Victim: Spaza shop owner Tiny Mokwena used solar power to refrigerate meat until the panel was stolen. (Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Tiny Mokwena is a spaza shop owner in the Marapong informal settlement in the mining town of Lephalale in Limpopo. Until six months ago, her business was booming, but then her solar panel was stolen.
“Meat was my top selling food item,” she said. “I used to sell chicken soup packs, chicken feet, necks, intestines and livers. Since they stole my solar panel, I haven’t [had] enough money to buy another one.”
For the residents of this informal settlement that is right next to Eskom’s Matimba power station, solar panels are precious jewels that need to be guarded.
It is women like Mokoena that the Waterberg Women Advocacy Organisation (WWAO) wants to see have clean and renewable energy. The women-led organisation has been advocating for a just transition to renewable energy.
Human rights activist Francina Nkosi founded the WWAO. When the Boikarabelo coal mine opened in 2012, Nkosi was nominated by the community forum members to work as a community liaison officer.
“I then got an opportunity to travel to Witbank in Mpumalanga where I got to see how mine hosting communities live. I saw the sinkholes, the air pollution, water pollution but the one that touched me the most was when I saw children swimming in the acidic water.”
When WWAO heard Boikarabelo mine’s owners — Resgen South Africa, a subsidiary of Resource Generation (Australia) — planned to seek capital funding from its shareholders to complete the construction of the mine, they decided to act against the mine because it had failed to fulfil its promises to provide houses, water, sanitation and electricity in Marapong
“They were painting a good picture which was something like fraud so we wrote a letter to the funders, through an Australian climate justice advocacy group, ActionAid, because they were going to use the pension funds from Australia and this was going to affect people from that country. The mine has been shut down because the funders pulled out,” Nkosi says.
She had to flee Maropong because some residents accused her of being against development and threatened her with violence.
“People who are politically connected will create stories about you so that you become a target … That created hatred towards me and they tried to kill me. I’ve always said that I’m not against development, but I want accountability and transparency.
“That also led to me being more vocal and I told myself that I would advocate for environmental, land issues or gender-based violence issues,” Nkosi said.
In 2019, WWAO became a member of the international climate change advocacy organisation, Climate Justice Alliance, and learned more about renewable energy, a just energy transition and that companies should reduce carbon emissions.
Nkosi believes that Marapong and Lephalale should be exploiting the weather in the area that can reach up to 36°C, with more than 10 hours of sunshine a day, for solar power.
“If Lephalale can build a bigger solar plant that is equivalent to Medupi power station, it can supply the whole community without going via Eskom. We have to be independent from fossil fuel. We are not saying that people shouldn’t have work, but we are saying that let there be no new fossil fuel projects because we have more than enough.”
Exxaro Resources’ Grootgeluk and Thabametsi coal mines are about 20km from Lephalale and supply Eskom’s Medupi and Matimba power stations with coal.
“This is a high priority area but they are still bringing in more mining projects and the question is, what about our health? When the air quality was recently measured, we found that the PM10 [particulate matter] and the PM5 are very high. But they have excuses and don’t want to admit that they are polluting the area,” says Nkosi.
She says people suffer from respiratory illnesses such as tuberculosis and asthma and experience severe headaches and sinusitis, which she attributes to air pollution.
“We want a green Eskom; we don’t want Eskom to die completely. It must have other measures of trying to minimise the illnesses that are caused by emissions and they must also reduce the way they pollute, and try to install new technology. The old technology consumes a lot of water and [produces] the high PM10 and PM5 levels.”