*The signposts that are being put by Pan African Resouces on the Vlakfontein mine tailing which is restricting Snake Park residents from entering the mine dump/ tailing.
Daniel Mkhwanazi
On the other day, we went to the tailing to check our Phytoremediation project as activists we coincidentally met with one of the workers who was busy with the mine sign posts he said he works under Mogale Tailings, yet this happened after we did the article with Sunday Times about the Phytoremediation project that we had done so this happens all because of the sunflowers we planted as we tried to remediate the toxic soil that affects our community as its dust rises.
We believe that we had an impact since we started the remediation project with help from the Benchmarks Foundation. We aimed to achieve the dust that has been affecting our community as Snake Park activists since we have been experiencing the tailing dust for many years so this had to improve, although we had many challenges during the process of the remediation project such as local farmers cows feeding themselves with our sunflowers, now it was the owners of the tailing restricting us as Snake Park sunflower activists which led us to fail somehow. We also had to raise awareness around our community to residents of Snake Park that we are negatively affected by this tailing dust which causes health problems and other factors that are severe to our environment.
So, we are encountering to help the community with this issue of being affected by the tailing dust and its toxins that affect the people, yet it is a good initiative to try and utilize this problematic factor that is been causing degradation. So, we as the Snake Park Bambanani activists are positively willing to alleviate this issue of the tailing being managed properly and maintained as it should.
Pan African Resources should make sure that they solve this tailing management issue and rehabilitate before they can even start re-mining because it is causing health problems to our community and environmental injustice.
