At the Chamber of Mines AGM last week, the main annual meeting of the mining industry, a man stood up to complain that some miners were disregarding the law, damaging the environment, and giving locals a raw deal. The room applauded. Finally, someone is calling out the rot.
But here’s the problem; the man who was saying this is the guy who’s supposed to be fixing all that – Mines Minister Winston Chitando.
The man was in quite a hot mood throughout the AGM. Chitando shouted at miners for resisting the government’s “use-it-or-lose-it” mine title policy. He fumed about investors’ tax break demands. But his most striking outburst was saved for those miners that he said are laying waste to the land.
“We have the laws which support the mining industry, although at times, you, the investors, disregard some of the laws,” Chitando began.
He described scenes of destruction in granite and coal mining areas; roads wiped off the map, landscapes shredded. “It’s a sorry sight. That has to stop,” he declared.
Soon, he says, we will have Phase Two of the Responsible Mining Initiative. Chitando says President Mnangagwa will launch it in July. The idea is to tackle “indiscipline”. What happened to Phase One, you ask? No idea; the results have never been published.
“Without any doubt, it has now come to a stage whereby if you violate the environment, you lose your mining title,” he said.
Bold words. Yet, under existing law, he already has the power to change things. The 1961 Mining and Minerals Act – yes, it’s that old – already gives the Minister the authority to cancel licences for environmental abuse. That law, flawed as it is, gives Chitando a whole team — Mining Commissioners, Inspectors, the works — to enforce compliance. It’s just that they rarely do. They are overpowered by politics and corruption.
The Environmental Management Authority (EMA) has tried its bit, slapping stop orders on riverbed miners and illegal prospectors. But the miners aren’t shaking in their boots. Some carry political shields. Government banned riverbed mining – an announcement it made more than once – but it continues in banned zones like Mazowe. Even the ruling ZANU PF party, at its last conference, had a resolution calling on authorities to “enforce the ban on riverbed mining and accelerate river de-siltation programme through the cancellation of mining licenses and environmental permits, including the confiscation of mining equipment in these areas”. Yet, this continues.
At the Ministry of Mines, prospecting applications still slide across desks for conservation areas like Dinde and Sinamatella.
In Penhalonga, illegal miners dig on, protected by powerful gold barons. A percentage of every granite, lithium or quarry miner’s earnings goes to community development, above what the mines already pay in national taxes and local council levies, but the Ministry of Mines hardly ever accounts for how the proceeds have been deployed.
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Chitando also moaned about how foreign miners prefer foreign procurement. “The transport sector is a reserved sector for locals. But we now have a situation where investors that aren’t local, without authorisation, go into the transport sector,” he said.
He hoped to surprise someone, but he didn’t. He’s not the first to discover this. Just ask Zimplow, a major supplier of mining equipment. The company says in its recent financials: “Chinese mines, which currently make up approximately 80% of all mines, generally buy exclusively from Chinese suppliers, reducing the rest of the mining equipment suppliers to 20% of the market, which leads to further pressure on margins.”
Chitando is not wrong. He’s just in the wrong seat to be doing the whining. Not even the worst referee – like the sort they have in the EPL – spends the whole shouting at players for not following the rules. Blow the whistle. Hand out the red cards.
It’s not enough to complain about environmental damage and ignored laws. Those are not new problems. What would be new is seeing the Ministry actually do something about them. Until then, Minister Chitando, don’t bore people with your job description. Just do your job.
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