REUTERS

Bench Mark Foundation’s website has a three-minute video about the Hondelklip community based on the west coast of the Northern Cape, which is trying to cope with the aftermath of decades of mining activity by De Beers.

Right now De Beers is poised to pull out of the area and sell what is left of its operation to Trans Hex; the community is opposing this because it fears that Trans Hex will not undertake the necessary rehabilitation when it has finished with the area. The community’s fears are based on its previous experience with Trans Hex.

The Hondelklip community wants to ensure that De Beers rehabilitates an area that it has mined for 80 years before it is allowed to pack up its bags and head off for new pristine, diamond-rich tracts of land in other parts of the country or of the continent.

The community fears that De Beers will be allowed to implement a deal that, from an environmental perspective, commits to the necessary legal undertakings but in reality may prove to be worthless.

The poignant video highlights just why it is that calls for nationalisation of the mines will never end.

Not only are such calls likely to get louder but the issue will forever be easily exploitable by opportunist politicians such as ANC Youth League president Julius Malema, which is why it would be foolhardy of anyone to assume that the departure of Malema from the youth league will put an end to calls for nationalisation.

The reality is that as things stand, communities across South Africa, indeed across all of Africa, have generally been worse off as a result of mining activity.

They may have benefited from low-skilled employment opportunities or some temporary largesse awarded them by corporates keen to get access, but unlike the companies these communities are unable to move on when the mining resources have been exhausted.

They are forced to live forever with the frequently devastating impact that the mining activity has had on their environment.

It is not just that the environment is left in an unspeakably ugly state, it’s that rivers and water sources have been poisoned and the air contaminated.

Thus the two essential ingredients of their agricultural-based livelihoods are destroyed because mining companies have been allowed to externalise a huge portion of the costs of doing business.

For all the talk – and there is much by well-paid consultants – about sustainability and corporate social responsibility, poorly resourced rural communities are in no position to make demands from what are often the largest and most powerful companies in the world.

The hordes of people who have become enormously wealthy through mining throughout Africa have invariably been the shareholders of mining companies, in particular the controlling shareholders of mining companies.

And so it is that we have the bizarre situation, described by the Southern African Resources Watch (Sarwatch), in which the owners of the resources – namely the community – are made poor through the process of mining their resources, while the buyers of those resources are made enormously rich. It is why, says Sarwatch, Africa is described as a wealthy continent with a poor population.

Risking the short-term loss of skittish investors should not discourage us from having a debate that helps to ensure poor communities are not forever left carrying the costs of mining our valuable resources.