Russia woos Namibia to mine uranium, sparking water safety fears

Russian nuclear energy company Rosatom is trying to drill for uranium in Namibia. Farmers say a key aquifer is at risk.

Windhoek and Leonardville, Namibia – Impo Gift Kapamba Musasa holds a hose pipe in one hand and gestures to a garden of cabbages, onions and turnips with the other. He is a teacher in the crumbling village of Leonardville in rural Namibia, where water is becoming scarce.

The vegetables, grown for children at the primary school where he teaches, are watered from one of the largest aquifers on earth. The groundwater nourishes tens of thousands of people and is the lifeblood of the Kalahari Desert, which stretches across Namibia, as well as neighbouring Botswana and South Africa.

Around Leonardville, 386km (240 miles) from the capital, Windhoek, scrubland meets ochre-coloured dunes known as the “red fingers of the Kalahari” for the way they reach out across the vast desert.

Leonardville is a village of cattle farmers subsisting off meagre government handouts and homegrown vegetables, but it also sits on top of vast deposits of uranium – the fuel for nuclear reactors.

That has brought the village of a few thousand people some unlikely attention in recent years.