Sådan er det i kongedømmet Swaziland
MBABANE, 18 January 2012 (IRIN) – Recently hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface of a stream which was the only water source for a rural community in Swaziland’s drought-prone (tørke-udsatte) eastern region.
A local sugar processing plant admitted to accidentally discharging toxic effluent (giftigt udflåd) into the stream, and brought in water tanks to supply the community until clean-up operations could be completed.
Communities like this one were at the mercy of polluters until the Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) was established five years ago.
An environmental watchdog group comprising 16 scientists from various fields, SEA is tasked with enforcing Swaziland’s 2002 Environmental Management Act as well as various international environmental treaties to which Swaziland is a signatory.
– Our acting director is on site now seeing what happened and if mitigation efforts are really happening. We do not take anyone’s word on anything until we do our own investigations, information officer Gcina Dladla told IRIN from SEA headquarters in the capital, Mbabane.
Although the authority is funded by government and falls under the Ministry of Tourism and Environmental Affairs, Dladla explained that the agency is independent and polices government operations in the same way as it does the private sector’s.
Not much to go for
With Swaziland’s only environmental NGO largely dormant (ikke-fungerende), SEA’s small staff are all that stand in the way of this tiny kingdom’s natural resources being exploited or mismanaged.
However, concerns have been raised about the agency’s ability to stand up to powerful private and government interests intent on putting profit and development before environmental concerns.
Especially after it gave the go-ahead for an iron ore reprocessing plant to be opened at the Ngwenya Iron Ore Mine, northwest of Mbabane.
Ngwenya ceased operations in the 1970s but due to its status as one of the oldest mines in the world, was declared a World Heritage Site by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO.
Indian-owned mining company Salgaocar now intends to reprocess the low grade iron ore dumped at Ngwenya to extract its mineral content.
Critics of the venture, mainly consisting of tourism operators and businesses in the Ngwenya area, have pointed to the threat of heavy metals seeping into a dam which supplies drinking water to Mbabane.
But according to Dladla, no iron ore processing will take place on site. Instead, the dumped rocks will be loaded onto trucks for transport to Mozambique.
“There are no chemicals being used. We will be monitoring the site as part of our inspection duties to make sure this remains the case,he said.
Palms greased? (Er nogle blevet smurt?)
Læs videre på http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94660
