more extensive environmental impact assessments of both the coastline and the marine environment.
If a final assessment indicated it was ecologically unfeasible, Gecko would not go ahead, Krappmann said. For Swakopmund and its environmentally conscious residents, though, the mere idea was pure anathema and amounted to selling off the country’s long-term future for a dubious short-term financial gain.
Alternative suggestions that the industrial plant instead be situated in Walvis Bay, already a location industrialised by the fishing industry, would render the entire project unfeasible because of huge cost implications, Gecko’s environmental experts said.