There’s no money to buy coal and Nomsa Zulu’s daughter is cooking the family’s supper on an open fire in their dusty backyard of eMpumelelweni, a township of eMalahleni.
It’s a cold, grey day and the bedridden Zulu lies huddled beneath a thick layer of blankets. An old coal stove stands hulking alongside her.
“Coal is very important to us,” said the mother of five children, who survives on social grants. “We depend on it. We use it to keep the house warm and to cook. Sometimes it makes us cough but we don’t have any other choice.”
A 50kg bag of coal lasts the family a few days.
Like many residents of eMpumelelweni, Zulu has not heard about the just energy transition to shift South Africa, and the coal belt of Mpumalanga in particular, away from coal to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy.
“If this cleaner energy can make our lives easier and give us cheaper energy, I will be happy to use it,” she said.
Some people in eMalahleni still use coal in their homes, even if they have electricity, said Vusi Mabaso, the project coordinator at Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action. “It’s cheaper than electricity but is expensive in your life,” he said, referring to the harmful effects on people’s health of burning coal in houses.
But, said Promise Mabilo, the coordinator of the Vukani NGO, Mpumalanga’s people are being excluded from the plans to shift from coal-fired power to cleaner energy.
“We feel that people here don’t even know what it means for a just transition,” she said. “We need people to [understand] these are the reasons we need to shift from coal. They feel like their bread and butter is being taken away, they’ve grown up with coal and they depend on coal, but they don’t know what the effect of coal is.”
In March, Vukani and groundWork, an environmental justice nonprofit, were victorious in their Deadly Air court case when a high court judgment found that toxic air pollution in Mpumalanga’s Highveld is a violation of constitutional rights.
For Mabilo, the transition seems “like this huge elephant where one or two legs are missing” and is being dominated by Eskom and large industries.