The amendment of mining laws should benefit communities
While the country’s archaic mining laws favour private companies, the amendment of the laws is going to significantly benefit the government and communities, Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) environmental affairs expert Alexandra Mliswa said.
Rudairo Mapuranga
Speaking to Mining Zimbabwe, Miss Mliswa said modern mining laws will invariably push shared value in mining as well as social and environmentally friendly mining practices.
She said the Government needs to take seriously the task of aligning the Mines and Minerals Act with the country’s Constitution, other policy guides like the AMV (Africa Mining Vision), UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, as well as various international treaties that Zimbabwe is a signatory to.
“Our archaic mining laws currently favour the private sector or the mining company. We will not see a push to modernize mining laws from the private sector because they view this as money out of their pockets. This is because modernization comes with increased regulation of the mining sector to align it with global best practices, in a word, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). For the private sector, this means increased spending on the rehabilitation of mined sites, renewable energy technologies, proper and adequate resettlement and relocation, meaningful development initiatives, and increased spending on qualified persons to track and report this data according to standard, just to name a few. The real push for modernizing mining laws has to come from the regulator, the government. In brief, we need to arm the Mines and Minerals Act with real enforcement mechanisms to create a mining industry that is just and sustainable,” Mliswa said.
She said to be fair to the Government and to give a practical picture, there may be a conflict between ensuring that Zimbabwe is indeed ‘open for business’ while also implementing mining reforms. The government needs to find a balance between those two but not at the expense of the rightful beneficiaries of Zimbabwe’s natural resources, being her citizens.
“We know that mining is a cross-cutting issue and all government ministries and departments need to be part of modernizing mining laws or at least enforcing the reforms. Knowing this, what becomes unclear is whether the key decision-makers in the relevant government ministries and departments are of one mind when it comes to mining law reforms in Zimbabwe, or even effecting the responsible mining policies that President E.D Mnangagwa continues to mention. We should give credit for the work that has been done, more notably, the Responsible Mining Initiative conducted in the first half of 2023 which is evidence of some political will to modernize mining laws. What is less clear is if we can trust the institutions that conducted the audit, and then, the audit report itself to have been conducted without fear or favour, and remedy non-compliance in the same manner,” Mliswa said.