08/28/2024

The Green Economy Is Hungry for Copper

People are stealing, fighting and dying to feed it

Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he’d left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, for his job as a security guard, he’d had to turn around twice, having forgotten first his watch and then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His supervisor had assigned him to join a squad protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by gun-wielding thieves. Now, on this day in May of 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, peering tensely through their truck's windshield as a group of armed men approached.

Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang coming toward him. "I'm feeling scared," he said. He didn't have a gun himself. "I think they are the same ones who attacked our colleagues."

"Call your supervisor," she told him.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.