The Sunday News
Simba Jemwa, Sunday News Correspondent
CABLE theft has become a form of organised crime whose impact on businesses, communities, and the economy at large are seismic.
It affects the electricity, telecommunications and transport sectors, and each year Zimbabwe’s parastatals spend millions of dollars replacing stolen cables and restoring vandalised infrastructure due to cable theft.
There is little doubt that copper cable theft has grown into a pandemic in Zimbabwe, particularly for the electricity, telecommunications, and railway parastatals.
Organisations such as Zesa, TelOne, Econet, Telecel, NetOne, and the National Railways of Zimbabwe tell tales of loss of business due to the effects of copper cable theft that like a gangrene has been spreading uncontrolled.
Households too are affected as they are left to spend days without power and sometimes asked to pull resources together for the purchase of copper cables.
The biggest driver of cable theft is the demand for copper, a commodity that has played a crucial role in global industrialisation.
While the uses for copper have changed and technology infrastructure has advanced, it is still an essential component for infrastructure across many industries, including telecommunications.
With copper being a valuable commodity, this has inevitably created an illicit market for the metal.
Sources said cable theft has multiple players involved from petty criminals on the ground, who dig up the copper cables and extract them to sell to dealers, to more sophisticated and organised structures, syndicates involving professionals and those who even take down the cables from power lines.
In a recent statement, it was revealed that Zesa lost US$256 million in stolen materials, additional millions in replacement infrastructure and in security mitigation for the same period.
Likewise, NRZ suffered losses running into hundreds of thousands of dollars to stolen materials, in replacement infrastructure, and going towards security mitigation.
What is not clear from these figures is who is benefiting the most from this illegal economy and what can be done to thwart the illegality.
Zimbabwe’s economic woes are being compounded by the theft of massive amounts of copper from state firms, much of which is suspected to be smuggled to South Africa, costing the country millions of dollars a year.
From South Africa it is believed that the copper is shipped further to countries who use the metal in the construction and manufacturing industries.
However, thanks to a strong rally in copper prices in 2021, many copper consumers have shown their preferences towards high-purity copper scrap, as a substitute for copper cathodes and blister copper.
The ready illegal markets have seen hundreds of thousands of metres of cables stolen in 2021, leading to difficulties for the NRZ to operate its rail network efficiently while communities have often been regularly thrown into darkness and security services working overtime to try and stop criminal gangs.
The cumulative damage of copper cable theft to the economy, Zesa, NRZ, and the general public is staggering.
The financial hits alone represent a significant economic blow to Zimbabwe, where frequent power cuts have stifled growth and disturbed industries.
While copper theft is not a new phenomenon, the state companies and market players in Zimbabwe say it has surged in recent years.
Global demand for copper scrap has boomed due to tight supplies and low inventories, pushing prices to record highs, sources add.
Some Zimbabwean scrap dealers buy stolen copper, melt it down, turn it into ingots and granules, which do not require scrap export permits, or remove identifying markers, sources at local manufacturing and recycling companies told Sunday News.
“There is almost no way to identify where scrap has come from once it’s been granulated, sheared or shredded as the processing machinery damages any identifying marks on metal surfaces” said Alec Nyoni, a local scrap merchant.
Data from reports compiled for the scrap industry show how the illegal South African market has morphed and become the preferred destination for illicit copper from most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Scrap and manufacturing sources in that country said the scrap was leaving the country in more processed forms or in mislabelled cargo.
However, International Trade Administration Commission (ITAC) believes the decline in permits was largely down to more scrap deals being agreed domestically, rather than a surge in smuggling. Changes in legislature in South Africa forced scrap exporters to offer local manufacturers material at a discounted rate.
“We believe there are syndicates involving people who are working for these companies or former employees of parastatals.
For not many ordinary people know how to strip the cables and it usually happens when power is not available with few people knowing when power will be restored.
It therefore boggles the mind on whether the thieves are ordinary, but citizens believe they are not,” said a citizen from Hillside in Bulawayo who added that they recently made contributions to replace stolen cables in their area.
