Mineral projects in Third World countries invariably come to be seen in one of two different ways: either as a shining benefit for a backward economy, or as a blot on the natural environment. On the southern Indian Ocean coast in Kenya, the Kwale titanium project of
The project has captured the attention — not to mention the fevered imaginations — of activist groups in the developed world. The more extreme portrayal has painted Tiomin as being ready with the bulldozers to obliterate a traditional way of life, as a sinister member of an neo-colonialist conspiracy, or as a corporate gangster threatening and bullying local landholders. But even the more balanced presentations have played fast and loose with the facts: Kwale’s mineral resource has been described as 200 million tonnes of titanium, reports have vastly inflated the value of the deposit, and Tiomin has been accused of bribing Kenyan government figures.
The furor has been an example of how things can go wrong even when a mining company does things “right.” Despite a textbook impact assessment and public consultation process, Tiomin’s outside environmental studies have been denounced as biased, and opponents of the project have hauled the company into court.
In March, Kenya’s High Court handed down a 14-day injunction preventing Tiomin from “undertaking any actions of mining or dealing with land within the Kwale district.” The court granted the order after hearing arguments from counsel for three individuals who had sued Tiomin, including Frank Mutua, a well-heeled local farmer who has been a principal local opponent of the project.
The suit names Tiomin and its Kenyan subsidiaries as defendants but is not for a specific liability. Rather, the suit simply seeks an injunction to stop the project.
Mutua at one point insisted that Tiomin had already started mining at Kwale, without a mining permit. His own presentation to the court said he represented more than 200 local farmers, but at least 130 of the farmers he named have disavowed any connection to Mutua’s court challenge.
The lawsuit is still being heard, and the original 14-day injunction is still in place after two months.
The planned project is an open-pit mine to extract heavy-mineral sands containing titanium minerals and zircon. Resources of 200 million tonnes containing 2% ilmenite (FeTiO3), 0.5% rutile (TiO2) and 0.3% zircon (ZrSiO4) have been outlined on the 64-sq.-km Kwale property, and feasibility work defined a minable reserve of 140 million tonnes at similar grades.
The feasibility study estimates capital costs will be $215 million and projects a $254-million cash flow over the life of the mine. The project’s internal rate of return was 20%.
Tiomin tabled an environmental impact assessment (EIA) in April 2000, completed by South African consulting firm Coastal & Environmental Services. The report concluded that, while the operation would change the topography of the area, its agricultural potential — the principal concern of the local subsistence farmers — would not be affected.
Similarly, the report found that the surface drainage pattern and the groundwater system would both be affected but that the main deep aquifer supplying water in the area, and another deep aquifer to the east that was proposed as the operation’s water source, the Msambweni formation, would not be drawn down excessively or contaminated.
A greater environmental concern was the loss of about 5 ha of swamp forest in the northeastern part of the property near the proposed tailings disposal area. The report concluded that the habitat loss there would have a “moderate” effect — that is, there would be a medium-term loss of species in the area but those species would likely re-colonize after the swamp is restored.
The report was criticized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which called the consultants’ independence into question. The IUCN’s principal objection to Coastal & Environmental’s study was that it did not contain a comprehensive environmental management plan. The IUCN also questioned the consultants’ water-balance calculations, saying it had not been demonstrated that the Msambweni aquifer could support the operation’s water demands without excessive drawdown.
The Coast Mining Forum, a group of community organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) led by the Kenyan office of European-based Action Aid, commissioned its own study by four members of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at Kenyatta University. That study concluded that the impact on surface water and shallow groundwater patterns would be “destroyed irreversibly” and that the deep aquifer might be contaminated by infiltration of seawater. The report also concluded that soil erosion is a significant danger.
Tiomin’s design for the Kwale plant will demand about 500 cubic metres of water per hour, against estimates by Kenyan government hydro-geologists that the Msambweni aquifer and the Mukurumudzi River, the planned water sources, could support an hourly draw of 1,000 cubic metres.
And then there is the issue of radioactivity. The heavy-mineral sands at Kwale, like most heavy-mineral sands, carry appreciable amounts of zircon and monazite, which, in turn, contain uranium and thorium. In bulk, the material to be mined contains 309 grams uranium and 143 grams thorium per tonne. Typical crustal abundances are 2-3 grams uranium and 7-10 grams thorium per tonne, and Western World environmental regulators have generally not promulgated guidelines for either element in soil.
Both zircon and monazite are resistant minerals, so the radioactive elements are not in forms that are highly “bio-available” — they tend to remain locked in the mineral grains. Zircon, particularly, is known for its chemical stability.
Zircon, which contains most of the uranium in isomorphous substitution with the zirconium, is to be recovered and sold as a concentrate; the monazite, which contains the great bulk of the thorium, is removed from the concentrate in the mineral processing plant and goes into the tailings. The net effect of the mineral processing operation is to remove the zircon from the environment and return the monazite to the tailings disposal area, where it is unlikely to find its way into the food chain.
The Coast Forum study, which quoted the upper limits of the uranium and thorium concentrations and also mistakenly identified the titanium mineral ilmenite as a species with high concentrations of uranium and thorium, argued that mining operations would cause abrasion of heavy-mineral grains, releasing the radioactive material into the atmosphere. It also suggested that a sulphuric-acid washing process, planned for the processing plant to remove iron oxide coatings from the zircon concentrate, would leach some of the uranium from the zircon.
Tiomin counters that the acid wash process has been used in Australian heavy-mineral operations without any leaching of uranium from the zircon. Monazite (a rare-earth phosphate with accessory thorium), unlike zircon, is soluble in hot sulphuric acid, but it will have been separated from the zircon before the washing stage.
Even at that, the report only recommended that current Kenyan radiation-protection standards be followed — yet the report’s senior author, Kenyatta University soil scientist Wellington Wamicha, was later quoted by Agence France-Presse as telling local residents that “the local soil contains 309 parts per million of thorium-232, which will kill if it gets into contact with your food and the water you drink.”
The Inter-Church Coalition on Africa, a Toronto-based forum of Christian church groups, published an article from All Africa News Agency that said the project was being bulldozed by Tiomin and “senior government officials,” and portrayed the Kwale operation as a strip mine covering the entire property (the pit area
is about 4.6 sq. km in size).
The news agency article said the Coast Forum study had declared “the Canadian mining giant had a poor track record on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar.” In fact, the Forum’s final report — searchable on the World Wide Web — did not even use the word “Madagascar,” and the characterization of Tiomin as a “mining giant” requires an elastic definition of the term.
Apart from the dispute over the environmental impact, Tiomin’s program to compensate local residents, who would have to move out of the area if mining began, has created controversy as well. Tiomin established a base price of KSh9,000 per acre ($180, or $450 per hectare) on relocation, plus payment for improvements, and an annual KSh2,000 per acre ($40, or $100 per hectare), with a 10% annual inflator, as a lease to offset the loss of farm income.
Opponents of the project have argued for sums in the range of KSh16,000 to KSh25,000 per acre for relocation. Some landowners insisted it should go as high as KSh50,000. The Coast Forum study placed an average value of KSh21,200 ($424 or $1,060 per ha) on local transactions, which included deals for improved land.
Coast Forum also argued that cultivated land brought in annual revenue of around KSh14,000 per acre and an operating margin for farmers of about KSh11,000 per acre.
Tiomin arrived at its compensation figures based on reports from Kenyan land valuers, and the base KSh9,000 relocation payment is for undeveloped land. In a letter to the East African Standard, the company’s local general manager, Ian Schache, said most farmers had structures and crops, bringing the average relocation payment to more than KSh40,000 per acre — $800, or $2,000 per ha, about twice what the Coast Forum report valued it.
Another concern has been social dislocation. The area has two rural schools in Nguluku and Maumba, the two towns inside the boundaries of the Tiomin permit area. There are several churches and mosques, and a medical dispensary, all of which would be removed by the mining project. But where Tiomin’s EIA recommended a comprehensive resettlement plan be designed, including nearby facilities for the residents, the Coast Forum study raised concerns that the local people would simply be displaced without any of the community’s assets coming with them. Coast Forum also raised the spectre of social problems, such as alcoholism and family violence, because of the uncertainty surrounding the relocation.
These concerns were voiced even as Tiomin committed to relocating the schools and places of worship, and to developing an employment and training strategy for the local people.
The EIA process included a public-participation component, where committees were formed in Nguluku and Maumba. In both towns, the area councillor and the local chief (a civil service official, not a tribal or traditional leader) were in charge of selecting the members of the council. An 8-member executive committee, drawn from both towns, was the primary representative of the local people in negotiations with Tiomin.
Joan Kuyek of Mining Watch, an Ottawa-based monitoring and activist group, told The Northern Miner that local groups in contact with Mining Watch said the committees were unrepresentative of the farmers and particularly of the squatters — homesteaders who occupied land without legal title but who reside, making up about 80% of the local population.
Tiomin’s difficulty in dealing with the squatters has been that without clear title to land, there is little basis for compensation. Titled landowners get compensation and have the land returned once Tiomin’s mining lease is up, but squatters have, in legal terms, no land to return to. Resettlement is the only reasonable compensation.
A cane plantation in the area, the Ramisi estate, belongs to a defunct company, and Tiomin has asked the government to open it up for squatter farms, but both sides concede there has been little progress so far on that front. The Bank of India, which was a secured creditor of the Ramisi sugar enterprise, holds the land leases, and it remains for the government to cancel those leases and write new ones to Tiomin.
The Montreal-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, which saw the development, and particularly the relocation plan, as a human rights issue, has reported “allegations that Tiomin delivered ‘gifts,’ such as motorcycles, to Kenyan officials.”
The bribery claim, denied by Tiomin, appears to have originated when Tiomin provided motorcycles to two local civil service offices to enable district chiefs to get around to the local farms. Elphas Ojiambo, of Coast Forum, argued that the motorcycles were “gifts to individuals.”
Similarly, there have been accusations from the Council of Imams and Preachers, which said in August of last year that private investigators it had hired had traced an offer of “millions of shillings” made to government officials by Tiomin.
None of the Western activist organizations has produced any evidence for the group’s claims. Still, they seem to have resonated with the mainstream press, who have pointed out that Kenya tied (with Russia) for 82nd place in the 90-country Corruption Perceptions Index, put out by corruption watchdog Transparency International.
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