Ashly DhaniLast Word
The rapid industrialisation of Zimbabwe, including the building of a heavy industrial base, opens a great many dangers of rampant pollution and environmental damage that need to be taken into account and minimised, rather than be cleaned up later at great cost as has been seen in so much of Europe.
Modern technologies mean that a lot can be done at minimal cost in the early stages of any new development simply by ensuring that the all the potential environmental issues are identified, and that does mean all, and appropriate measures taken.
But that said, this does not mean that development and major industrialisation cannot take place, nor that the industry should not be spread out, only that the planning rules are followed and that serious practical thought is given in advance.
There are those who decry almost any new industrial investment, seeing it as an evil, even if a necessary evil, rather than as a challenge that can be managed.
For a practical example we have the new planned US$1 billion cement factory for Magunje in Hurungwe district, down the side highway from Karoi, where a degree of interference is already been seen.
We agree that cement works can be a serious source of environmental pollution and contamination. The original three cement works in Zimbabwe, built from the 1950s on the outskirts of Harare and Bulawayo and at the small mining town of Colleen Bawn in Matabeleland South, are good examples.
For some reason a decision was taken to site the major polluting industries of the Harare area far out of town but on the eastern side, a curious decision when you consider the prevailing winds tend to be northeast and southeast.
So we had the cement works at Manresa and the Rhodia fertiliser factory, now Zimphos, on the southern side of the headwaters of the Mukuvisi River to the east of Greendale and Msasa.
The main reason was to keep the mess away from the residential areas, or at least the then white residential areas as they were the only ones with voters for both national and local government.
No one really expected the city to expand that far, although it has, and so the cement and phosphate processing factories could operate with minimal safeguards.
A bit of pollution at the nearby Tafara, set up by Greendale Town Management Board largely as family accommodation for domestic workers, and Mabvuku, a Government development mainly for industrial workers in Msasa, was not really seen as a major problem, since the residents did not have any effective voice for complaints.
The sequence of owners of the Manresa cement factory, and the owners of the fertiliser factory, had to as time passed invest large sums in fixing up their plants to minimise the dust, the main pollutant, plus sort out the others to make them acceptable.
Residents of swathes of Greendale, especially as Mandara farm was developed, did complain when the winds came from the southeast.
The Bulawayo cement factory was sited in open country to the northeast of that city, along the main highway to Harare, and again that saw the dreadful dust pollution usually falling on the open land towards the city.
The clean-up started later than in Harare and even at independence there was that weird greyness of the land along the main road.
Looking around at other errors from the past, Redcliff was never a wonderful town with Zisco and the opencast coal mining at Hwange was, and to a degree still is, somewhat careless.
Farmers downwind complain of pollution.
Zimbabwe enacted legislation to set up the Environmental Management Agency, the EMA, and gave it considerable powers, the most critical to manage the environmental impact assessments that all new mining and major industrial development have to work on before the digging or factory building starts.
A lot of the headlines for the EMA revolve around illegal or semi-legal mining, sand abstraction and the like, where the illegals obviously care zero for the environmental rules.
The willingness by corrupted councils and their officials to allow development on wetlands also produces headlines, but again this is illegal development.
What does not produce the headlines, and in a growing more honest society will become the mainstay of the EMA work, is the legal development, making sure that it is done right.
Environmental impact assessments can be regarded as window dressing in some circles, yet they have to be done properly.
EMA has stressed that these assessments are not designed to prevent development, or curtail development or even to add excessive costs to development.
That is the correct concept and attitude. But it does require that the EMA has adequate resources, especially staff resources, to supervise the assessments that are done by industrial and mining developers.
The main function of an assessment must be to minimise or eliminate environmental damage, and minimise means reducing it to levels where it can be contained and coped with for many years in the future.
So we come back to the Magunje cement factory. And here a new factor has entered the ring, the Zimbabwe National Organisation of Associations and Residents Trusts (ZNOART), a body representing those who need to live near development rather than a body of environmental experts.
Obviously those who will be living with development need their view considered, but very often these will be “not in my backyard”, and yet development needs to be in someone’s backyard.
The EMA has responded tersely to the initial input from ZNOART, which has centred on the modest dam to the south of Magunje that supplies the small new town with its water supply. ZMA has pointed out that impact assessment is still being done, rather than being a final document.
One can understand the impatience of the ZMA. The protection of the dam and the rivers that run into it from the south is such an obvious factor that obviously the impact assessment will be looking at the needed protection, and all ZNOART has done is point out vaguely the danger, rather than coming up with innovative engineering ideas to prevent the danger. There is a air at least of “not in my back yard” and build the works somewhere else.
There is nothing wrong with residents of a town or area listing their special concerns, but they should be careful to make it clear that they want these matters effectively addressed by the industrial environmental experts drawing up the impact assessment, and make it clear that they think an industrialist should be hiring quality expertise.
This is a new business area for Zimbabwe, and opens the door to a new profession, or those with the expertise to figure out all the dangers and develop the options for solutions.
This will pay for itself since if done properly will mean that clean-up and corrective work will not need to be done later.
It is, for example, exceptionally cheap to move a factory a couple of hundred metres before it is built to avoid siting it on a water course, and to ensure that drainage that may contain sediments can flow into a type of slime dam where it can dry out.
A lot of research has been done in Zimbabwe on dealing with mine dumps, both the engineering on how to make sure they are stable and the biology over how they can be vegetated, with particular hardy species, so eventually they return to the natural veld, and much of that seems applicable to industrial waste dumps.
Air pollution from dust simply needs filters, but again the factory investor will want to be able to dump the filtered dust cheaply and suitable sites, where it will stay put and can eventually be grassed over, are needed in advance. Again a range of expertise is required.
Industrialists should not skimp of their assessments. The objective from their point of view is be a good neighbour and especially to figure out the most economical of the available options to be that neighbour, and then to avoid hugely expensive remedial works down the line.
NGOs wanting to muscle in need, perhaps, to be environmentally aware and have expertise in that field to be able to make practical suggestions, rather than just try to move development to another backyard.
Online Reporter