Honest Mhungu
Mining companies, particularly from China, have hastened to mine lithium and other valuable minerals in Namibia and other African countries to produce the batteries essential for electric cars, wind turbines and other technologies, with little regard for the long-term livelihood security of the people who live in these places. The common David-and-Goliath framing tacitly accepts that some environments will have to be destroyed to provide the raw materials required for a clean energy technology to sustain the climate, while also leaving it up to vulnerable communities to fend for themselves.
Unprocessed minerals currently constitute the bulk of Namibia’s total export basket. The Namibian government has, over the past years, been exploring possible methods of ensuring the beneficiation of minerals, with policies targeting mostly diamonds, uranium, zinc, etc. This is intended to unlock the backward and forward linkages between the mining sector and the manufacturing sector, as well as to create jobs. These policies have since been motivating the need for exploring whether the beneficiation of minerals, as currently provided for by policy, is indeed feasible in Namibia. However, ensuring that clean energy generation is truly clean requires a shift in the status quo of resource extraction. Namibian citizens believe that there are currently few benefits from the export of lithium, relative to its value.
Many ores in Namibia are exported as ores or concentrates, and these include iron, lead, etc. However, the concentrates can be further processed through smelting, to produce matte, which is a purified version of the concentrate, and thus more valuable in terms of value per unit. The matte can be further purified using refinery plants to produce a refined version of the product, which can be easily utilised by the manufacturing industry to produce various products. The general thrust on beneficiation, which has also been adopted at the African continent level through the African Union’s Africa Mining Vision of 2009, is generally hinged on a number of anticipated benefits from beneficiation. The export of raw minerals generally implies that the exporting economies do not have the opportunity to enjoy all the value chain benefits associated with mining. Firms in the importing economies stand to gain, as they add value and export final products to realise prices that are higher than the exporting economies.
The establishment of beneficiation facilities also eventually creates a local market for primary products, which fosters economies of scale and incentivises mineral extraction. Given that beneficiation would be seeing the development of new industries outside mining, this creates demand for high-skill and capital-intensive expertise, which has to be in-built into the economy. Yet, many such communities have no channels available to raise concerns or seek redress. This leaves the door open for abuse.
Once established, it would serve to boost the existing economic hubs and development corridors, which are independent of the beneficiation facilities.
In order to incentivise zinc refinery in Namibia, it was mostly the industrial policy that was instrumental. Namibia now boasts of successful zinc refinery projects at Skorpion Mine and at Namzinc refinery in southwest Namibia. Many mining and mineral-processing projects which are crucial to the energy transition, unfortunately, cause social and environmental harm. These include deforestation, pollution and water scarcity, labour standards’ violations and the displacement of local communities. Companies linked to such damages through their supply chains are under increasing scrutiny. Government assistance can be credited for the success, as the refinery is one of the export processing zones (EPZ) facilities operating in Namibia, implying that it pays no company tax.
The government should play a similarly vital role in lithium mining so as to ensure value- addition. Most African countries fail to interpret discourses of transition, as they have blindly focused on fictional changes from underdevelopment to development. In all these instances, we have allowed ourselves to be dispossessed and exploited through these deceptive development discourses. All of this brings colonial-era dynamics into the present, in which global elites satisfy their resource and technology needs at the cost of Africans’ landscapes and lives. This voracious mining is not just very predatory for the ecosystem; it is economically predatory to the nation and disastrous in the long run. Africa, let’s rethink and imagine our own futures for our own goodness.
* Honest Mhungu is a sociologist (University of Namibia and Karlstad University alumni), who writes on environment, climate change, education, agriculture and mining activities in Africa.