Russia woos Namibia to mine uranium, sparking water safety fears

Windhoek and Leonardville, Namibia – Impo Gift Kapamba Musasa holds a hose pipe in one hand and gestures to a garden of cabbages, onions and turnips with the other. He is a teacher in the crumbling village of Leonardville in rural Namibia, where water is becoming scarce.

The vegetables, grown for children at the primary school where he teaches, are watered from one of the largest aquifers on earth. The groundwater nourishes tens of thousands of people and is the lifeblood of the Kalahari Desert, which stretches across Namibia, as well as neighbouring Botswana and South Africa.

Around Leonardville, 386km (240 miles) from the capital, Windhoek, scrubland meets ochre-coloured dunes known as the “red fingers of the Kalahari” for the way they reach out across the vast desert.

Leonardville is a village of cattle farmers subsisting off meagre government handouts and homegrown vegetables, but it also sits on top of vast deposits of uranium – the fuel for nuclear reactors.

That has brought the village of a few thousand people some unlikely attention in recent years.

Impo Gift Kapamba Musasa grows vegetables for schoolchildren in Leonardville, Namibia [Tom Brown/Al Jazeera]

On shop windows and village waypoints, posters appear, bearing the name and logo of a foreign company: Rosatom – Russia’s State Atomic Energy Corporation, one of the world’s largest uranium companies.

Rosatom has spent years attempting to set up a mine in eastern Namibia after the country lifted a temporary ban on uranium mining in 2017. The isolated African village has since seen an influx of investment from companies linked to the Russian government.

A Rosatom subsidiary, known as Headspring Investments, in 2011 proposed to use a controversial drilling method to extract the uranium, known as “in situ” mining, which involves injecting a solution that includes sulphuric acid down into the aquifer. While Australian miners frequently use the drilling method, it has never been attempted in Africa, and is not usually done around aquifers, mining experts said.

While the prospect of financial reward has some locals supporting a potential mine in the area, Rosatom’s proposal has also raised concerns among others in the country.

Calle Schlettwein, the minister of agriculture, water and land reform, told Namibia’s National Assembly on February 29 that Headspring’s activities could “endanger the groundwater” in Namibia, South Africa and Botswana, “destroying the economic basis for the entire region”.

Additionally, because of the need to cool down equipment during uranium mining, the process is also one of the most water-intensive operations. Namibia is becoming hotter and drier because of climate change, leaving residents more dependent on aquifers to grow their food as rainfall decreases. With the prospect of a uranium mine and its effects dangling over their heads, local farmers worry their livelihoods will disappear – for good.

“Pollution is going to change people’s livelihoods,” says school teacher Impo, looking at his crops.

Some local landowners have even started campaigning against the planned uranium mine, asking the government to consider the risks to their water supply.

“Should uranium mining be allowed, it could render the water in the southeastern region of Namibia unfit for human and animal consumption, effectively bringing agriculture to a total and permanent standstill in the area,” said former Namibia Agricultural Union (NAU) president, Piet Gouws, speaking to the Namibian Sun in 2022.

Just as it seemed that Rosatom was on the cusp of achieving its goal of building the uranium mine, the Namibian government cancelled the drilling permits in November 2021, citing non-compliance with the licence terms.

Many farmers hoped this was the last they would hear of Headspring. But Rosatom doubled down – on the ground in Leonardville and by trying to win supporters through softer means.

The inauguration of the Rosatom-funded school kitchen in Leonardville, Namibia [Justicia Shipena/Al Jazeera]

Trips, truck and influence operations

Since 2021, Rosatom has been accused of running an influence campaign in Namibia, sponsoring trips for government officials and reporters to visit Russia, Al Jazeera has found.

In April this year, Rosatom subsidiary Uranium One invited Namibian Minister of Health and Social Services Kalumbi Shangula to Sochi, Russia, to attend Atomexpo 2024, a nuclear industry event organised by Rosatom, where he spoke about rising cancer cases in his country. Uranium One had earlier donated a four-wheel drive to the Namibian Ministry of Health.

Pijoo Nganate, the governor of the Omaheke region where Leonardville is located, has also visited Russia multiple times in trips he confirmed were at least partially funded by Rosatom. Nganate at first refused to answer whether Rosatom sponsored his trips to Russia.

“Let them make those claims,” he said when informed via phone of accusations that the leadership in the region was aligning itself with the Russian-state entity, adding: “That’s immaterial, you lose the bigger picture.”

He went on to tell Al Jazeera that it was Namibian ministries that had requested some donations in the form of food and medicine from Rosatom, not the other way around, and pointed out the severe unemployment and poverty in Omaheke. The Omaheke region has the smallest population in Namibia, but one of its highest poverty rates, at 51 percent of the population.

Other government officials are listed on travel documents, seen by Al Jazeera, as attending multiple sponsored trips to Russia and Kazakhstan between 2022 and 2023. Namibian government officials appearing on these documents include Governor Nganate; Obeth Kandjoze, the director of the National Planning Commission; Hardap regional Governor Salomon April, who said he could not attend; and the chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on natural resources, Tjekero Tweya.

Phone calls to Kandjoze and Tweya by Al Jazeera, seeking their response, went unanswered.

Responding to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on the accusations of the company trying to gain influence through donations and sponsored trips, Rosatom spokesperson Riaan van Rooyen said: “It is disheartening to see and hear that there are those cynical people that label Uranium One’s community upliftment efforts as ‘greenwashing’ and even ‘bribery’.”

“Those privileged ones have had numerous opportunities and time to uplift their own communities,” he said, referring to the farmers who own the land.

To critics of Rosatom, van Rooyen’s comments were an example of efforts to stoke deep-seated racial tensions that persist more than three decades after the end of apartheid, between wealthier, mostly white landowners and poorer Black villagers drawn to the Russian company’s promises.

A sign welcoming visitors to Leonardville, Namibia [Justicia Shipena/Al Jazeera]

‘Why can’t the mine be opened in Leonardville?’

Leonardville is a barren village of dusty roads and sheet-metal homes, where residents spend whole days lying inside to escape the sweltering heat. Young people walk up and down in groups in search of jobs, spending money on alcohol to get by. Many are lured into drug dealing, often using more than they sell, while mothers pray for a better future for their children.

Driving around the settlement, living conditions resembled squats, with up to 10 people living in a two-bedroom house. Villagers say they feel exploited by the predominantly white landowners who dictate the terms of their work and pay. White farmers own 70 percent of agricultural land in Namibia, while Black Namibians own just 16 percent as of 2018, according to the Namibian Statistics Agency (NSA) — even though Namibia’s population is 98.2 percent Black.

Last year, ambulances — which often have to travel 145km (90 miles) from Gobabis, the regional capital and nearest city, to get to the village — stopped coming to Leonardville after the Omaheke government pulled funding because of the cost and distance.

Police vehicles have broken down from the dirt and sand and have not been replaced. Domestic violence is increasing, locals say.

“At night we call the police. But the police don’t come,” said Magdelena, a 53-year-old mother of five in the village, who said drug use and vandalism are growing. All her children, save one, are looking for work.

Leonardville resident Petronella Subelelo worries about the lack of jobs and the rising crime rate. She feels that uranium mining may help things improve in the community.

“Because there are no work opportunities, the youth are drinking too much and crime is constantly increasing,” said the pensioner, who was born and raised in the village. “Why can’t the mine be opened in Leonardville? That is what we want to know,” she told Al Jazeera.

About 800 people have died from malnutrition in the Omaheke region since 2022 — including 45 children in 2023, according to Governor Nganate.

Food is often grown locally, with thousands relying on the groundwater for sustenance. The prices of basic staples such as wheat, maize meal, pasta and rice in the Southern African nation went up in April 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Namibia declared a state of emergency because of drought in May — its second in five years.

Google Earth Engine analysis of above-ground freshwater and plant life shows vegetation declining significantly between 2011 and 2021. The government announced plans to kill hundreds of wild animals to stave off starvation for Namibians in August, in part because there was not enough freshwater to sustain them.

Without the aquifer Rosatom plans to drill into, a vital water line for Namibia and its neighbours could be cut off.

In what Rosatom says is an effort to alleviate malnutrition, the company set up a new kitchen on May 24 at Noasanabis Primary School in Leonardville, the same school where Impo teaches, investing more than 400,000 Namibian dollars (about $22,100) annually in the feeding project. The kitchen, equipped with modern equipment and utensils, employs 10 cooks to feed more than 600 children.

During its official opening, the community gathered with the school choir singing thank-you songs. Salome Witbooi, the chairperson of the Leonardville Village Council, said the kitchen would help address malnutrition and urged residents not to vandalise it, as crime rises in the village.

With the new facilities, Impo’s efforts to feed schoolchildren have been largely forgotten as the school no longer has any use for the vegetable garden.

Instead, many in the village are hoping that a uranium dream 14 years in the making can finally lead them out of desperate poverty — even though others fear that the community might have a heavy price to pay for it.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, left, and Namibian President Hifikepunye Pohamba shake hands before their talks in Moscow, May 20, 2010 [Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Photo]

‘Gross violations’

In 2010, then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin travelled to Namibia to sign a memorandum of intent to explore the country for uranium. Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Rosatom, indicated that Russia planned to invest about $1bn in Namibian uranium.

The same year, Headspring acquired eight exclusive prospecting licences (EPLs) in Namibia. The company began setting up water testing facilities on several farms in Leonardville after obtaining an environmental clearance certificate (ECC) in 2011, drilling at least 600 exploration boreholes and 36 boreholes to monitor water across 39 different farms. The project was expected to last 15 to 25 years.

Those EPLs were not originally approved for uranium exploration because of a nationwide 10-year ban. But the Namibian government lifted its moratorium on uranium mining in 2017. When it did so, it extended all of Headspring’s licences to “nuclear fuel materials”, allowing the company to drill for uranium.

The official who approved Headspring’s EPLs for uranium mining was Mines Commissioner Erasmus Shivolo, who stepped down from his role in October 2022 after allegations surfaced that he had taken a bribe of 50 million Namibian dollars ($2.8m) from a Chinese lithium miner called Xinfeng Investments, according to Namibian media.

Mines and Energy Minister Tom Alweendo did not fire Shivolo, but moved him to a different part of the ministry. Alweendo denied accusations that he had been aware of the bribe.

Over the course of the drilling, Headspring discovered a large uranium deposit in the sandstone beneath the aquifer that was “believed for now to be suitable for in-situ leaching”, it said. The next step would have involved drilling more holes and injecting a weak sulphuric acid solution into the ground to get at the uranium.

To start drilling, Headspring had to obtain yet another ECC from a licensed consultancy. Headspring approached two firms for the certificate, but both walked away, with the second one describing “irreconcilable differences” with Headspring as the reason, according to Informante, a Namibian news outlet.

By then, Leonardville’s farmers had begun to mobilise against Headspring, and the government took notice. Former agriculture executive director Percy Misika informed the corporation in a letter dated November 9, 2021, that the government was cancelling two mining permits due to “egregious carelessness”.

“Based on the gross violations and non-compliance of permit conditions, Permit No 11561 and Permit No 11562 are hereby withdrawn with immediate effect and no further drilling is permitted,” wrote Misika.

“Although no mining activities are taking place, the number of boreholes drilled has ignored the licence conditions of proper sealing and grouting,” said Agriculture Minister Schlettwein while addressing parliamentarians in the National Assembly.

Although Headspring lost two of its EPL permits, it still has seven. Another eight permits appear in public registries under the ownership of a company called Green Mining. Land documents seen by Al Jazeera suggest that Green Mining is ultimately owned by Headspring, which could circumvent the need for Rosatom to get its cancelled licences reinstated.

A shop window in Leonardville, Namibia, with a Rosatom poster pasted on its window [Tom Brown/Al Jazeera]

Contamination dispute

On one shop window in Leonardville is a poster in Afrikaans — the most spoken language in the village — which reads: “Headspring Investments is aware of fabricated rumours circulating regarding the activities on Tripoli”, a farm in the village, alluding to murmurs of water contamination through mining activities. “If you want to know more and want to familiarise yourself with the activities there, please call Riaan van Rooyen.”

Van Rooyen is the deputy director of strategic communication and reputation management for Uranium One, through which Headspring operates. He lost his previous job at Bank Windhoek after comparing Black people with monkeys in a social media post.

His communications have been aimed at addressing concerns about the use of sulphuric acid in uranium mining. In areas where the water level is too high, companies cannot use open pit mining as they do in Namibia’s desert, or the mines would flood — instead, they are forced to inject either a strong acid or an alkaline substance such as sodium carbonate to “leach” the uranium and suction it back up before refining it.

During a press briefing discussing possible contamination of the aquifer in March, reporters asked van Rooyen if there was a risk of contamination. He answered that farmers had been “using sulphuric acid for decades in the Stampriet water basin area”, something which the Stampriet Aquifer Uranium Mining Association (SAUMA) called misinformation.

A local farmer, van Rooyen claimed, used sulphuric acid to lower the pH value of the soil. Certain foods, particularly strawberries and blueberries, grow better when the pH is lower — neither are native to Namibia, and Al Jazeera reporters did not observe any in Leonardville during two reporting trips. “So why are they so worried?” van Rooyen concluded. When asked to clarify the comment, he later responded that the farmer responsible could not be identified and that he could not elaborate because “we [Headspring] do not know what the farmer did wrong”.

When asked if Headspring could produce water reports showing before-and-after levels of uranium and sulphuric acid in the aquifer, van Rooyen responded with a photo of three file binders and said: “I am sure you don’t expect me to copy all these water reports as proof that [we] had water analysis done”, before sending a water report whose authenticity could not be verified by Al Jazeera.

Rosatom needs approval from three different government agencies to reinstate its licence and restart drilling, setting the stage for a multibillion-dollar project that could cement Russia’s foothold in the uranium market for decades.

Of those, the Namibian Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Tourism have reportedly not hindered Rosatom’s plan — referred to in government documents as “Project Wings”. The Ministry for Agriculture, Water and Land Reform is the one holdout, sources said.

“At the end of the day, we cannot survive without water and food, but we can live without coal or uranium,” said Agriculture Minister Schlettwein.

The fate of those licences will now be decided by Namibia’s next government, after elections on November 27. Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah — the candidate of the governing party Swapo — predicted to win — has not commented on the dispute, but Russian influence in the country runs deep, and long.

The erstwhile Soviet Union supported the Swapo government-in-exile before the country separated from apartheid South Africa in 1990. The party is still in power to this day and has never lost an election.

Now it is Russia’s turn to seek something from Namibia.

Uranium One and Anfield’s Shootaring Canyon Uranium Mill facility sits outside Ticaboo, Utah, US, November 13, 2017. Russian enriched uranium made up 35 percent of the US’s nuclear fuel needs, but its import was banned by the Biden administration in May 2024 [George Frey/Reuters]

Nuclear fuel supply chains

Namibia became the world’s second-largest uranium producer in 2021, behind only Kazakhstan, a longtime Russian ally. Namibian uranium has become more important for the African continent since the closing of the Arlit uranium mine in Niger, just before the Russian-aligned military rulers replaced the civilian government, which had received Western support.

If Rosatom’s drilling licences are reinstated in Namibia, Russia would find itself in control of one of the world’s most important sources of nuclear fuel.

Russia owned 40 percent of the total uranium conversion infrastructure in the world as of 2020, and 46 percent of the total uranium enrichment capacity, at a time when countries are pivoting towards nuclear energy. In May, United States President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill banning imports of Russian-enriched uranium, which still makes up approximately 35 percent of US nuclear fuel.

Around the time of the Ukraine war, multiple European nations began investing in nuclear power in an attempt to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas. On May 13, 2022, the United Kingdom set up a fund to enable eight new reactors to be built by 2030, while the European Parliament approved a European Union law labelling nuclear energy as green on July 6 that year.

But energy analysts worry the efforts may leave many governments reliant on a nuclear power supply chain already dominated by Russian-state businesses.

“[Rosatom] is a key player in the nuclear fuel business and sells both goods and services to Europe and the United States,” said James Acton of the Carnegie Energy Institute, in the run-up to the first anniversary of the Ukraine War in February 2023. “Ironically, the process of weaning itself off Russian fossil fuels has left Europe particularly reliant on Russian nuclear exports.”

On June 18 this year, the US Senate passed the ADVANCE Act, to accelerate the adoption of next-generation nuclear reactors in the US. Darya Dolzikova, a research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, wrote in March that “US utilities may struggle to keep nuclear power plants operating should Russian enriched uranium supply be cut off”.

On November 15, Russia began throttling exports of enriched uranium to the US nuclear power plants in response to sanctions, Bloomberg reported.

Rosatom’s board is chaired by Sergey Kirienko, a former Russian prime minister who has admitted to “orchestrating Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s occupied territories”, according to Rusi. The company has also allegedly provided equipment and weaponry to the Russian military. Namibia abstained from a United Nations vote condemning Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in March 2022, along with a majority of African nations.

Meanwhile, Russia has begun working with countries to set up their own reactors across the globe, including China, India, Iran and Bangladesh — whereas nuclear cooperation memorandums of understanding have been signed in Zimbabwe, Mali, Burkina Faso and Brazil. In Turkiye, Rosatom has pioneered a “build-to-own” model where the Russian state finances nuclear reactors which it builds outside of Russia and eventually owns, selling the electricity back to the country itself. Rosatom executives have indicated that Turkish nuclear power stations could receive Namibian uranium once the planned mine in Leonardville develops.

Since losing its drilling licence, Rosatom has also announced plans to fund a nuclear power plant in Namibia. The development could mark the first time an African country’s nuclear supply chain would be controlled by the Russian state — from when the uranium is first extracted to the moment the spent fuel rods are removed from the nuclear reactor.

In April, Ryan Collyer, Rosatom’s chief executive for Central and Southern Africa, took a visit to South Africa, whose Koeberg plant in Cape Town is the only nuclear reactor on the continent. Collyer urged South Africa to embrace nuclear energy.

An entrance to the Rossing Uranium Mine in the Namib Desert near Arandis, Namibia, February 23, 2017. In 2018, the China National Uranium Corporation bought majority stakes in the mine from the Rio Tinto group [Siphiwe Sibeko/Reuters]

Chinese uranium ambitions

But Russia is not the only country looking to control the supply chains that power nuclear facilities. Located in the Namib Desert near the coastal town of Arandis and 70km (43.5 miles) from Swakopmund on the Atlantic coast, Rossing, Namibia’s largest open pit uranium mine, has attracted investment from China in recent years, with the China National Uranium Corporation (CNNC) buying 69 percent of shares from the Rio Tinto group in 2018. The government of Iran has also owned 15 percent of the Rossing mine since 1976.

Workers at the Rossing mine told Al Jazeera they were being laid off since the Chinese takeover, and were being replaced with contractors, who are easier to hire and fire and do not come with additional costs such as pension contributions. CNNC also owns the Husab mine, only 5km (3 miles) south, which is set to overtake Rossing’s uranium production in the coming years.

Former workers have accused the Chinese owners of “union-busting” tactics across its uranium facilities in Namibia. CNNC fired the entire Rossing branch of the Miners Union of Namibia (MUN) after they protested the dismantling of health and safety standards, they claim. CNNC did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Al Jazeera carried a handheld air pollution monitor around Swakopmund, Namibia’s second-most developed city of 75,921 residents and 66km (41 miles) from the CNNC mine. The monitor showed high levels of PM2.5, particulate matter linked to cancer cases. Cancer is on the rise in Namibia. It even killed the country’s third president, Hage Geingob, in February this year.

Residents in Swakopmund, wealthier on average than the rest of the country, said they were scared of uranium contamination from the groundwater. Some had installed up to three separate water filters before drinking from the tap.

“The stories we heard from quite a few people were hair-raising and very worrying,” said one water treatment worker, wishing to speak anonymously, who shared concerns that thousands of people were more exposed to uranium in drinking water than was publicly acknowledged.

To test how much uranium might be found in drinking water in Swakopmund, the worker installed a filter over many months to capture uranium entering Namibian households directly from the water supply. He intended to prove the true level of uranium in the tap water, but when he sent the filter for testing, the water facilities said the tests would be too dangerous.

“The filter system, as submitted by your company, set off the radiation alarm,” came the response from the lab, according to email responses shared with Al Jazeera. The company declined to examine the filter because of the threat to the staff members, meaning that it was not possible to test for the true levels of uranium.

In an attempt to verify claims of water contamination in Leonardville as a result of Headspring’s activities, Al Jazeera took drinking water samples from the village to a testing facility named Analytical Laboratory Services (Analabs) in Windhoek, Namibia’s capital city.

But when Al Jazeera reporters attempted to collect the samples for further testing, Analabs said the samples had been disposed of. It emerged that a businessman named Roland Enke, a Namibian landowner who sources said has allowed Rosatom the use of his farmland, had bought Analabs only months before.

“It’s effectively in Russian hands,” said the Stampriet Aquifer Uranium Mining Association (SAUMA), when asked about the laboratory. Analabs said when approached for comment that it was “absolutely certain” that neither Enke nor any of its employees would have intentionally tampered with sample results. Enke did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Kuiri Tjipangandjara, chair of the Water Solutions Group, a partnership of public and private companies aiming to bolster Africa’s resilience to climate drought, showed water contamination results from Headspring during a presentation on June 17, which revealed that in three to four out of 10 boreholes samples there was dissolved uranium in the water, and that radionuclides exceeded permissible limits. But tests also found high uranium levels in samples where in-situ mining activity was not thought to have occurred, making it difficult to attribute any contamination to the company.

Tjipangandjara warned against allowing Headspring or other uranium investors to monitor water levels in the basin, citing a “serious conflict of interest”, adding that a football player “cannot be a referee”.

Back in Leonardville, SAUMA and the farmers continue to face opposition from many villagers. Town council meetings are tense, filled with accusations on both sides.

Namibia’s latest drought is thinning tempers even more. More animals are dying as grazing disappears and crops dry out. Farmers sit on their property, their heads hanging low, waiting for rain that refuses to come.

“It’s horrific,” said SAUMA, which represents many of the farmers. “This [drought] tops all of them. The little water that we had has gone by now.”

The water beneath their feet is quickly becoming Leonardville’s only source. But for many residents, the chance to escape poverty is worth any risk — even one that could destroy the ancient aquifer sustaining almost all life around them.