Phola, a community situated near Eskom’s Kendal power station, has long been exposed to the health risks associated with coal pollution. (Photo: Thom Pierce/Spotlight)News & Features
18th August 2025 | Sue Segar
Despite a landmark court judgment three years ago that upheld the right to clean air, air pollution remains rife in South Africa’s coal country. For part 2 of this Spotlight special series, journalist Sue Segar and photographer Thom Pierce travelled to meet some of the activists on the ground in Mpumalanga.
About a decade ago, whilst playing football with his friends in the community of Phola in Mpumalanga, Thabo Skosana says he became aware that most of the young men on the field were suffering from chest pains, sore throats, and asthma.
“About 35 of us played most afternoons. We’d play for a while but as soon as they started running, they’d begin to cough. They complained of sore throats and struggled to breathe… Many of them also had sinus and eye problems. Some had skin problems, but, mostly, it was chest pain,” he recalls.
Like several other activists we met in the Emalahleni municipal area, previously Witbank, Skosana would soon start connecting the dots.
“Once or twice a week, there would be blasting in the opencast mines that surround our community. We’d see the dark smoke rising, but as youngsters we didn’t realise that when it floated down, we were all inhaling it,” he says.
Wherever you look around Phola, there are coal mountains and ash dumps. It’s a bleak landscape, featuring numerous underground and opencast coalmines, as well as abandoned mines.
When the wind comes up, and the vast piles of coal dust are disturbed, a visibly dark pall blankets the community, and, as if by reflex, the people walking in the streets stoop down and cover their mouths and eyes.
With Eskom’s Kendal coal-fired power station nearby, and the Kusile power plant about 15 kms away, Phola is surrounded by the coal mines that fuel them.
On the road towards Phola, signs warn that “this is a blasting area” or that there are “heavy duty trucks turning”.
After his realisation that day on the soccer field, Skosana says he started attending workshops organised by environmental activists. Eventually, he would set up the Phola Environmental Justice Alliance in 2023. Before that though, he was one of the many activists in the province who would march in support of a landmark court case that would become known as the “deadly air case”.
The road to a landmark judgment
One of the applicants in this case was an organisation called the Vukani Environmental Movement (VEM), founded in 2016 by activist Promise Mabilo. She moved to the eMpumelelweni community in Emalahleni in the late 1990s, with the hope of finding job opportunities, but things didn’t quite go according to plan. Not long after she arrived, she says her son started getting sick.
Mabilo adds: “I had to care for him constantly. The medication from the clinic didn’t help, so I took him to doctors who gave him medicine, but after a week he would start coughing again. The doctor told me it was because we were in a high priority area for air pollution.”
Like Skosana, Mabilo started seeing her surroundings through a new lens. She joined the activist group called the Highveld Environmental Justice Network. At their meetings, she encountered the organisations groundWork and the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER). Little did she know that these two organisations, plus her own, would become central to one of the biggest environmental court cases in South African history.
To back up for a moment. That air pollution is a serious problem in Emalahleni and surrounds is not seriously disputed by anyone. In 2007, Emalahleni and several other areas were designated in terms of the National Environmental Management: Air Quality Act (NEMAQA) as a pollution hot spot called the Highveld Priority Area (HPA). In terms of this framework, a first air quality improvement plan was published in 2012. A second would follow in 2025.
In 2019, groundWork and VEM took the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment to court for failing to implement regulations to enforce the 2012 Air Quality Management Plan. Without legally binding regulations, they argued there would be too much room for mining, energy, and other large industries in the area to keep polluting at unacceptable levels. But the activists went further. They also asked the court to declare the unsafe levels of air pollution to be a violation of the right to an environment not harmful to one’s health or wellbeing, a right enshrined in Section 24 of the Constitution of South Africa.
“The launching of this case came out of the realisation that the communities in which Vukani operates, as well as many other communities, were being sacrificed for the generation of electricity, and that this generation of electricity was being done in dirty ways, resulting in people having to live with poor health and poor quality of life impacts,” says Brandon Abdinor, a senior climate advocacy lawyer at CER. CER represented groundWork and VEM in the case.
“There was a sense that if we did not get a recognition that this was infringing their rights to a healthy environment, nothing was going to change. We needed to get these rights confirmed by the court and we needed to get recognition by the court of the fact that the air pollution was contravening those rights,” he says.
In March 2022, the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria ruled in favour of the activists on both counts. This decision was appealed by the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment, but in April 2025, the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the key elements of the high court’s ruling. According to Thobile Molobi, spokesperson for the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment, Minister Dion George will abide by the ruling. Shortly before the appeal hearing, the Minister published draft regulations, but the judges chose to continue with the matter due to the importance of the legal issues involved.
The judgment, says Abdinor, is a big deal on two fronts. Firstly, it upholds the Section 24 right to a healthy environment and declared that this is an immediately realisable right, not something to be deferred to the future. Secondly, the ruling confirms that air pollution is one of the most pervasive and destructive environmental harms around.
But how much has really changed?
Since the initial court action more than three years ago, Mabilo says she doesn’t think that much has changed for the ordinary citizens of Emalahleni. “We have been forgotten, sacrificed, for years, and there is no sign of this changing on the ground. We have no choice but to breathe this toxic air as we go about our daily lives. Our people get sick, our loved ones die. And still the polluters are allowed to continue polluting, and this is enabled by the state which is supposed to protect us,” she was quoted as saying when the matter was heard in the SCA in August 2024.
In our research around Phola, we met at least 15 people with health issues (as we described in part 1 of this series). Wheezing, rattling, one could tell from the sound of almost all their voices that something isn’t right.
BATTLE TO BREATHE | Emalahleni translates to ‘place of coal’. But for many people living here, it has also become a place of dirty air. To get first-hand accounts of their stories, Writer Susan Segar and photographer Thom Pierce travelled to Mpumalanga.
www.spotlightnsp.co.za/2025/08/04/b…
— Spotlight (@spotlightnsp.bsky.social) August 4, 2025 at 9:39 AM
One doesn’t have to look far to find a devastating story. For example, Simon Mahlangu, a man we met in Phola, tells us his wife is in hospital because of asthma. “She’s gone to Johannesburg now and she’s on a machine there,” he says.
Another man called Joseph Matshia tells us he worked for an opencast mine till two years ago. He’s lived in Phola all his life and his father worked in an underground mine at Klipspruit. “My job was to close the coal trucks with tarpaulin once the coal was loaded,” he says.
About six years ago, Matshia says he started having difficulty breathing, especially at night. “It’s like a whistle when I breathe. I went to the clinic with bad chest pains. The clinic told me I am suffering from breathing in dust. They give me pills and something to rub on my chest,” he says.
Unemployed for two years now, Matshia says these days he fails the medical tests when applying for jobs.
Like Mabilo, Abdinor also isn’t under any illusions about their court victory being the end of the matter. “The journey continues,” he says, “and without substantial work to keep pressure on actual pollutions emissions reduction, it will be somewhat of an empty victory.” Abdinor adds: “Without enforcement of the regulations and without ensuring compliance with minimum emissions standards, even those regulations will be somewhat hollow.”
Where emissions cannot realistically be curbed (for instance, we cannot shut off all coal overnight), he argues the minister must prescribe strong mitigation measures, such as improved healthcare screening and treatment, filtration systems in public buildings and schools, and vastly improved air quality monitoring, which is publicly accessible so that everybody has a real-time appreciation of pollution levels.
Whereas the air quality management plan and the regulations published by the minister point to some seriousness about reducing air pollution in the HPA, critics charge that this is undermined by the fact that several of Eskom’s coal-fired power plants were recently granted exemptions from South Africa’s minimum emissions standards.
“The postponements to compliance are not an endorsement of indefinite non-compliance but a bridge to a cleaner, healthier future, which factors in the country’s economic stability, aligning with the National Environmental Management Act’s call for sustainable development that places people and their needs at the forefront,” Molobi told Spotlight. “For this reason, the exemptions come with rigorous conditions to improve the quality of life in the communities affected.” (You can see Molobi’s full response to Spotlight here and the minister’s relevant announcement here.)
For its part, an Eskom spokesperson told Spotlight that to date it has invested over R3 billion in emissions reduction projects, with another R15.6 billion allocated over the next five years. In a detailed set of responses provided to Spotlight, Eskom describes how emissions of particulate matter, No2, and SO2 have already been reduced at several power stations. (You can read those responses in full here.)
When asked whether they accept that pollution from Eskom’s power plants are contributing to unsafe levels of air pollution in the HPA, the spokesperson said: “Eskom is the primary producer of electricity in South Africa, with the bulk of that electricity generated with coal-fired power stations in Mpumalanga (Highveld Priority Area). The emissions from these power stations does contribute to increasing the atmospheric pollution load of the air shed. Eskom is, however, not the only source of pollutants in the region, with other industries, mines, road traffic, agriculture, biomass burning, waste burning and household fuel use all contributing to the pollution load and ultimately to exceedances of WHO-recommended standards.”
Back on the ground
Meanwhile, the day-to-day struggle for clean air in Emalahleni continues for the activists we met in the area.
Lindiwe Maelane is a resident of the MNS informal settlement and the local branch coordinator for Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), an NGO working to raise the voices of the communities most affected by mining.
She and two fellow activists from the youth wing of MACUA, called Youth Affected by Mining United in Action (YAMUA), walk with us across a stretch of damp black coal dust the size of a football pitch. This field of black, interspersed with puddles of sludgy water, is all that separates the MNS community from a coal mine and a coal processing plant. Behind the coal washery is a large dam of water. The closest homes to the mine are no further than about 200 metres away.
“This black we are walking on is powder from the coal dust,” explains Bonginkosi Vader Mahlangu, an organiser with YAMUA. “You can see it’s wet. If it wasn’t wet, it would be blowing everywhere,” chimes in Sizwe Madonsela, another YAMUA member walking with us. “Once in a while, the mine brings a water bowser to wet the dust, so it doesn’t blow and so we don’t stay angry. We call it ‘bluff’. It’s like giving the community a lollipop to keep us happy,” he says.
A particular point of contention for these activists is the Social and Labour Plan (SLP) for the local mines. All mining companies operating in South Africa are legally required to submit an SLP as part of their mining rights application submitted to the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy. The SLP is meant to specify what the company will contribute socially and economically to the workers it employs, and to the communities in which they are operating. SLPs are normally required to be revised and resubmitted every five years during the life of a mining right.
“By law, there should be a meeting between these mining companies and the community. They need to show us their SLP, which is legally required before a mining licence can be issued,” explains Maelane. According to her, the local mining company has not consulted the community and they have not seen its SLP.
Putting these allegations to the mine’s owners is not straight forward. The activists refer to the mine as Masemanzi, but when we contacted Masemanzi, they denied that they held the relevant mining rights and said they were just the “contractors” at the mine. They did refer us to another company, but we’ve been unable to reach that company or confirm that they indeed own the mining rights. We saw no clear signage outside the mine. We also couldn’t find the mine on a database held by the Minerals Council (an industry body). The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy has a registry of mines and SLPs, but they did not respond to our queries and the relevant section of their website appeared to be broken.
Mapule Mdhuli is a resident of eMpumelelweni. She volunteers for Vukani and helps run awareness campaigns at schools. Spotlight first met her in May at the People’s Hearing on Energy Profiteers – an event organised by Open Secrets, a non-profit working to expose and build accountability for “private sector economic crimes”. Key roleplayers, including Eskom, the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, as well as Minister Gwede Mantashe, were invited to the event. But their reserved front-row seats remained empty.
Mdhuli has asthma, her five-year-old son has the same condition, and she says both her best friend and a cousin who lived in the area died from asthma. It was partly her story that convinced us to look more closely at what air pollution is doing to the health of people in Emalahleni.
“It makes me emotional talking about Emalahleni. The air pollution affects generations and generations of people,” she says. “The mines and the power stations must start working with the community so that they stop destroying our health.”
*This is part 2 of a Spotlight special series on air pollution and health in the Emalahleni area. In part 1 we asked what people in the area are going through when it comes to their health. In part 3 we will explore the scientific and other evidence relevant to health and air pollution in the area.
