Our South African Karoo has an area of four hundred thousand square kilometers, a vast inland basin for the past two hundred and fifty million years. This unique and beautiful area, with enormous deposits of underground coal, was to be one of the pillars of the economy of South Africa today. Volcanic activity once took place on a titanic scale. Ancient reptiles and amphibians prospered in the wet forests and their remains have made the Karoo famous amongst paleontologists.
Large herds of antelope, thousands of zebra and large game roamed this region. It is also where the Khoi and Bushmen, the last of the African Stone Age people, wandered far and wide. With the arrival of European settlers, sheep grazing started the huge industry of wool production in this area. This soon became one of the worlds’ largest wool producing regions.
During the nineteenth century, a railway track was built from Cape Town in the south; eventually all the way up through to Bechuanaland and Rhodesia in the north. The impact of this railroad on the history of southern Africa cannot be emphasized enough.
Currently sheep farming is still the economic backbone of the Karoo, with other forms of agriculture established where irrigation is possible. Recently game farms and tourism have made a large economic impact here.
With recent climate change, Southern Africa is having a severe drought, with predictions that we could just run out of water within the next few months. No one has come up with a solution to this. What has happened despite this dilemma is that some money hungry politicians have decided to allow an oil company, Shell, to start the controversial process of mining unconventional gas in the Karoo. This type of mining is called ‘Fracking’, a process of hydraulic fracturing of the earths’ surface using water (which we are already short of). This ‘fracking process has already been banned in certain USA states.
Shell intends to drill and frack at levels down to 4000m , but at a press conference they would not say what the chemicals pumped into the ground were. According to their presentation, the chemicals were a cocktail of reducers, biocides, corrosion inhibitors, scale inhibitors, surfactants and breakers, which certainly make us and all the Karoo farmers feel just great! So much for their time to address our concerns about our mother earth.
The community shouldn’t worry about water either, they assured us. Shell would “engage” with the community. Water is the biggest waste product in the process, they said, but if it is recycled and maybe even purified it could be used for human consumption! “We promise not to compete with the people of the Karoo for their water needs” they said, a statement of painful ambiguity. We would have to wait and see who would address the water needs of the already thirsty Karoo people.
Shell intends to sink twenty four wells in the area, at a cost of $15 million each! Of course, we should not worry about the impact the fracking process would have per square kilometer, especially after they assured us that the drilling where the greatest amount of disruption would occur would only take two weeks. Didn’t we just agree it took two hundred and fifty million years to create?
Shell did not stop short of promising unicorns and eternal rainbows.
Oh, and if you, as a Karoo landowner, are still unhappy, then go ahead, sue Shell. The exact quote to a question about why the Dutch royal family are complaining about the fracking process was, “ The sister to the princess of the Netherlands has a democratic right to say ‘no drilling in my backyard’ “. I personally, along with many farmers, would agree that this government is overdosing on too many bananas and beetroot-curing AIDS foodstuffs.
Meanwhile our President travels the world, blissfully unconcerned for his native and ancestral land. A man voted into power despite recent charges of rape, corruption and fraud related to the $5 billion weapons acquisition deal. This is a government that is allowing thousands of Somalians to pour across our borders into our once safe land. Perhaps they should just consider scrapping the ‘fracking’ by Shell, and allow the Somali’s who are here already to use the Coega deep water harbour to operate a hijacking business from. After all, this harbour was designed to accommodate large oil tankers. We could then save the Karoo, have free oil from the hundreds of oil tankers that pass by, and simply create more flights to return the ships’ crew back to their home countries. The airline companies would then also all benefit. That would be job creation without any environmental impact. During the evenings the Somali pirates could play soccer in our now empty world cup soccer stadiums. Our rainbow nation would remain intact instead of fracked !
"The riches that the earth yield up have become a curse, fuelled by the greedy, to the disadvantage of the poor ..."
"The riches that the earth yield up have become a curse, fuelled by the greedy, to the disadvantage of the poor ..."
On another lighter note….
After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year, British scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 200 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 150 years ago.
Not to be outdone by the Brit’s, in the weeks that followed, an American archaeologist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story published in the New York Times: “American archaeologists, finding traces of 250-year-old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors already had an advanced high-tech communications network 50 years earlier than the British”.
One week later, The Cape Times, in South Africa reported the following:
“After digging as deep as 30 feet in his backyard in Thabazimbi, South Africa, Lucky Simelane, a self taught archaeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing at all. Lucky has therefore concluded that 250 years ago, Africa had already gone wireless. “
Doesn’t this just make you proud to be from Africa?
eish!
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