Uthaka Energy goes to the Constitutional Court next month to argue that the reason its Mpumalanga coal mine still does not exist is litigation. The Indian-owned company, formerly Atha-Africa Ventures, has filed an affidavit saying a decade of review applications has left it with R1bn spent and nothing mined.
The papers name the opposition as a bloc. Uthaka calls the environmental organisations challenging it the "green lobby" and casts the litigation as a co-ordinated strategy rather than a series of separate cases. "It presents itself over and over again in litigation against any mining activities opposed by the green lobby, as part of environmental activism," the company says. It goes further: "The environmental special interest groups, the green lobby, have a specific agenda, namely, the eradication of coal mining worldwide, and often exaggerate harm to the environment. In pursuing this agenda, they often destroy the economies of developing nations."
What is actually being fought over
The mine is the Yzermyn colliery, an underground coal project inside the Mabola Protected Environment near Wakkerstroom, which is both a declared protected area and a strategic water source area. Eight civil society organisations, represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights, have challenged the approvals that state ministers granted for mining there; they include Earthlife Africa Johannesburg, BirdLife South Africa and the Endangered Wildlife Trust. The project would produce about 2.2-million tonnes of coal a year.
The coalition is asking the apex court to set aside last year's Supreme Court of Appeal decision, whose effect was to clear the way for the project. Their case rests on water. The mine would sit inside a protected regional water basin, and the organisations argue the damage to water resources could not be undone.
The answer from the other side
The Centre for Environmental Rights takes the framing on directly. Its papers note that Uthaka "characterises the applicants as being part of a so-called 'green lobby'" and then attacks the whole of it, accusing the applicants of favouring future generations over current ones, of lawfare and harassment, and of destroying the economies of developing nations. Its reply: "Lawfare has been accepted by our courts as a commonplace and legitimate process of holding parties to the rule of law."
This is not the first round of that argument. In 2024 the same coalition asked a court to strike claims from an earlier Uthaka affidavit, calling them "scandalous, vexatious and irrelevant". That 36-page affidavit, deposed by the company's South African representative Praveer Tripathi, described the applicants as funded mainly from abroad, said its members "sit in air-conditioned offices", and summarised the dispute as one "between rich whites and poor blacks". The coalition's replying affidavit, signed by groundWork director Sven Peek, called the allegations "manifestly scurrilous".
Uthaka has been trying to develop Yzermyn for ten years. The Constitutional Court hears the matter next month.
