By Tendai Marima
Published On 17 Oct 2023
17 Oct 2023
Mine accidents are not uncommon in Zimbabwe.
For years, many unemployed young men in Zimbabwe’s gold-rich areas have earned a living by working in unregulated mines with little to no safety procedures. Bay Horse was a disused mine that collapsed because the safety pillars had been dug out by artisanal miners hoping to strike a band of gold ore there, other miners said.
The accident, declared a national disaster by the government, has raised strong concerns over the safety of mining and the efficacy of rescue missions in Zimbabwe’s extractive sector.
Farai Maguwu, director of the Harare-based Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) calls the gold industry “a crime scene” saying it is riddled with corruption and artisanal miners, locally called makorokoza, often operate in unsafe conditions.
In the first quarter of 2023, Zimbabwe recorded $376.73m in export earnings, according to Fidelity Gold Refinery (FGR), a state agency that is the sole authorised buyer. Although more than half of those earnings are attributed to small-scale miners, the FGR notes that while 6.19 tonnes in gold deliveries is significant, there has been a 19 percent drop in deliveries compared with the same period in 2022 due to heavy rains.
But Maguwu feels this still is not a true picture of Zimbabwe’s true potential, due to illegal exports more than three times that amount and smuggling involving high-ranking state officials, as exposed by Gold Mafia, a four-part series by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, earlier this year.
Maguwu told Al Jazeera that CNRG had sent several petitions to parliament recommending regular mine inspections to be carried out by the Ministry of Mines and the Environment Management Agency. He said the CNRG also tried to lobby for reforms to improve safety and reduce illicit financial flows in the mining sector. All they got in response, Maguwu, said, was a letter in 2021 from parliament saying it would consider the recommendations. Nothing came of it.
“When a disaster such as this occurs, it’s the small-scale miners who take the risk to go down, they don’t have the right rescue equipment and they just burrow in the ground while the politicians don’t seem interested because these are the lives of poor miners, politicians seem to only worry about the gold,” he told Al Jazeera.
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