BREAKING: Mines Bill nearly ready
Edmond Mkaratigwa led Portfolio Committee on Mines and Mining Development might after a series of failures from previous Committees be the one to succeed in the implementation of the Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill.
Rudairo Mapuranga
Recently Mines and Mining Development Minister Hon Winston Chitando said that the work of drafting the Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill is now with the Attorney General’s Office, which is expected to conclude its work by month-end, bringing a possibility of the bill being tabled before Senate by the end of next month.
“The Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill is with the AG’s Office and we definitely expect that end of June, it would be done and then it will go to Cabinet,” Minister Chitando said.
The Bill was returned without approval by President Mnangagwa in 2018 after stakeholders expressed their concerns about the basic thrust of legal changes, and the consensus was that it needed to be redrafted to reflect the far more open and investor-friendly environment of the Second Republic.
The re-drafting of the bill did not prove to be heading in the right direction up until 2020 when Hon Mkaratigwa took over the chairmanship of the Mines and Mining Development Parliamentary Portfolio Committee.
According to Mkaratigwa, the Portfolio Committee took different initiatives to make sure that the bill is inclusive to avoid a situation where stakeholders’ concerns would not be taken into the drafting of the bill.
“From day one we sought to actually accelerate the drafting of the Mines and Minerals Amendment Bill, but bearing in mind of course that the stage that we were at, is what we refer to as the prebill stage. At that stage formally there is nothing that is expected from the parliament. The parliament process will kick in from the day that the Minister tables the bill in Parliament and according to the constitution we are then supposed to conduct public hearings thereafter as a Portfolio Committee. We are supposed to deliberate on public views and come up with our recommendations that the Minister will then have to factor in.
“In line with that, we had oral evidence sessions in Parliament whereby we called the Ministry and the institutions under the purview of the ministry and other stakeholders to try and understand where they were with the bill. This is at which stage, we realized that nothing was moving. We then decided to go the paradigmatic route by way of workshops which incorporated various stakeholders including the Ministry and that allowed a process that will actually make us relevant and not Altovise with the law in terms of following resolutions that will come out of a workshop that would cause us as a Portfolio Committee to get involved in the grafting of the bill.
“To that end as a Committee, we constituted a committee that was headed by Hon Davison Svuure to actually work closely with the grafting team from the Ministry of Mines as well as the Deputy Attorney General’s Office. At some stage, it became apparent that we needed to take these officers out of their busy office schedules in Harare and we booked them in a hotel outside Harare. We managed to achieve this complement of friends of the committee like ZELA who managed to meet some of the financial costs involved.
“This actually enabled the completion of the grafting and thereafter it began the prerogative of the Deputy Attorney General’s office to start decoding and crafting the graft bill into legal language so to speak. This process has taken a long time and we have been following up in between. We had other workshops just to buttress the same resolutions and come up with new resolutions because most of the resolutions were time-based and we realized in some instances that the time-lapse actually led to expiration and the effectiveness of the resolutions. And I must say that where we are today the bill stands complete and the Deputy Attorney General’s office has actually reverted back to the Ministry of Mines to say now they can maybe finalize attendance to the bill and be able to take it before the Cabinet Committee on legislation which they had done before but they were issues raised by the Cabinet Committee and which led to referring back the bill the Ministry,” Mkaratigwa said.
When President Mnangagwa referred back to the bill, the Chamber of Mines and other parties were reportedly unhappy with some sections of the Bill, including the definition of strategic minerals, which was thought to be “too broad” that it covered nearly all minerals.
There were concerns too, over provisions that seek to transfer administrative aspects of the pegging of claims from the principal Act to subsidiary legislation. Many stakeholders want the 1961 Mines and Minerals Act to be amended, arguing that it was no longer in sync with what is obtaining in the country today.
The 61-year-old law criminalises possession of gold, therefore making the work of small-scale miners illegal. Now, the Bill seeks to formalise the work of artisanal and small-scale gold miners, who have become critical in terms of gold mining and deliveries to Fidelity Printers and Refiners. Other progressive provisions in the Bill cover the protection of the environment, sustainable development and the establishment of the Safety, Health and Rehabilitation Fund.