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The man in the yellow vest, who had been keeping an eye on our cars parked in the town of Vosman near Emalahleni, walks me to my car. His chest is wheezing as he stands next to the vehicle and instructs me to return to the N4. I ask if he has asthma, and he absently nods. Here on the Mpumalanga Highveld, everyone is struggling to breathe.
It was July and my colleagues at the Center for Environmental Rights and I were in Emalahleni to join community members and activists to celebrate a huge court and campaign victory: a few months earlier the community-based organization Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action (VEM) and environmental justice NGO groundWork won a major court victory against the state in the so-called Deadly Air case.
The Deadly Air judgment ruled for the first time that the Highveld’s poor air quality was a breach of the constitutional right to a healthy environment. The court ordered the government to make regulations to implement and enforce the Highveld Priority Area Air Quality Management Plan, which aims to clean up the Highveld’s air to meet health-based air quality standards.
The president’s plan
That same evening in July, the president announced his energy crisis plan. The Energy Plan is a mixed bag of measures that include a significant acceleration of renewable energy capacity (unfortunately most of it is privately owned, with State Capture freeing Eskom from any chance of building its own renewable energy), but also fixing coal-fired power plants that have been plagued by breakdowns.
What the president’s energy crisis plan didn’t mention once was the continued toxic air pollution being spewed out in flagrant violation of the constitution and air quality laws by the same coal-fired power plants we’re now trying to fix. It is as if the public health emergency that is the Mpumalanga Highveld does not exist.
The Lethal Air Sentence was an extraordinary victory, a first of its kind, especially for the activists from VEM who made personal sacrifices to bring the case to court. As incomplete as the fight for clean Highveld air was, the judicial vindication of the continued suffering of these activists and their families meant more to them than I can describe here.
Disappointingly, the state appealed parts of the verdict in the Deadly Air case to the Supreme Court of Appeal. There is no date yet for the appeal to be heard, but rest assured the courtroom in Bloemfontein will be packed that day – with mothers, grandmothers and children from the Highveld.
“Bloodline” myth.
VEM activists tell the story of how they painstakingly debunked the myth popular in Mpumalanga that asthma is a “bloodline” condition passed down from generation to generation. Individual interviews with asthma sufferers revealed that Emalahleni people who return to rural areas find themselves miraculously cured of their symptoms; it is only when they return to Emalahleni that the tight chest, coughing and wheezing and burning eyes return.
The Deadly Air judgment held that more than 10,000 people die prematurely each year due to air pollution in the Highveld. Since the case began in June 2019, more than 30,000 people have died earlier than they would have if they lived in a less polluted place.
If 30,000 people have lost their lives prematurely from breathing polluted Highveld air since 2019, imagine the scale of suffering from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory and heart diseases caused by this pollution in recent decades.
Babies whose health has been compromised by polluted air in the womb. Parents who take a child with a respiratory illness to a doctor here in Emalahleni are often told that the best remedy would be for the family to move away from the area. Few families can afford it.
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Violation of human rights
So when we talk about the “energy mix” we have discussions about how we should keep coal power for “base load” and “we have so much coal” and “but China is still building coal plants” and “this is now our turn for coal-based development’, how is it possible not to talk about stopping the human rights abuse that is Highveld coal pollution?
Let’s talk for a moment about those who are actually responsible for the pollution of the Highveld air. Expert research conducted by Dr. Andrew Gray, presented as evidence in the Deadly Air case, shows that Eskom’s 12 coal-fired power stations, Sasol Synfuels in Secunda and the nearby NatRef refinery are responsible for the lion’s share of air pollution in the priority area Highveld.
Are these companies willing to face a class action lawsuit from victims of air pollution for loss of life, health, income and medical expenses incurred by parents trying to keep their children alive?
How will we compensate the people of the Highveld for sacrificing their health so we can have coal-fired electricity, especially when clean alternatives are available? What does restorative justice look like for them? Do we need a pollution tax to fund a public health response? Will an ‘air tax’ on the polluters who use and pollute the air change corporate behaviour?
Public health burden
This brings us to another pertinent question: how much could we save our public health system if we cleaned up the air of the Highveld?
In 2017, UK expert Dr Mike Holland estimated that pollution from Eskom’s power stations alone costs the state R30 billion a year in hospital admissions and lost work days. Imagine all the ways that money could be better spent, and how freeing our hospitals from the burden of pollution would free up valuable public health capacity for other challenges.
How radically would the lives of ordinary people living in Mpumalanga improve if they did not have to deal with chronic and acute illnesses on top of all the other social and economic ills they have to contend with?
Prof. Rajen Naidoo of the University of KwaZulu-Natal describes how air pollution contributes to the cycle of poverty – how poor people cannot move away from pollution, only to find that their opportunities for education and development are impaired by pollution and the resulting of this ill health prevents them from earning an income that would allow them to move to escape pollution. And remember, these pollution victims are mostly black.
So for those who argue that we should “sacrifice” clean air and meeting air quality standards because it’s too expensive and because we now have to choose between burden reduction for all and toxic air for some, think again. Pollution is an extremely expensive burden – for people, for families, for the state.
And check your conscience. Have we become so lulled by the sacrifice made by those living in the polluted Highveld that we no longer even consider their suffering?
In Emalahleni, I found the following written on a poster made by a young resident: “Ooooooooooooooooooooo pollution. Will I live to be 15?” OBP/DM
Melissa Fourie is the Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Rights.
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