Australian uranium mining project strongly opposed by Zambia’s Green Party

the uranium mining issue a symptom of an extremely serious malaise affecting Zambia.

The Green Party of Zambia and the Lower Zambezi National Park Preserving the Zambezi ecosystem Ian Manning 16 Dec 14,The leader of the Green Party of Zambia, Peter Sinkamba, has set out their platform for the Presidential elections of 20 January 2015: to cancel the mining licence issued to Australia’s Zambezi Resources Limited for the Lower Zambezi National Park. Reading this, the electorate will wonder what could possibly be so important about the proposed mining of a National Park. And why do the Greens consider it the single most important issue facing Zambia today?

At one level the mining saga does signal dysfunctional undemocratic malgovernance, requiring a President – given the flawed Constitution handed to Kaunda by Britain that contained no safeguards against the use of excessive Executive power – who is wise and somewhat unworldy, but, above all, a visionary.

The mining, which would utterly destroy Lower Zambezi, poison the Zambezi River and destroy an ecotourim industry was, after all, refused by 17 Chiefs of the Zambezi Basin – now greatly empowered by the Nagoya Protocol of the Biodiversity Convention; by the MMD Government; by Parliament’s environmental committee; by the PF Government’s own Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA), a decision later overturned by the Minister. And mining would negate Zambia’s membership of the Convention on Biological Diversity; run counter to its membership of various United Nations bodies; make impossible the declaration of a World Heritage Site joined with Mana Pools; contradict the IUCN’s definition of a National Park; and dishonour the Stockholm and Rio Declarations which bind the nations of the Zambezi Basin under a code of good environmental stewardship. The list is a long one. But are they sufficient reasons to provide a political party with a presidential candidate?

Perhaps Sinkamba sees the mining issue – as do I – as a symptom of an extremely serious malaise affecting Zambia. For the mining issue removes the trousers to reveal a suppurating Zambian ulcer on the nations bottom: the continuing existence of a dictatorial, grasping Executive, uncurbed by Government, Parliament, the Judiciary or the Constitution……………..

As a backdrop to this crime against customary people, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature meeting took place on 5 and 6 December 2014 in Lima, the judges referring ‘to the Rights of Nature and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010’. ………….

Another reason, I would hope, for putting the mining up in lights, is that the Greens need to expose the fact that consumer capitalism is dying, and that therefore Zambia should adjust its thinking; for we live in a world of declining resources, one increasingly prone to Liebig’s Law where the amount that a species or ecosystem can produce in a given place and time is limited by the resource in shortest supply – something politicians fail to understand……………….

For mining the SNDP lists the mid-Zambezi uranium mines as coming into production – for which no strategic EIA has been conducted, let alone full environmental management plans – as a UNESCO/IUCN mission discovered – mandatory for the issue of prospecting and large-scale mining licences.

ZEMA and Zambia are woefully unqualified to deal with the environmental effects of the proposed uranium mining upstream of the Park and the management of the radiation and its very serious genetic impacts on people. Brugge & Buchner of Tufts University in 2011 concluded that ‘the strong biological plausibility of adverse effects on the brain, on reproduction, including estrogenic effects, on gene expression, and on uranium metabolism’ will not only affect mine workers but also villagers living near uranium mines and processing facilities. They ended on a chilling note, ‘As much damage is irreversible, and possibly cumulative’. In addition, no strategic socio-environmental impact study has been made of the State’s past and present programmes; nor has there been given any thought to maintaining the integrity of Zambia’s cultural and religious heritage………

The Green Party, with the Lower Zambezi National Park as its platform, has certainly provided a litmus test for the future.

For more information on the issue see:

https://www.change.org/petitions/director-general-zambia-wildlife-authority-prohibit-mining-in-the-lower-zambezi-national-Park

(Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/6CeIIPlmD)

Future publication by I. P. A. Manning:

Out of Zambia: its history, conservation and plunder; and an alternative way http://zambeziheritage.wordpress.com/

December 17, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AFRICA, opposition to nuclear

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