Concerns over mining in pristine eSwatini reserve

Taiwanese firm Michael Lee Enterprises has been mining green chert from outcrops in eSwatini’s Malolotja Nature Reserve, despite a public outcry. The cryptocrystalline quartz is sent to a sorting site above the Nkomazi River, loaded into shipping containers and trucked to a railway dry port in Matsapha, the kingdom's primary industrial town. GroundUp reports that it is then railed to Maputo and exported. Residents in the reserve, environmentalists and some tourism industry players are asking how mining was permitted in the first place. Covering about 18 000ha of mountainous wilderness bordering Mpumalanga, the reserve has been managed by the National Trust Commission eSwatini since 1979, and it attracts thousands of local and international visitors annually. The mining is taking place in the depths of the Makhonjwa Mountains, part of the Barberton Greenstone Belt and designated as a Unesco World Heritage site of Outstanding Universal Value in neighbouring SA.

In February, the company was granted a 25-year mining licence. The company was previously granted a licence to prospect for green chert in 1998, under the then Mining Act. However, after a public outcry, the project halted. Since then laws have been changed with a new Mines & Minerals Act passed in 2011. ‘Sections in the Mines and Minerals Act of 2011 were carefully crafted to undermine or supersede the Swaziland National Trust Commission Act of 1972,’ a government official told GroundUp on the sidelines at a public scoping meeting in Piggs Peak in April. The granting of a 25-year licence has sealed the deal. However, a project brief states that the 25-year right will commence ‘on the day Michael Lee Enterprises receives an environmental authorisation from the Eswatini Environmental Authority.’ No such authorisation has been given. There is only a memorandum of understanding that Michael Lee Enterprises entered into with the National Trust Commission. It granted the miners access for a period of one year, from 1 March 2023 to 28 February 2024.