Deogracias Kalima

The Group of 20 (G20) gathering of the world's most powerful economies (excluding the US), kicked off in Johannesburg at the end of November. The host, President Cyril Ramaphosa, is a billionaire with deep coal roots and as a corporate investor in mines. He is trumpeting one of the summit’s main themes as breaking the world, especially the Global South, from the curse of ‘extractive colonialism’ and unleashing a wave of ‘green jobs’.

It was on the back of this polluting legacy that South Africa made lavish demands at the 2021 Conference of the Parties (COP) to combat climate change. The EU, Canada, Germany, the UK, and France promised to provide South Africa with $8.5bn in concessional finance. In return, South Africa pledged to shift its energy matrix toward renewable energy sources. Key to South Africa’s pledges was the decommissioning of 9 of its coal power plants by 2035.

As new nuclear plants take off in South Africa, and an old one is being stretched to life, farmers dread that high-level, radioactive nuclear waste will be buried on their land in a Nevada-like remote district.