Zambia Takes Anglo American to Court

By Nosmot Gbadamosi; foreignpolicy.com

Published February 8, 2023

A landmark class-action lawsuit in South Africa could set a precedent for holding multinational corporations responsible for environmental damages.

Anglo American, one of the world’s largest mining companies, has been accused of turning a “blind eye” to decades of lead poisoning suffered by hundreds of thousands of people living near a Zambian mine that it held a stake in for nearly 50 years, according to a landmark case in the Johannesburg branch of South Africa’s High Court.

The lawsuit alleges that the British firm continued to profit from the extraction and smelting of lead from the mine in Kabwe, Zambia, without ensuring that proper safety standards were met, even when it knew the great harm being caused.

An eight-day hearing that concluded on Friday will decide whether a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of as many as 140,000 women and children can proceed. The lawsuit was filed in Johannesburg because Anglo American was headquartered there when it held a majority stake in the lead mine in Kabwe from 1925 until 1974, when it was nationalized by the Zambian government—before eventually being closed in 1994.

Blood lead levels in children living in Kabwe are many times higher than the poisoning standard amount of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter adopted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Although the CDC and the World Health Organization advise that there is no safe level of lead, many children tested in Kabwe had levels at more than 45 micrograms, causing heart, brain, and liver damage. Numerous investigations since 1971, when eight children died of suspected lead poisoning, have found alarmingly high levels of lead in local children.

Lawyers based in the United Kingdom and South Africa are demanding compensation and an environmental cleanup. If successful, it could set a precedent as one of the largest class-action lawsuits for historical damages caused by extractive corporations that will be heard in an African court, as opposed to courts in the U.K., the Netherlands, the United States, or France, where companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil, and Total are (or have been) based.

“It is quite clear that generally for an African community to really get recourse, they need to follow where the company’s money is, and the money is so often not in the global south,” said Ariella Scher, an attorney and the head of the business and human rights program at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Centre for Applied Legal Studies in Johannesburg. What makes the case significant, she said, is the provisions that South African law allows in terms of class-action litigation, compared with more limited avenues in Zambia, and the potential to hold large corporations accountable within Africa.

Anglo American denies liability, arguing that it provided “technical services” but never “owned or operated” the mine. Instead, Anglo American places the blame on the Zambian government through the state-owned Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines and other minority stakeholders, which it says acknowledged “responsibility for all historic liabilities” following nationalization.

Anglo American signed up to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which it heavily promotes as part of its corporate responsibility literature. U.N. experts have argued through their intervention that by opposing the class-action suit, Anglo American is behaving “contrary” to its “professed commitments” on human rights.

Zambian authorities continue to emphasize metals extraction as a key driver of economic growth—accounting for more than 40 percent of government revenue—despite concerns around the lack of benefits it has offered residents thus far. More than half of the country’s population lives in poverty.

At last year’s U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema announced that California-based KoBold Metals, an exploration firm backed by billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, would invest $150 million to develop a new copper mine in Zambia. Zambia is Africa’s second-largest producer of copper—a metal critical to the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

It’s part of the Biden administration’s efforts to wrest economic influence from Beijing through the use of private U.S. companies.

The deal is set to close by the first quarter of this year. China is currently Zambia’s largest infrastructure creditor and has a heavy presence in the country. Hichilema is also pursuing new copper mine deals with Chinese firms.

The push to capitalize on renewable energy demands will likely cause similar pollution problems for Zambians. As Cobus van Staden wrote in Foreign Policy last June, the green energy revolution threatens to repeat “a trail of environmental degradation, human rights violations, and semipermanent underdevelopment all across the developing world” because it uses the same destructive extraction methods.