Lüderitz residents stop manganese exports

Residents of Lüderitz Bay have done in less than a week what Port Elizabeth has failed to do for decades – stopped manganese exports through the port for health reasons. According to the publication New Era, Trade Port Namibia, which started transporting manganese from South Africa for exportation to China via the Lüderitz port on December 30 2018, has been instructed by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism to halt operations. According to the newspaper Lüderitz residents did not allow the drivers of the first trucks to arrive from South Africa to offload the manganese on the grounds that exposure to airborne manganese dust has catastrophic health consequences, especially in a town with strong winds such as Lüderitz. The concerned residents immediately wrote a letter to the Ministry of Environment and Tourism asking it to stop the operation. They demanded that if an environmental clearance certificate was already issued to the company, it should be withdrawn. The office of the environmental commissioner gave the operator five working days to clean up the manganese at the site and place what was already loaded on trucks in storage in a safe place for the time being. Exporters will have to continue using Port Elizabeth where, despite ongoing complaints by residents, Transnet has continued to ramp up exports through the port, with loading now being done at the old fresh produce terminal and container terminal as well as from the manganese dump. Self-imposed deadlines by Transnet for the moving of the manganese operation to Ngqura have been regularly missed.