Titanium
Mon, 29 Sep 2008
A PROJECT to mine titanium in the Xolobeni region of Eastern Cape, granted to Transworld Energy and Minerals (TEM), has been stopped in its tracks by Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica, Business Day reported.
This after an internal appeal from a community organisation, the AmaDiba Crisis Committee, represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC). The licence to mine, originally granted by the minerals and energy department, was supposed to come into effect at the end of next month, it said.
But the committee appealed the licence, saying that it would change the community’s traditional way of life and result in the forced eviction of people from their ancestral homes, loss of grazing land and relocation of their ancestral graves.
In its appeal, the committee said the consultation process TEM was obliged to undertake was flawed.
Posted on September 30th, 2008
Filed under: Newspaper and Media
The Wild has to Pay its Way
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
Alien Magnates are blasting dunes, rock-face, estuaries, mangroves, away;
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?
Africa’s southern tip spins on its burdened axis; a netted populace wails:
Tagged are our dreams, labour, fauna & flora, land, lives & days;
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
Shells strip verdant Raphia forests, make pink-backed pelicans ail,
Damn rivers; engender toxic lakes, kill stirring things straying their way;
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?
Thabo Mbeki’s era abruptly expired; does the new era augur grace or travail?
Palmnut vultures, butterflies, our young, in dread of a global hammer sway;
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
In our land of ubuntu the faceless, voteless; homeless, still starve and rail;
Who fixes price-tags, hacks up habitats; heeds the Dollar’s honeyed refrain?
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?
And you, my Mother Nature’s Son, up there on the Milky Way sail,
I thank, praise you now for villanelles that effervesce as they proclaim.
Touch heart; trash immoral deals; our wilderness is not for sale!
I ask you, why, why does the wild have to pay its way?
Deela Khan
24 September 2008