TITANIUM

by Robert Odoul

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About three years ago, Tiomin Resources Incorporated, a Canadian mining firm moved into Kenya's Kwale district at the coast and set up a titanium mining project. With the Kenyan economy in a tailspin and the country in the grip of a severe drought, nobody realistically expected the US$137 million project to spur the sort of controversy it now has.

World Bank figures (which Tiomin's President Jean Charles Potvin would later quote to justify the project) indicated that Kenya, indeed, was in dire need of foreign investment. In 1998, the country received only US$20 million in foreign direct investment. By contrast, Tiomin alone would invest almost four time that amount on a 64-square kilometre strip over a 21-year lease period.

"It is obvious to any observer that Kenya is in great need of foreign investment," Potvin remarked recently, adding for good measure that the development in Kwale was bound to bring substantial benefits to both the local communities and the country as a whole. What is more, he said, Tiomin had established that there were huge findings of titanium sites in the nearby Mombasa and Kilifi districts and at Mambrui along the Kenyan Coast.

In Tiomin's view, therefore, everything appeared just fine. Already a South Africa-based consultancy firm, Coastal Environmental Services --- which Tiomin had hired --- had conducted an environmental impact assessment and given the project a clean bill of health and pronounced loudly that its impact on the surrounding environment would be minimal. Top Kenyan government officials including the powerful Minister for Tourism, Trade and Industry, Nicholas Biwott, and the Minister in charge of mineral exploitation, Jackson Kalweo, had chimed in heartily and expressed their desire to see the project off to a speedy start.

Not quite, argued the non-governmental organisation (NGO,) ActionAid, which went ahead to commission experts from the public Kenyatta University to carry out a parallel assessment and organised stakeholders seminars to feel the pulse of the communities that stood to be affected directly by the project. It was this new assessment's report that has now brought about all the brouhaha.

Its findings varied widely from those of the Coastal Environmental Services declaring from the onset that the Canadian mining giant had a poor track record on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar. Sea pollution, they noted, now constituted a real hazard in the island largely due to the mining of titanium there.

And returning from field visits, which took them to various sites in Kwale, the experts declared that the project would, among other things:

• destroy the local landscape,
• expose the residents to radio-active radiation (titanium-related minerals like rutile, ilmenite and zircon contain inert quantities of uranium and thorium which are potential radio-active emitters which could be activated during mineral processing) and
• alter the area's soil chemical conditions.

The experts noted, also, that the project would affect the local albedo (reflectivity of solar radiation) through the removal of vegetation implying that more of the solar radiation would be reflected back to the sky and could therefore cause more heating of the cold inward-bound winds and impact negatively on local rainfall. The study argued that titanium mining would eliminate aquatic bio-diversity parts, and pose a serious threat to ecosystems, communities, species and genetic materials. Mutations due to chemical toxins, too, the report said would lead to inferior traits and there would be loss of environments, wetlands and forests.

Other negative effects that would result from the project, the report said, are that it would contaminate ground water bodies, increase competition for water resources, degrade the water quality, and lead to gaseous emissions (sulphur dioxide) emitted into the air from combustion of heavy oils.

But a more immediate, if not graver matter, they said, revolved around the issue of compensation. Tiomin intends to pay the farmers US$120 per acre against what the locals say is an observed market value of between US$270 and US$800; and an annual rent of US$27 against the US$200 that residents make per year from the sale of agricultural produce.

The residents have since indicated that they will not take Tiomin's offer although early this week Tiomin announced that it had paid out US$3378 to one family and that this was the largest amount it had paid so far.

The local district commissioner, Nathan Hiribae, recently accused ActionAid of inciting the farmers against the project. But then, the land issue is far more complicated than this. While the residents have rejected compensation rates floated by the company, most of them have no acknowledged legal title deeds to the land they now occupy.

It was only in 1966 that the local residents came to learn that an Asian-owned company owned by the Madhvani group owned the land, which they occupied. The land --- they were told to their utter astonishment --- had since 1911 been owned by the Madhvani group which is said to have signed an agreement with the colonial government without any reference to the indigenous Digo and (later) Kamba communities.

The simmering altercation notwithstanding, Tiomin's operations in Kwale will involve the recovery of at least 200 million tonnes of mineralised sand in three adjacent areas containing four million tonnes of rutile and 600 tonnes of zircon. The firm will then upgrade ilmenite to synthetic rutile, a high-grade feedstock for the production of titanium dioxide, which has wide application in the pigment industry. The ore concentrate will then be transported from the mining sites, 20 kilometres inland, to their port facilities at Shimoni using trucks. All the economic minerals (rutile, ilmenite and zircon) contain impurities of uranium and thorium, which are radio--active emitters.

The ActionAid report says the mining technology will need to be quite sophisticated if cases of radioactivity in the area are to be averted. This is because, during the process of mining, there will be physical attrition of these minerals by the excavators. There will also be chemical reactions between the minerals and hot (17 degrees centigrade) sulphuric acid (2 tonnes per day). These physical effects and chemical reactions are likely to free the uranium and thorium into the environment.

The titanium deposits in this area too, are up to 40 metres deep and the preferred mining method, is opencast (strip) mining. This, however, involves clearing all vegetation, stripping and stockpiling the topsoil so as to expose the mineral-heavy sands.

ActionAid's concern is that this will cause irreparable damage to human settlements and local ecological systems. Application of such a system in an area estimated at 64 square kilometres (64,000 hectares), it contends, is bound to impact heavily on the natural systems supported by the soil mantle in the area.

Either way, judging from the tone of senior government officials on whom the decision whether the project will go on or stall largely lies, nothing, so far, appears likely to stand in the way of the project and that it will almost certainly commence operation early next year.... Which leaves the locals with little else to fall back to save to hope that someone further up, will remember to invoke Kenya's little-remembered Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act and the Radiation Protection Act so that mining companies can --- at the very least --- be compelled to maintain acceptable levels of ionising and other radiation in the mining area.

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ROBERT ODOUL - works with the Nairobi, Kenya-based Central Africa News Agency. Previously served as Editor of Trade and Industry Magazine and senior writer for the Economic Review and Weekly Review newsmagazines. This is his first piece for the G21.