The Sunday News
Obey Sibanda, Features Reporter
ON the pathway of the disused gold rich Motapa Mine in Inyathi, Matabeleland North province, a female vendor selling headlamps, balaclavas and other essentials to the many young men who look to carve out a living underground runs for dear life, leaving her hapless child behind.
The mining area is plunged into chaos when a team of more than 200 illegal panners brandishing machetes and axes seize control of almost all the gold claims, prompting a vicious backlash from the locals.
As the fight intensifies, in a poorly ventilated hut, near the disused mine Siphosenkosi Tshuma (24), a female miner stokes the fire in her charcoal stove, releasing the mercury from a black compound as a cloud of the thick white chocking fume engulfs her hut.
She is seemingly unconcerned about the toxic compound and the harm it may cause to her health. Instead she is more interested in the residue to make a fortune.
“This is how we extract the mercury to treat the ore, it’s very dangerous I know, but come to think of what we get after selling the gold. It’s hard to resist,” she says, while continuously blowing her stove with a cardboard box.
These depressing pictures are as varied as the scenarios as growing competition for the precious stones in an area of rampant poverty and unemployment sparks deadly wars.
For years, momentum has been building behind the nation and community’s efforts to prevent wars and improve management of natural resources’ wealth through greater transparency.
In gold rich villages these sparkling stones are more of a curse than a blessing. Too often, the gold villages produce not only precious stones, but also turf wars, violence, worker exploitation, and untold human suffering.
Precious stones are supposed to be a secret code of love, commitment, and joyful new beginnings, on the contrary it often leads to conflict, corruption and poverty. The opposite is true in gold-rich villages. More and more women are breaking barriers by venturing into small-scale mining as they have been continually pushed off their traditional agricultural land and forced to eke out livelihoods through mining. The undertaking is life threatening as aggressive males who seem ready to kill, can maim or rape them.
To some, the participation is driven by the allure of riches, however, for many women artisanal mining, with its related hazards, signifies an opportunity to relieve the strains of poverty. For the past few years this informal sector has been dictating the pace and level of national output after scores of large-scale producers collapsed.
Despite the dreams and motivations of these women, they are trapped in the poverty circle associated with informal economies. Most women artisanal miners are at subsistence level earning enough for their necessities but lack sufficient capital to move on and are unregistered due to technical hurdles one has to overcome in order to acquire a mining licence.
Where they strike it rich, turf wars often break out and push them away.
Female artisanal miners have endured inhospitable conditions in this cut throat male dominated and fast expanding but dangerous gold panning industry. They are experiencing a myriad of problems such as victimisation, violent disposition of intruders on their claims and various gender based violence issues combined to a larger extent with lack of skills and equipment.
Women experience negative direct consequences of mining operations in different and more pronounced ways than men.
These entrepreneurs like their male counterparts employ rudimentary techniques for mineral extraction and often operate under hazardous conditions.
Some of these women are working in dangerous gold mines that could collapse without notice according to locals. While these women can work underground isolated from the outside world for long periods, receiving air from a tube hooked up to an air compressor above the surface fears of death are rampant.
Most of these female artisanal miners occupy a number of roles ranging from labour intensive methods to the processing aspect, including amalgamation with mercury for processing gold. Their processes are often conducted at home without protective clothing. Mercury poisoning has been scientifically proven to cause a myriad of cancers, birth of malformed children or offspring with severely decreased intelligence, numbness in the body, weakening of muscles among a host of horrific side-effects.
Silicosis — a severe respiratory infection that can cause death — which is caused by inhalation of fine dust particles is also an ever present danger. These negatives may overshadow any positives on women empowerment in mining. A metallurgist at a mine near Motapa said exposure to toxic chemicals like mercury, sulphuric acid pose great danger to the women.
“Mercury causes spontaneous abortion and the inhalation of mercury vapour can produce harmful effects on the nervous, digestive and immune systems, lungs and kidneys, and may be fatal,” she said.
Artisanal miners employ precarious mining methods as they crack rock walls with handmade chisels without gloves to protect their palms from blisters. They use their bare hands scooping the mud which, if they are lucky, contains traces of alluvial gold.
In spite of the huge potential for lifting individuals out of poverty, this has not yet been achieved in Zimbabwe and is made worse by occupational segregation and lack of access to capital even for the most basic tools.
Addressing delegates at the Women in Mining breakfast meeting held in Bulawayo late last year, Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development Deputy Minister, Abigail Damasane highlighted that 95 percent of women in gold mining are in the small-scale sector, with 55 percent of them being illegal gold panners.
“Mining sector in Zimbabwe has generally been regarded with mystification as a sector for the white, rich and powerful because it is associated with high capital investments, big machinery and underground activities, she observed.
Quite a number of women in mines often work in lower paid, less physical roles, working as loaders and others are engaged in hand sorting the ore and blending as most mines use manual sorting. These are less attractive and least rewarding positions yet they often provide the only option for an unskilled labour force.
Some in the sector have opted to provide sexual services to male miners or foodstuffs and sell assortments of goods needed to miners for their day to day activities. They expose themselves to sexually transmitted diseases and other forms of abuse from often drunk illegal panners.
A female miner who owns a claim only identified as MaNcube claimed that women are often overlooked in initiatives and development programmes directed at catalysing the transformation of artisanal mining.
“Due to challenges in obtaining licences, we sell our produce at the black market depriving Government of potential revenue.
We face challenges in securing licences. One has to secure a prospecting mining licence before engaging a pegger then you have to verify with the ministry whether the claim is occupied. The process is tire some,” said MaNcube.
Outgoing Women in Mining Association president Anakileta Gumba admitted that a lot still need to be done to really empower small-scale women miners.
“In the end, most women who venture into mining end up poorer. Some of them get occupational sicknesses caused by chemical poisoning while others may get incurable diseases due to sexual abuse,” Gumba said.
“The Government came up with a good idea to empower us but more still has to be done. We need workshops to understand the nature of the work and eliminate expensive experiments. We need lines of credit to begin and sustain operations in a safe manner. We also need a relaxation of laws on staking a claim so that we get lawful protection when turf wars break out.”
In 2017 Fidelity Printers and Refinery (Fidelity) said Zimbabwe is losing over $500 million worth of gold annually to smuggling due to lack of support to small-scale producers. The country’s delay in amending the colonial Gold Trade Act and the Mining and Minerals Act was prejudicing Zimbabwe of millions of dollars in potential revenue.
Fidelity said it was crucial for the artisanal miners to continue working with the gold buyer to ensure that an estimated 700 to 1 500 kg of gold smuggled out of the country every month benefits Zimbabwe rather than the underground, foreign-linked economies.
