Dr Mbuso Moyo is a postdoctoral fellow in the Climate Change and Inequality project. He holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Johannesburg. His research was on youth unemployment, aspirations and development in the Royal Bafokeng Nation, a ‘traditional community’ that has carved for itself a lofty position as a ‘successful’ platinum mining community in South Africa’s North West province. His work interrogates the political economy of mining, extractivist accumulation and the various modes of popular resistance it has engendered in coal, copper, platinum, and lithium mining host communities in the global South in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Moyo’s work amplifies the point that mining operations undermine rural communities' access to, and rights over, land resulting in land enclosures. The just energy and digital transitions, Moyo believes, hold the promise for mine host communities for as long as appropriate industrial policies are crafted to engender structural transformation and employment creation. Moyo’s current research activities include: a. collecting fragments or artefacts of the situation through photographic recordal of the mining operations, and their impact on the environment, and livelihoods in coal, platinum, and lithium mining host communities in Zimbabwe; b. building a digital archive of the unfolding situation; and c. collecting and analysing material about industrial policy and the legal frameworks on mineral exploitation and beneficiation.
