The Disastrous Musina-Makhado Economic Zone

Dear Editor

The DA is calling for the calamitous Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone (MMSEZ) industrial mega-development plan to be replaced with alternatives that are more in line with the natural assets and local context of the Vhembe region. These alternatives include expanded ecotourism, carbon markets, bioprospecting, agriculture, agro-processing, and game farming.

The proximity to the Beit Bridge border post lends itself to the area becoming a logistical hub at the gateway to Africa. None of these activities threaten the sensitive biodiversity or water supply, yet they can yield similar, if not higher, numbers of jobs that can actually be accessed by the local community without the need to import labour.

The DA implores the Limpopo Provincial Government and the Minister of Trade, Industry, and Competition to reconsider their strategy for socioeconomic development in the province.

A much more appropriate SEZ is already proposed in the Fetakgomo-Tubatse area, which the DA would support, while we believe that the plans for Musina-Makhado should be scrapped and rethought. We have written to the Minister of Trade, Industry, and Competition as the authority under the Special Economic Zones Act requesting his intervention.

Yesterday evening, Carte Blanche laid bare some of the shortcomings of the Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone. A team of DA representatives from the National Assembly and the Limpopo Provincial Assembly visited the area in January and confirmed a litany of fatal flaws in the plans.

The Zuma-era scheme for this underdeveloped, rural part of South Africa involves a metallurgical complex, a smelter, and several coal mines. The development is counter to the natural assets of the area and economically incongruent with the location.

While the DA agrees vociferously that more should be done to alleviate poverty and unemployment for the people of Limpopo, what is being pushed through by the ANC-led government here is an absolute non-starter that needs to be halted, exposed, and rethought.

Firstly, it is an unmitigated environmental disaster. The development will require the stripping away of hundreds of thousands of protected trees, including thousands of baobabs which are sacred to the local people. The region has some of the richest faunal and floral biodiversity in the country as captured in the unpublished Vhembe Bioregional Plan, a document deliberately quashed by the provincial government because of its incongruency with the MMSEZ.

More than just destroying the area’s sense of place as a natural wonder, it will decimate the area’s ecological integrity.

Perhaps the biggest flaw in the planning process is water provision. Musina town regularly experiences water outages – a factor of both unmaintained infrastructure and natural water scarcity. The Limpopo River, though currently in flood, is traversable by foot most years and flow is unpredictable.

The water requirements for the industrial complex proposed would require upwards of half the river’s average annual flow and a damming of both the Limpopo and Sand Rivers east of Musina.

Besides being an unaffordable infrastructural investment, the localised environmental consequences of the dam itself as well as the downstream effects on areas like northern Kruger National Park and neighbours Zimbabwe and Mozambique would be catastrophic.

Another environmental consideration is the emission of greenhouse gases and particulates. The MMSEZ is poised to become one of South Africa’s largest single-point emitters, as tonnes of low-grade coking coal would be required for smelting.

This flies in the face of the Department of Trade, Industry, and Competition’s (DTIC) decarbonisation strategy, as it would consume a significant portion of South Africa’s annual carbon budget and pollute the otherwise pristine atmosphere over a wide airshed.

The project is also economically hare-brained. ArcelorMittal recently announced the shuttering of its steel operations, costing the economy over 3,000 jobs. Yet, the government is through this project giving Chinese investors the opportunity to produce cheap steel at preferential tax rates while using South Africa’s carbon budget. This despite the fact that South Africa’s iron ore is mined in the Northern Cape and would require transport via non-existent road and rail to the smelter.

Once processed, the export-ready product would then need to reach Richard’s Bay, again on a non-existent route. The logistical challenges are complex, immense, impractical, and expensive to solve. The jobs available through this project will not be accessible for the local communities who are the purported beneficiaries of the MMSEZ, the vast majority of whom are unskilled and/or uneducated.

Over R1 billion has already been spent on the project with close to nothing to show for it during nearly a decade of the implementation phase. The fact that the ANC-led provincial government continues to push ahead despite these critical issues and several credible legal challenges indicates that there are likely to be ulterior motives behind the development.

Regards

Andrew de Blocq MP
DA spokesperson for Forestry, Fisheries, and Environment