Report exposes Mpumalanga's coal mine closure crisis

The Centre for Environmental Rights (CER) launched a report titled 'No More Ghost Towns: Lessons from Mpumalanga's Mine Closure Crisis' at the University of the Witwatersrand on 22 May 2026, documenting how few of South Africa's coal mines are ever properly closed and rehabilitated once they stop producing.

The scale of neglect

The report estimates South Africa has around 6,100 abandoned mines in total, including at least 400 abandoned coal mines. In Mpumalanga, the heart of the country's coal industry, fewer than six closure certificates were issued for any type of mine between 2011 and 2016, and none of those covered a coal operation. CER's mining programme head, Tarisai Mugunyani, and legal practitioner Pettavia Madibana authored the study, which draws on a 2021 Promotion of Access to Information Act request to probe how financial provisioning for closure actually works in practice.

Wesselton's abandoned pits

The report centres a case study on Wesselton, near Ermelo, where the Imbabala coal mine has sat abandoned since 2011. Communities there have lived with contaminated open pits for more than a decade, which CER says have contributed to child deaths and continue to pose safety risks, without either the mining company or the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy taking visible steps toward rehabilitation or formal closure.

Why financial provisions keep failing

CER argues the core problem is that mining companies are able to avoid or defer their financial rehabilitation obligations, while the state lacks the capacity to enforce existing rules. CER director Wandisa Phama said the point of proper closure planning is to ensure "mining doesn't leave our communities worse than it found them." The report calls for tighter enforcement of financial provision requirements and clearer rules on when and how mining rights can be relinquished.

Why it matters

As Mpumalanga's coal mines age and some, like Exxaro's Leeuwpan, face closure decisions of their own, CER's findings raise the stakes for how the next wave of shutdowns is managed. Communities affected by the Imbabala mine have since taken the South African government to court over the site, a sign that unresolved historical closures are increasingly spilling into litigation as the country's coal industry approaches a broader, energy-transition-driven contraction.

Sources

• Centre for Environmental Rights: Mpumalanga's mine closure crisis exposed, 22 May 2026
• Mining Weekly: Report addresses issues of mine closure in Mpumalanga, 22 May 2026

Photo: A residential area of Ermelo, Mpumalanga, near the abandoned Imbabala coal mine at Wesselton. JMK, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.