Fishing for a solution for the Olifants
River of life on the line with toxic waste, sewage flowing in
SAMUEL Malungani flashes a broken, yellow-toothed smile as he holds up his dying barbel like a prize. The farmworker places it back inside his bag to take home to feed his family, as he has done for years.
After a long afternoon spent fishing on the barren shores of the Olifants River – with wide eyes he tells excitedly how he has just wrestled a crocodile hooked on his line – Malungani has only caught two small fish.
The 62-year-old remembers when the river had far more protein to offer than this meagre meal. “The river has changed a lot since I was a child – there used to be a lot of fish,” he says, looking out to the turbid, sediment-filled waters gushing past him in the tourist town of Hoedspruit in northern Limpopo.
He tells how, a few weeks ago, the Olifants was so dry he could walk straight across this stretch of riverbed. “But at least the rains have come,” he beams. “Now I can fish again. I know there are problems with the water sometimes, but we have to eat and catching this fish helps me save on buying food.”
Malungani and his family should not be consuming the fish at all. Studies in recent years have warned how some fish species in the river and its tributaries, such as the Loskop Dam, are contaminated by carcinogenic heavy metals including lead, antimony and chromium – largely from rampant mining in its catchment. Long-term consumption, experts say, could cause heavymetal poisoning.
The trouble in the murky Olifants runs far deeper than the health of the aquatic species that cling to life in the river, explains Derick du Toit, the assistant director of the Association for Water and Rural Development (Award). “Sooner or later, we all get to share the bad effects of polluted water.”
After a century of toxic acidic mine water, acid rain, sewage inflows, industrial pollution, agricultural fertilisers and pesticides, poisoning the river, it is regarded as one of the most abused and degraded systems in South Africa, particularly in its upper catchment in the eastern highveld.
Signals of its death appeared in 2005 when the river ceased flowing into Mozambique for a staggering 78 days. Since then, there have been repeated crocodile and fish kills. The river flows near Witbank – home to some of the dirtiest air in the world from coal mining – through Sekhukhuneland in Mpumalanga, passing into Limpopo and the Kruger National Park and across the Mozambican border to Massingir, Chokwe and Xai-Xai.
Du Toit, a straight-talking evolutionary ecologist and environmental educator, speaks admiringly of the hard-working river. “The Olifants River basin is the ‘powerhouse’ of South Africa because of all the coal mining that generates electricity. It’s home to the second-biggest irrigation scheme in the country, and it’s a massive source of tourism revenue because it runs through the Kruger.”
But while the river and its waterways are vital to support life and economic growth, unchecked pol- lution, improper land resource use, weak, poorly enforced policies and the lack of biodiversity protection are fast killing off the once mighty Olifants river.
That’s why saving it, says Du Toit, has to be about working to improve the land and water uses across its extensive 55 000 square kilometre catchment – not the river alone.
Award, bolstered by $10 million (R140m) in funding from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has been gauging the land-use activities – mining, agriculture and tourism – that affect the health of the river as part of the Resilience in the Limpopo River Basin programme.
This trans-boundary project is designed to offset the ongoing degradation of the basin in souther n Africa “where people face water shortages, increased floods and declines in crop productivity as climate change further stresses an already limited water region”.
Dr Sharon Pollard, the director of Award, says the focus is on realising the connection between neglected water infrastructure, declines in water quality, burgeoning human populations, and climate-related extreme weather.
This “systems t hinking” approach centres on inter-relationship dynamics, how the over-abstraction of water upstream for mining or inter-basin transfers can disadvantage downstream beneficiaries, including the river itself, she says.
There has been a failure in systemic gover nance to safeguard water resources, our natural gold, says Pollard. “Although South Africa boasts some of the best water legislation in the world, in the past 20 years the reality is we’ve seen very real reductions in flows and huge impacts on water quality, particularly in the eastern rivers, through the impacts of mining. Nearly 70 percent of our 19 catchments are either in water deficit or approaching this situation.”
Water tainted by heavy metals – 160 times higher than maximum allowable levels in parts of the Olifants – is being used for drinking and crop watering. “It doesn’t take much to imagine the impacts on health and early childhood development,” remarks Pollard.
Consider there are nearly 700 mines in the Olifants catchment area, the scene of an unregulated, unbridled spread of coal and platinum mining, that worries her. “You’re not supposed to drink the water in the lower Olifants. But people are. So it’s this latent insidious silent beast. And there’s very little accountability from the min- ing sector …”
Two hours from Hoedspruit in the mining town of Burgersfort, James Mofolo bends down in his torn jeans and fills his water containers with dirty-looking water from the gushing Steelpoort River, a tributary of the Olifants. A ZCC badge is pinned to his shirt. He will drink a little of this water for the next six months. “This water is holy. I don’t think it can make me sick,” he claims.
Sewage is a big problem. In Makhushane, a rural community on the outskirts of the Kruger near Phalaborwa, Thabo Mohlala shows a crumbling treatment plant, which discharges a constant foul barrage of untreated sewage straight into the Selati, another Olifants tributary.
“Of the more than 80 wastewater treatment plants in the Olifants’ catchment, only 10 percent are compliant. They discharge into the Olifants system and it all makes its way down here, downstream into the Kruger. It poses a lot of human health risks. In Mozambique, communities use this water directly.”
Mohlala, the NGO’s bio-monitor, has studied the shifts in the micro-invertebrates, key to the foodweb, from pollution. “We used to have 52 fish species, now half (of these) just don’t occur in the system any more.”
He peers over a nearby bridge, where several packets of used disposable nappies fester in the bush. “People just come with their bakkies and dump bags of nappies. When it rains, they’re washed into the river.”
Last year, local far mers lost their European accreditation for agricultural imports because of the worsening river quality.
“I don’t think you have any catchment in South Africa that faces the diversity of water quality and flow issues that the Olifants does purely because of the multitude of land uses,” says Hugo Retief, who models water quality in the Olifants basin for the non-profit. He has recently helped design an app that allows scientists and the public to get realtime data on the river.
He says the Department of Water and Sanitation “doesn’t seem to have the bite it needs” to enforce compliance, while the Department of Mineral Resources has never pitched at a single meeting.
But there is hope – despite a three-year delay, a new catchment management agency for the Olifants to address the shared water risks, is on its way.
Pollard says there is too little dialogue about the looming spectre of climate change, which promises severe and profound effects on water resources. “Dams may effectively lose up to 50 percent of their water. We’re in for hotter temperatures… You won’t be able to farm under those conditions.”
For Award, ensuring life remains in the Olifants is about engendering a shared sense of identity and responsibility among all the river’s users – and seeking social and environmental justice.
“Our current work to make the Olifants catchment better able to cope with change shows the legacy of apartheid lives on in the densely populated areas into which people were forcibly removed. Some of the most vulnerable are those that are directly dependent on their surrounding environment to make ends meet.”
Yet there’s a disconnection from natural resources. “Now we’re asking people who still suffer without access to land to move into a space where they are custodians of natural resources. It’s an incredibly hard space to ask people to be in,” she says.