This article appears in the December 22, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
MUSINA-MAKHADO
The Flagship Project for the
Industrialization of Southern Africa
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 14—P.D. Lawton published her article on the Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone (MMSEZ) in South Africa, “Musina-Makhado: Economic Integration and Mineral Beneficiation for SADC,” on her blogsite, AfricanAgenda.net, on Oct. 18, 2023. It is reprinted following this introduction, with her permission.
The MMSEZ project—the flagship project for the industrialization of Southern Africa—should attract the interest of investors across Africa and beyond, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, Brazil, and sane investors in the United States. China is already a participant; it joined with South Africans to craft the concept of the project. And Ghana may be interested; Ghana was represented at the 2023 Limpopo Investment Conference in October. It should be publicized in the press—and the financial press—of the BRICS-Plus nations. It is a game-changer like the Grand Inga Project; the Transaqua Project; and the multi-faceted transformation of Egypt now underway called the “new republic,” which includes city-building, the expansion of irrigated agriculture, nuclear power, an enlarged Suez Canal, and other transport infrastructure.
The production of steel and stainless steel will be a major focus of the Musina-Makhado project’s manufacturing sector, which will include plants for the associated ferromanganese and ferrochrome alloys, metallurgical lime, chrome plating, and other related plants.
Another focus, agro-processing, will include the manufacture of fertilizers and agro-chemicals, food processing and canning, cold storage, fresh produce handling, and timber processing. The MMSEZ will also produce petro-chemicals.
The project is well situated for this scope of work. Limpopo Province is rich in minerals, and its extensive agriculture features fruits and nuts, as well as large portions of South Africa’s potatoes and tomatoes. The province borders on one of Africa’s great rivers, the Limpopo, and lies astride the major Durban–Dar es Salaam transport corridor near the Beitbridge crossing between South Africa and Zimbabwe.
InvestSA—an agency of South Africa’s Department of Trade, Industry and Competition—has compiled a detailed and compact account of the MMSEZ and its potentials, which supplements P.D. Lawton’s report that follows here.
Unclean Hands Oppose It
The project is properly designed to spearhead the industrialization of Southern Africa. It’s no wonder, therefore, that the MMSEZ has been subjected to ferocious attack from the beginning, by the Anglo-American neo-colonial powers and their German sidekicks. (Germany does not have clean hands. Before World War I, the colonial authorities in German South-West Africa, forerunners of Hitler, were busy attempting to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples, whom they called Unmenschen—non-humans—to make space for Europeans, as documented in The Kaiser’s Holocaust, 2010, by Olusoga and Erichsen. German anti-industrial ideologues are highly active in Southern Africa today.)
The hand of the neocolonialists is seen, for example, in the “climate change” propaganda of their toadies in the South African press and the NGOs. A blow-by-blow history of the impact of the international corporations’ green lobby on the MMSEZ and its power plant, written by one of the lobby’s own NGOs, is found here.
But the hoax that we must try to stop climate change to survive, is losing its credibility by steps and stages. The latest is that COP28 President Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber shocked the UN’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai, UAE, Dec. 2, by stating that there “is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve [a limit of] 1.5°C” above supposed preindustrial levels. “Show me a roadmap,” he added, “for a phase-out of fossil fuels that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Dr. Al Jaber is also the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
