Coal’s deadly toll — Mpumalanga community members share their experiences of sickness and suffering

Ethan van Diemen| Daily Maverick

Sharing their experiences of living in the shadows of Mpumalanga’s coal mines and power stations, community members and activists said that the health impacts of coal use are vastly understated and not widely understood on all levels. 

Giving testimonies in a town hall in Cape Town on Wednesday, community members and affected groups that live in and around Mpumalanga’s coal power stations and mines said that the health impacts of mining, processing and burning coal are greatly understated by political leaders and widely misunderstood and understated by residents themselves.

The testimonies were shared at Open Secrets’ “The People’s Hearing on Energy Profiteers” event. Open Secrets explains that the event was meant to be a “platform for affected communities, activists and civil society experts to advocate for the prioritisation of human and environmental rights in the efforts to address the energy crisis and the climate crisis”.

Addressing the crowd, Happy Skosana, a member of the Middelburg Social and Environmental Justice Alliance (Mseja) explained that community members are not often aware of the adverse impacts of the industrial activities around them.

“We’ve got a lot of mines, maybe we are surrounded with plus minus 50 mines, we’ve got power stations, we’ve got manufacturing, for example, steel and alloys companies surrounding us. All of that it’s a coal value chain industry. Now, what we are doing, we run around the community. Our community, they don’t have correct information about what coal is really doing to our life.”