ZimRights host governmental and non-governmental stakeholders conference

The Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZimRights) on Friday, August 21, 2015, in the southern provincial capital, Masvingo, hosted governmental and non-governmental stakeholders at an interactive ideas exchange conference on socioeconomic and cultural human rights.

The organisation said artisanal miners and farm workers met and interacted with policy makers, including Mines and Mining Development Deputy Minister, Fred Moyo, and key stakeholders such as Japhet Ndabeni Ncube, the commissioner responsible for Socioeconomic and Cultural Rights with the Zimbabwe Human Rights Commission (ZHRC) and the media.

"ZimRights Board Chairperson, Passmore Nyakureba, attended the national policy dialogue conference, and in opening remarks appealed for its resolutions to be implemented," stated the organisation through its FaceBook post.

"ZimRights Director, Okay Machisa, said the policy conference deliberately afforded stakeholders a crucial discussion to improve the welfare of the marginalised socioeconomic groups."

Machisa said, "The purpose of the conference is to identify joint programming between the state and the non-state actors, artisanal miners, farm workers and sugarcane cutters to ensure the improvement of living and working conditions of the concerned actors."

"Decriminalising artisanal mining is important for people to benefit from their resources and do it legally. Zimbabweans need to ask for the right to own land even farm workers," he added.

ZHRC commissioner Ncube, said the meeting had opened a vista into the lives of marginalised communities in Zimbabwe.

Promising to take the issues to the Commission next week, he observed: "What a wonderful time for the ZHRC to meet the people who are affected by serious human rights violations. "What a challenge to all of us to act." The organisation said the artisanal miners from Battlefields in Kwekwe, Midlands province, complained of the overpricing of prospector's licence costing US$350, exploitation by politically-linked mining sponsors, health hazards, lack of access to the politicised mining tributes, and fraudulent double registration of mining claims due to political manipulation of the system.

"Mines and Mining Development Deputy Minister, Hon. Fred Moyo, said government had taken a step towards mainstreaming the previously lowly-considered artisanal miners into the national economy," stated the organisation.

Moyo said globally artisanal miners are gaining increasing acceptance in developing regions in Africa, Asia and South America, and the sector which has millions of people in it cannot be termed illegal business.

"If we have the numbers [of artisanal miners] going into millions as we think they do, then we have a dilemma. How can millions of people be engaged in illegal business in a nation? Is it possible that we can have a million people engaged in a business that is termed illegal? If it is illegal business, how is it possibly transacted with the law failing to stop it. That perspective brings the dimension that says around the small scale miners is a big market of beneficiaries. Those who sell equipment to them are illegal, those who buy minerals from them are equally illegal, those who live with them in their homes become accomplices and so on?," he said.

Accompanied by the Masvingo Provincial Mining Director, Chris Dube, Minister Moyo said government was already considering measures to improve the sector.

The specific interventions, include opening of regional and district mining offices, computerised registration of mining claims, decentralising the School of Mines, and engagement of micro-finance and medical insurance companies to support the fledgling sector.

Pardon Mlambo, an artisanal miner, said: "The challenge that we have is that we are exploited by sponsors, who get a lion's share of the proceeds after we have endured the hard and precarious work."

Runyararo Mashinge added: "Often we are affected by the chemicals such as carbon that are used in the mining, but we have no medical cover for treatment. When we fall ill usually the sponsors, who get mining tributes through their political connections abandon us."

"Sometimes we open disused mines and when they start being lucrative politically connected people come with doubtful claim ownership certificates to wrestle the mines from us," said Moyo.

A researcher, Jabusile Shumba, said the laws that limited ordinary people's possession of minerals were rooted in the colonial limitations that needed to cede space for new laws, but which observe environmental protection.

"The legalisation and formalisation of artisanal miners should also not make it unsustainable to run mining claims through high taxation," Shumba said.

Sugarcane cutters from Hippo Valley Estates and Triangle in Masvingo revealed the perennial affliction of unsafe and inhuman working conditions, lack of infrastructure, low job security, abuse by newly established politically-linked farmers, and pathetic remuneration.

Due to lack of banking facilities as many as 19000 farm workers depended on five Ecocash mobile money outlets, which could not dispense enough cash.

Charlton Tsodzo, who recently did a research on behalf of ZimRights on the plight of the farmer workers confirmed disturbing findings.

In some cases, the farm workers were lowly-paid getting as little as US$1.50 per day and overworked in a way reminiscent of the colonial practises such as "musengabere".

"Musengabere" is a practise where sugarcane cutters are made to carry stacks of hordes of cane to the truck-loading areas with bare hands in wet and drenched fields.

Tsodzo said new black farmers did not give employees protective clothing, due to lack of accommodation on some farms parents shared bedrooms with children, and above 20 families sometimes use one toilet.