Environmental disasters are not accidents

After Tom Stoppard’s recent death at 88, the former BBC investigative journalist, John Sweeney, quoted the playwright on the subject of journalism:-

“People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark.” (Night and Day)

Neither Stoppard nor Sweeney were referring to the world of commodities but it applies as much here as anywhere else.

Zambia is, alas, a resource country in which darkness rules. A country under-reported outside its borders, and one in which it is regarded as unpatriotic to share facts with the outside world. Rich in many resources - not merely copper - Zambians hoped for great things when Hakainde Hichilema came to power in 2021. But this turned to dust as the competition between China, USA and UAE (Russia) for African resources ramped up further.

Billboards still bear posters of a beaming President alongside the words ‘Corruption is an Enemy of Economic Development’ with a toll-free number. But the phone number might as well be a hotline to the President’s office. The indelible stain on the Presidency was Hichilema’s sale of Mopani Copper Mines (MCM) at COP 28 to a UAE entity with no previous history of managing a copper mine. The MCM mine and smelter is now in a state of virtual collapse.

If this was not bad enough, a symbol of how resources continue to damage rather than support one of the poorest countries in the world, is highlighted by the tailings dam burst at Chambishi Sino-Metals Leach plant in Feb 2025. Just west of Kitwe, and 35 km from MCM in the Copperbelt, 50 million litres of liquid waste were released into the Kafue River, a tributary of the Zambezi, thought to include cyanide, arsenic, lead and uranium amongst other toxic elements. But apparently this isn’t news – certainly not to UK broadsheets or the trade press.

According to www.InsideClimateNews.org, those trying to shed light on the consequent pollution in surrounding farmlands have come up against obfuscation by ministers, an expensive China-financed PR machine, and hush-money paid to locals poisoned or made destitute.

So, what about John Sweeney’s question? Where is the dark place in which to shine a torch?

Rather mundanely it resides in dusty reports; geological/ecological reports of the highest academic standards once commissioned by the Zambian government via ZCCM-IH just after privatisation in 2000. One of these in my possession, prepared by Swedish Geological AB (a spin off from of the Geological Survey of Sweden) is an example.

Concern about tailings dams and the effect of a dam burst on the Kafue River is outlined in one document titled ‘Preparation of Phase 2 of a Consolidated Environmental Management Plan’ dated 2005. A report specifically about the Mopani tailings dam in Mufulira, but applicable anywhere in the Copperbelt. The fear for the Zambezi and Kafue, farmlands and its people, was all there.

Swedish Geological AB and its partners did a professional and thorough job. Data was collected from rivers and lands around tailings dams; measurements taken of water sediment quality, liquid and solid discharges, groundwater, tailings, acid rock drainage potential from tailings, soil inhabited areas, vegetables, fruit and fish, air quality around smelters, benthic fauna (organisms at the bottom of aquatic environments), respiratory functions in those living nearby, socio-economic concerns and impacts. And a whole section was devoted to ‘radiation from mineral waste’ and to ‘air quality and sulphurous gases from smelters’.

The Chinese owners of Sino-Metal Leach (China NonFerrous Mining Corp) may claim lack of knowledge, but ZCCM-IH and the Zambian Ministry of Mines cannot deny the existence of the necessary information required to mitigate the possibility of environmental disaster.

Environmental disasters are not accidents. The definition of an accident would be if such reports did not exist.

As John Sweeney might say – all that is needed is light.