Africa – Integral ecology in the context of mining: an interview with Dr Ke Rafitoson
Ketakandriana (Ke) Rafitoson is the Executive Director of Transparency International in Madagascar and coordinates the Publish What You Pay coalition in the country. She was in the UK from 4-12 April 2023 to attend the AGM of multinational mining company Rio Tinto. She speaks to Séverine Deneulin, Director of International Development at the Laudato Si’ Research Institute, about her work and what Jesuit networks and institutions can do to promote integral ecology in the context of mining and just energy transitions.
Ke, you have been working tirelessly for many years to hold Rio Tinto, and its subsidiary QMM, accountable for its actions in an ilmenite mine in Southern Madagascar. Could you tell us more about the type of work you do?
Transparency International (TI) is an organization which fights against corruption, and promotes integrity, accountability and transparency in all sectors, including the mining sector. Our chapter, TI Madagascar (TI-MG), has been elected as the coordinator of the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) national coalition. PWYP promotes better governance of extractive industries so that these industries benefit local communities. Our work mainly consists of monitoring how companies behave in terms of governance. For example, this involves ensuring whether companies have adequate grievance mechanisms which are suitable for local communities, or monitoring the relationship between the companies and the government. We suspect that, most of the time, there is a collusion between the companies and the government because the government is granting them a license to operate in the country. So, there can be bribes or embezzlement involved in such relationship, and such patterns of corruption can be detrimental to communities. We also monitor the social performance of companies. Which kind of social activities do they support? Do these activities meet the needs of local communities, or do they just tick some boxes? We are also obviously monitoring potential human rights violations.
We do all this in order to improve company performance and the benefits derived from mineral exploitation, not only for the country, but especially for local communities. ‘Putting people first’ is one of the mottos and motivations of such activities. The slogan of PWYP is ’Extracting the Truth’, which means you have to investigate, you have to listen to the complaints of the community, to what is going wrong, but not just listening, also fact-checking and documenting failures in order to identify room for improvement. We send recommendations to government, because the government is first responsible for the wellbeing of local communities, and needs to be held accountable for what it is doing, or not doing. We also send recommendations to companies so that they can improve their mining operations. The QMM/Rio Tinto mine is only one of the companies we are monitoring, but the case is very illustrative of the kind of lack of involvement of the government in environmental and social monitoring in the mining sector in Madagascar, and the lack of adjustment from mining companies to the needs of local communities.
The mining operations started in 2005 and we are now in 2023. People have been complaining for more than 15 years without anyone listening. That is why we have put an emphasis on that case. In association with the Andrew Lees Trust (ALT) based in the UK we have conducted two main perceptions studies. A first study in 2020 was around water pollution. ALT UK commissioned scientific studies about water pollution, but the company strongly denied some of the scientific findings. This is why I would like to show our methodology. We asked people what they felt on a daily basis about the changes in the water. The population said that it has been more than 10 years that the water they have been using for cooking and other daily needs has changed in colour, smell, and taste. They also sensed that this water was bringing a lot of diseases; their skins were itching, they had stomach aches and reported other, more unusual symptoms of disease. They did suspect that all this was linked to water pollution. We wanted to carry out such study about people’s feelings to complement the scientific study of water contamination, to put more pressure on the company to recognize its responsibility. Read more….
Source : jesuitmissions.org.uk
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