Mines bill public hearings, Mashonaland Central speaks
It was a full house as Mashonaland Central Stakeholders heeded the call to attend Public hearings on the Mines and Minerals amendment bill HB 10 2022 held in Bindura.
Some attendees braved fatigue and chose to attend the proceedings standing as all seats were occupied signalling the importance of inputs to get a desirable Mines Bill.
Miners raised a lot of issues and the most outstanding was displeasure with the Mines Affairs Board (MAB), the slow pace of mining title allocation amount others.
Members who will seat on the Mines Affairs Board (MAB) should go through public interviews instead of being hand-picked by the Minister of Mines and Mining Development, stakeholders voiced their concerns.
Speaking at the Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill public hearing held in Bindura on Tuesday a miner who attended said the Permanent Secretary was not supposed to be a member of the board and worse off, chairing it.
“The Board Members will be appointed by the Minister and the Permanent Secretary who is also the CEO of the Ministry will be chairing the MAB. The Permanent secretary should not be the chair of the board because it will be difficult for the board to hold him to account. I also think that the board Members will be very influential therefore should be appointed through Parliamentary interviews,” he said.
Speaking at the same event, Zimbabwe Geological Survey Director Forbes Mugumbate said stakeholders were not reading well through the lines of the Bill by suggesting that it is taking away the rights of land owners, particularly farmers.
He said that the Bill doesn’t allow miners or prospectors to peg without written consent from the farmers.
“You can’t peg without written consent from the holder of the farm,” Mugumbate said.
A miner submitting his views to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Mines and Mining Development said it was of importance for the government to ensure that when a person discovered a mineral, they should be given discovery certificates so that no one can peg the land except themselves.
“There should be a temporary licence to ensure that people who discover minerals are protected,” he said.
Meanwhile, miners stressed disdain in the handling of disputes saying they preferred disputes be finalised by the Mines and Mining Development Ministry.
Addressing the gathering a Bindura miner said unscrupulous individuals are taking advantage of the court orders and will use the order to mine and even attain EIAs.
“There is an individual who went to court for a dispute and got Police officials to evict a miner with a mining title and started mining with a Court order. By law, we know that only a person with a title should conduct mining yet court orders are being used to mine right here in Bindura,” he said.
Mkaratigwa asked the miner to petition parliament in writing so that they can conduct an enquiry to get to the bottom of the issue.
Another miner stressed the importance of timely processing of titles and EPO applications saying at least 90 days should be the maximum time it takes for approval or disapproval as miners are forced to mine without requisite certificates.
On CSR a miner said it must be made a law that the community gets a share they agree on and it has to be fixed. Miners concurred that mining companies are currently taking advantage of the situation in some instances just buying school exercise books which they claim are good enough yet they make millions from the communities they are operating from. They said sometimes they are surprised to see in Media, mining companies claiming to have done non-existence projects therefore it should be made a law for communities to get at least 5% from mines operating in their areas.
A farmer also stressed the importance of separating mining from farming. He said proper planning needs to be done as they are losing cattle to haphazardly dotted pits and bridges are collapsing from miners who follow gold belts, mining without a care for the environmental impact their operations create. He also said that sometimes they are subjected to heartbreaking situations where Miners mine pits that run over each other leading to mine shaft collapses.
Another called for the ban on alluvial or river bank mining saying the practice which is mainly done by foreign-owned companies does more harm than good.
The Portfolio Committee on Mines and Mining Development is currently on a two-week tour conducting public hearings on the Mines and Mineral bill which if passed with become law replacing the existing one enacted in 1964.