Coalition fights to save pristine Limpopo bushveld from huge Chinese industrial land grab

In northern Limpopo there’s a bitter struggle by a coalition of farmers, rural communities and conservationists trying to keep a Chinese industrial giant from deciding the future of their water, their land – and the future of South Africa’s steel industry.

Kinetic Development Group has already dug a huge coal pit in the middle of a pristine bushveld area near Tshipise. It’s part of a string of coal mines and factories planned, under a provincial government policy to develop a new coalfield and metals manufacturing in a Unesco biodiversity reserve between the Soutpansberg Mountains and Limpopo River.

The plans and projects are backed by a provincial authority, the Limpopo Department of Economic Development Environment and Tourism (Ledet), that both promotes the development and judges its environmental acceptability.

For Living Limpopo’s Lauren Liebenberg, that means fighting on two fronts: challenging the industrial expansion and trying to hold its government backers to account.

The coalition has taken its case to court, investigated the compliance breaches, filed objections and petitioned ministers. But Liebenberg says successive approaches to the national minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment have been rebuffed on the basis that the provincial department is the competent authority. It’s a national issue that the national government appears to be ducking.

She likens granting the power of Ledet to promote the special economic zone and then exercise environmental decision-making powers to a vampire in a blood bank.

It has made a mockery of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) process, Liebenberg says, with every authorisation predetermined, and it is in clear violation of the principles of procedural fairness enshrined in the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act.

Challenges

The provincial approvals keep coming. But so do the challenges by opponents, including Living Limpopo. Despite the setbacks, the coalition is refusing to surrender a landscape of farms, baobabs and wildlife corridors to a development programme it says threatens large-scale land transformation, industrial pollution and the water on which all of them depend.

“This is an entire coal mining and industrial frontier that’s advancing across that landscape,” she says.

The area is the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve, a region encompassing farms, wildlife corridors, the Mapungubwe World Heritage Site, the Makuleke wetlands and part of Kruger National Park.

Within the reserve, Kinetic-controlled MC Mining’s Makhado colliery is entering production. Linked industrial plans include coke ovens, power generation and smelters associated with the government-backed Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone.

The Vhembe Biosphere Reserve covers about three million hectares, 84% of which remains in a natural state, largely because it incorporates two national parks and an extensive network of protected areas. Nearly 40% is classified as Critical Biodiversity Areas. But protected areas between Mapungubwe and Kruger remain fragmented: wildlife needs connections that lines on a conservation map cannot supply.

This is a landscape of baobabs, riverine forests and the Soutpansberg Mountains, where conservation areas sit alongside farms and rural settlements.

The Makhado coal pit lies adjacent to the site of the smelter cluster in the special economic zone and is central to the overall development. Its controlling shareholder, Kinetic Development Group, is also an anchor investor in the industrial zone.

The coalition argues that these connected projects are being assessed in pieces, allowing their combined demands and consequences to slip between the files.

Water, unfortunately, does not organise itself by application approval. For Liebenberg, this is the central absurdity: the government is advancing a water-intensive development programme while fundamental questions about its supply remain unanswered.

Her immediate concern is the coal mine’s water demand, compounded by Kinetic’s one-million-tonne-per-annum ferrochrome smelter project – which was granted approval in May this year – and its proposed three-million-tonne-per-annum coke and power plant project, now progressing through the approval process.

Coke is used in steel production, the intended end product of the industrial zone, for sale domestically or export into an already glutted international market. Farewell ArcelorMittal (formerly Iscor).

The plant would add another substantial thirst to a region where farmers, villages and ecosystems already depend on constrained supplies.

Hefty objections

In June, Richard Summers Inc, the lawyers acting for Living Limpopo, Earthlife Africa, the Vhembe Biosphere Reserve, The Herd Nature Reserve, Elephants Alive and the Lepidopterists’ Society of South Africa, submitted a 97-page objection to its draft environmental assessment.

The submission challenges the assessment’s treatment of water, pollution, biodiversity and public participation. Its water argument is basic enough: establish that a reliable, sustainable supply exists before approving something that cannot function without it.

The objection argues that the combined impact of the water-intensive industrial project and Kinetic’s open-cast coal mining projects across 100,000 hectares has been inadequately assessed, particularly its effect on the already stressed Nzhelele River catchment and the other users who depend on it.

In other words, the factories are being planned and approved with more confidence than their water supply warrants. It argues that authorising a project when its water supply and technical feasibility are uncertain is irrational.

Liebenberg says the consequences would fall particularly heavily on rural households and smallholders dependent on wells and boreholes. For them, groundwater is drinking water, water for livestock and the means to grow food.

A falling water table would not arrive as an abstract environmental impact. It could arrive as a community well that no longer reaches the water.

The objection also warns that pumping water out of open coal pits can lower groundwater levels beyond the excavations themselves. It cites EIA assessments that put the area at risk of aquifer dewatering around the coal pits at 3,600 square kilometres.

Coal mining can also cause toxic pollutants to leach into the groundwater.

Arsenic contamination has already been detected in borehole samples taken around Makhado. The minister of water promised to act on the evidence in January this year. Nothing has been done.

Those opposing the development say the assessments for the coke plant, ferrochrome smelter and individual coal mines fail to account for their cumulative impacts across the catchment and wider river basin. A separate water-licensing process later, they argue, cannot repair an environmental decision made without knowing whether the necessary water exists.

Liebenberg describes proposals for dams and long-distance transfers as increasingly fantastical schemes to solve a problem that should not exist. In her view, industries that consume vast amounts of water and power and generate pollution should not be developed in this highly sensitive, water-scarce landscape.

She fears the region could inherit both failed industrial investments and damaged water resources. A plant can close. A depleted or contaminated aquifer is harder to switch back on.

She accuses the national department of washing its hands of the affair. In her account of a recent parliamentary committee meeting, officials concentrated on explaining their jurisdiction rather than addressing the environmental consequences the committee wanted examined.

Application dismissed

The lengthy dispute over Makhado’s own authorisation has deepened that frustration. A 2021 appeal challenged an amendment removing that year’s deadline for mining to begin. Liebenberg says it remained undecided for more than five years while construction proceeded in defiance of its suspensive effect, before being dismissed by the minister this month as the mine entered production.

MC Mining, a subsidiary of Kinetic, has rejected allegations that it operated unlawfully. The coalition disputes that position. Liebenberg now sees another decision to challenge, with the mine already built.

For the coke-plant objection, meanwhile, she says the coalition had received an acknowledgement but no notification of a final assessment or decision by the time of our interview with her. Liebenberg believes the outcome is predictable because, she says, the decision was taken before the process began.

Maverick Earth sought comment from Limpopo economic development, environment and tourism MEC Tshitereke Matibe, the national environment department’s Dr Sabelo Malaza and Kinetic representative Chris Huang. None replied.

Employment questions

Employment remains a central justification for the development. Living Limpopo’s October report, Vanishing Jobs, disputes the scale and reliability of the promises. But Liebenberg’s larger argument is that farming, tourism and conservation already sustain livelihoods dependent on the very water and landscapes now at risk.

She wants those alternatives considered before further commitments make the choice academic. “We have put forward solutions, we want a robust debate on their merits, we want genuine consideration of alternative growth pathways.”

That alternative now has a name and a plan. An October 2025 policy brief proposes a Vhembe Special Environmental Economic Zone, replacing the coal-and-steel strategy with investment in conservation, tourism, sustainable agriculture and businesses drawing on the region’s biological resources.

The April 2026 concept note develops its central project, the Great Vhembe Conservation Area. It envisages connecting protected land from Mapungubwe along the Limpopo Valley to the Kruger/Great Limpopo system, with a southern arc through the Soutpansberg. The proposal draws on Ledet’s and the biosphere reserve’s sound spatial development plans.

Restoring riverine forest and degraded land would, it says, help sustain the ecological systems on which water security and farming depend.

These are proposals, not secured investment or guaranteed livelihoods. Their success would depend on an enabling policy and regulatory environment.

But they give the coalition something more substantial to put before ministers than another objection: a concrete, evidence-based option built on preserving South Africa’s rich environmental assets rather than trading them for a development pathway that will deliver worse economic outcomes than a biodiversity-based alternative. That’s on the government’s own assessment.

Liebenberg wants the government to give the idea a serious hearing before the industrial alternative renders it moot.

This is a fight to the death, quite literally,” Liebenberg says. “The death of an entire landscape, sacrificed on the altar of coal. It’s not over yet.”

For now, her coalition keeps writing, objecting and appealing. Its questions about water remain on the table. But the Chinese extractive machinery is already on the ground. DM