A Just Transition? Green Drive Splits Opinion in South African Coal Belt

Cooling towers and smokestacks still loom over the single-storey houses of Komati, but the winter sky is clear; smoke hasn't billowed from the vast concrete chimneys of the South African town's power station since it stopped burning coal in 2022, 61 years after its inauguration.

- Rachel Savage

While the state power company Eskom didn't fire any permanent employees, the end of coal generation and earlier job losses in nearby mines have fuelled doubts in the small town and the wider coal belt that there are any benefits to South Africa's "just energy transition" to renewable power.

Opposite Komati's supermarket on a Thursday afternoon, unemployed people of all ages sat at the roadside. "We are just sitting here, waiting for anything, maybe a company car that will come by and say they are looking for people," said Busisiwe Ndebele, a mine plant attendant for five years until she was fired while pregnant in 2022.

Ndebele, 34, said she had received training from Eskom in CV-writing and running a business, but didn't see a future beyond coal. "We are surrounded by coalmines, so if the coalmines close down there won't be any jobs," she said.

The phrase "just transition" is thought to have been coined in the US in the early 1990s by the trade unionist Tony Mazzocchi, who wanted a fund to help workers move away from jobs in which they were exposed to toxic chemicals.