The Parliamentary Committee on Natural Resources has called on the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Land Reform to educate farmers and communities on how mining and farming can coexist, guided by scientific evidence rather than fear-driven claims.
The call forms part of a wider parliamentary push to unblock uranium exploration activities near Leonardville in the Omaheke Region, where Headspring Investments (Pty) Ltd — a Namibian-registered exploration company wholly owned by Uranium One Group, the international mining arm of Rosatom — has been exploring for uranium across eight Exclusive Prospecting Licences (EPLs 4654, 4655, 4656, 4657, 6780, 6781, 6782 and 6783).
The committee’s report says exploration began with desktop work in 2011 and diamond core drilling in 2012, before operations were interrupted by a national moratorium on uranium exploration in 2013 and resumed only in 2018–2019 after the moratorium was lifted.
Although the company says it has completed about 50% of its exploration programme, the report describes a prolonged standoff that has effectively frozen progress since late 2021.
According to the committee, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Land Reform revoked or failed to renew drilling permits around that time, leaving the company unable to drill additional hydrogeological and monitoring boreholes needed to complete its planned pilot testing work.
The report notes that the drilling permits have now been pending for nearly four years, with the project placed on care and maintenance despite the company having already drilled 592 exploration boreholes between 2012 and 2021 and 36 hydrogeological or monitoring boreholes under earlier permit conditions.
The committee frames opposition to the project as being led primarily by some commercial farmers grouped under the Stampriet Aquifer Uranium Mining Association, which it links to concerns that uranium exploration and future mining — particularly the proposed in-situ recovery method involving diluted sulphuric acid — could contaminate the aquifer.
The report says the farmers’ objections hardened as exploration activity was expected to expand beyond commercial farms toward communal areas, with the company arguing that some of the same farmers who now oppose the project previously benefited financially when drilling took place on their land.
The committee states that an NGO opposing the project emerged around the same period the permits were revoked and alleges it was formed with support from farmers who had benefited from the exploration activities.
It also claims these farmers enjoyed “preferential support” from the then leadership of the Agriculture ministry, and that compensation paid to commercial farmers ran into millions of dollars.
The report repeatedly argues that uranium is naturally occurring in the area and says fears around “imported uranium” are misplaced, asserting that naturally elevated radionuclide levels may already exist in groundwater in parts of the orebody zone.
It goes further, claiming the current situation may be a “clear and present danger” because communities and livestock could be consuming water with high radionuclide levels without adequate monitoring capacity.
In this framing, the committee positions the stalled pilot testing programme — including monitoring boreholes around the pilot area and IAEA-linked scientific evaluation — as central to resolving the dispute through data rather than rhetoric.
Uranium One, through Headspring, has effectively been waiting since late 2021 for the key water-related drilling permits to be reissued, the report says, despite having secured other approvals from different ministries, including active EPLs, environmental clearance certificates for the EPLs and a mobile laboratory, and radiation management approvals for existing activities.
The committee describes the delay as already contributing to job losses in Leonardville and to growing frustration in the Omaheke Region, with the regional governor raising concern that exploration has been inactive for roughly 4 years following the termination of the company’s water-drilling licence.
Against this backdrop, the committee recommends that the government urgently finalise the outstanding scientific work, expedite the release of radionuclide water analysis results, and fast-track the evaluation of the pilot test environmental application by independent IAEA experts.
It also calls for policy clarity, urging the relevant ministries either to present a specific written clause that explicitly prohibits ISR mining and justifies the prolonged delay, or to immediately begin developing ISR-specific guidelines so that specialised uranium recovery is not assessed under generic borehole-drilling rules.
