MBERENGWA, ZIMBABWE – Phineas Moyo, 31, works in a small mine and as a farmer in Mberengwa, a district in southern Zimbabwe. He is married and has two children.
His wife is pregnant with their third child. She is a housewife and also takes care of the family vegetable garden for household consumption.
But this agricultural season, a drought prevented them from harvesting anything. Moyo has therefore had to rely on his income from mining – an occupation characterized by risk, hard work and low pay.
Moyo briefly disappears into a makeshift plastic shelter. He emerges five minutes later barefoot, pulling on cut-off shorts and a worn T-shirt. These are his mine-working clothes.
Moyo doesn’t have his own mine, as he can’t afford it. Together with three other friends, he provides labor at mines owned by others.
The mine owner pays for the expenses, such as compressors, jackhammers, food, fuel, explosives, transport and milling. They then share the profit – 65 percent to the mine owner and 35 percent to the laborers.
The mine workers’ main job is to clear areas to be drilled as well as to remove stones and soil from drilled shafts. They also gather ore.
It takes about three weeks for the team on site to gather enough ore for milling. Another week is spent at the milling machine once the team joins the queue there and waits for its chance to extract gold from the stones.
If they are lucky, they get 50 grams of gold after milling 7 to 10 tons of ore, Moyo says. The mine owner, who has a license for the mine, sells the gold at $40 per gram.
“$1,000 usually covers costs then each of us,” Moyo says. “The laborers get around $170 after a monthlong, backbreaking job.
But sometimes they earn less.
“At times, the mine owner does not have money to cover expenses, and a sponsor is then brought on board and gets a share,” Moyo says.
In this case, profits are usually split – one-third to the sponsor, one-third to the mine owner and one-third for the laborers to divide among themselves.
But many times, the mine workers don’t earn anything at all.
“Most of the times, we don’t even get enough gold to cover costs,” Moyo says. “When this happens, we just pack up and move to the next mine until we get lucky.”
Despite being forced to walk away empty-handed after hours of hard labor, Moyo says he has not lost hope. He says he continues to look forward to fruitful partnerships with mine owners.
“For us, the unlicensed miners, using a chisel and hammer is slow, labor-intensive and it is illegal as we can get arrested by the police,” says Moyo, who, along with many other laborers, doesn’t have a prospecting license. “So, partnerships with mine owners are a good deal for us since we can’t afford to own mines.”
Persistent droughts and a lack of alternative income sources have forced various farmers into mining, which involves difficult labor with many times no pay. Mine owners say they want to create fair pay and satisfactory working conditions to comply with Zimbabwean laws, but a lack of profits forces them to fall short. The government has implemented legislation to protect local workers, including in the mining industry, but recent fee hikes to boost government revenue make it hard for them to follow the law.
Mining contributes 20 percent to Zimbabwe’s gross domestic product, according to a 2010 report by the Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe. About 45,000 citizens were employed in the mining industry as of then in Zimbabwe, a country of 12.5 million people. But this figure doesn't include the many unlicensed miners like Moyo who are engaged in the industry informally and illegally.
Zvishavane and Mberengwa are rural areas in south-central Zimbabwe that are rich in agriculture and minerals. Many residents are engaged in crop production. But because of the persistent droughts in the region that yield harvests that last four months at best, farmers like Moyo say they have resorted to mining the locally available minerals.
Moyo’s colleague, Lawrence Shumba, 24, is another farmer forced to turn to mining because of a lack of other income sources. He reaffirms that life in the mines is tough.
“This is why,” he says, “when I get money, I spend most of it drinking beer, so that I forget my sorrows.”
Shumba says that his life is doomed and no one appreciates him. He quickly adds that the only people who appreciate him are women he engages in casual sex with whom he meets at various drinking points.
“These women make me feel like a man,” he says. “Yes, I know that there is HIV and AIDS, but when I look at a woman, I am able to see that this one is either 'clean' or not.”
Various institutions carry out HIV and AIDS awareness programs in Zimbabwe. But Shumba says he can’t afford to benefit from them while his competitors in the mining industry are busy looking for work to earn money.
But small-scale mine owners say they can’t always pay laborers what they deserve.
Moyo has worked before in the mine of Nicholas Phiri, 35, a small-scale mine owner. Phiri says he dreads not being able to pay his laborers when profits fall short.
“It pains to see the boys walking away with nothing after we have worked together for a month,” he says. “But there is nothing I can do, as I would have also lost some money through hiring equipment and buying food and explosives.”
Owning a mine for Phiri is an expensive process because he has to hire drilling equipment and labor.
“I only own a mine, but I don’t have any equipment or any other form of capital,” he says.
Moyo and Phiri both cite a lack of safety equipment, such as helmets, overalls, boots, gloves and earmuffs. Phiri also worries that the accumulation of dust from dry drilling could lead to illness in the future for the miners. But he says that small-scale mine owners can’t afford to comply with government standards aimed at improving working conditions for miners.
“We are not able to comply with what regulatory authorities want,” he says. “The Environmental Management Authority wants us to construct toilets and fence off the mining site. In as much as this makes sense, we do not have the financial resources to comply since, more often than not, the gold we get is only able to sustain our families and keep operations running.”
Endless fees for mine owners make it even more difficult to meet minimum standards. Phiri somberly points out that when it comes time to pay the annual inspection fee to the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development, he usually lowers the percentage of profits that goes to labor. He does not like doing this but says it is the only way he has thought of to raise enough money to retain his mine.
The Ministry of Mines and Mining Development has made it illegal for employers to pay laborers varying wages – or sometimes nothing – for work, Phiri says. Instead, a mine owner is supposed to pay employees a minimum salary of $150 per month. But Phiri says that this isn’t sustainable for small-scale mine owners because of a lack of funds.
Prospecting license fees increased from $100 to $1,000 in 2012, according to the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development. The license is valid for two years. In addition, prospective miners must pay $200 to register mines with the ministry as well as $300 to a registered prospector, a technical worker who confirms where there are mineral deposits in a mine. The mine owner is also required to pay a $400 inspection fee each year to the ministry.
“I am confused by this increase in prospecting licenses fees as it contradicts with the Indegenisation law,” Phiri says. “It discourages Zimbabwean players, who often don’t have that kind of money to get into mining.”
The objective of the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Act is to cede no less than 51 percent of shares or interests of businesses to indigenous Zimbabweans within five years of the act’s passing in 2010.
Livingstone Dzikira, executive director of the Zimbabwe Youth Council, a parastatal under the Ministry of Youth Development, Indigenisation and Empowerment, says the law should go even further. He says that the minerals belong 100 percent to the people of Zimbabwe, regardless of whether communities have ever exerted control over them.
“If I did not wear my shoes for 10 years, that does not mean they are no longer mine,” he says as an analogy. “Minerals are resources that should be owned and extracted by those who reside in the communities.”
He implores the Zimbabwe Republic Police to stop arresting unregistered miners. Instead, he says that Zimbabwean laws must be transformed in order to cater to the youth who are mostly engaged in mining locally available minerals.
“Arrests and hiking of mining fees will only result in chaos,” Dzikira says. “But if laws are transformed to also cater for the needs of local communities, everything will go well.”
In order to address the plight of local miners in Zimbabwe, Moyo suggests that the government should make affordable mining equipment available and consider lowering mining fees so that more players can legally get into mining. In addition, Phiri proposes that the government assist with technical services, such as prospecting, so that miners can drill where technical people have confirmed that there is gold.
Dzikira says that the Zimbabwe Youth Council has reserved $30 million for mining equipment. Groups, not individual miners, may apply for this funding.
The council is also currently petitioning the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development and the Ministry of Finance to allow local miners to register mines as groups or syndicates so that they can split the fees. It’s also asking the ministry to stagger fees across the year so miners can pay smaller amounts at a time, among other requests.
“We are engaging the two ministries so that they categorize miners into Zimbabweans and foreigners so that the mining fees are different,” he says. “Zimbabweans cannot be made to pay the same amount of fees as outsiders.”
Various foreigners come to mine in the mineral-rich country.
The challenge, however, with people like Moyo, Shumba and Phiri is that they do not belong to any mining association or group. In addition, they say they did not know about the existence of the Zimbabwe Youth Council.
Phiri says he has not seen the need to join a group or mining association because those he knows in groups still face the same challenges that he is facing. But he says that he would consider organizing some fellow miners into a group so that they can apply for funding from the Zimbabwe Youth Council.
Meanwhile, the government this year has announced plans to recoup lost revenue from the mining industry after detecting a gap between its earnings and industry production and exports.
