ZCDC Workers Down Tools
Operations at Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC) have completely halted with workers reportedly camping at the premises complaining over salary arrears and lack of food.
Well-placed sources at the government-owned diamond entity say the situation is dire and has been compounded by the recent failure of the company to provide food for its workers.
The workers have also gone for over five months without salaries while operations have halted as the company is failing to buy fuel for the plant machinery, leaving only a skeleton staff coming to work as others have downed tools.
“The company is failing to buy fuel, you know we have dumpers, excavators among other machinery which need fuel to operate.
“At Portal A at plant B, almost 300 workers used to come to work, only five people or some just above five are now coming to work at the plant every day just to do safety talk,” said a worker on condition of anonymity.
One worker said since the start of the Covid 19 lockdown operations have slowed down and now completely halted as workers can no longer sustain without food at the company canteen.
“Operations at the plant last ceased almost three months ago, there is no work to talk about at the plant. There is no food at our canteen, we have been eating Sadza and vegetables through and through and this is not good for a diet.
“Now they are failing to provide us even food to eat, so we have said enough is enough we need to be addressed,” said the worker.
He said the company has since resumed diamond sales and was close to resolving the salary impasse with its workers.
Chagonda is on record that the company have been affected by the Covid 19 pandemic as they have not made any sales due to lockdown.
“I don’t have that report at the moment, we have no report like that from the ground that workers are not working I will need to confirm that.
“That we had problems paying our salary arrears is no secret, its fact that we have been updating the workers on the challenges that we had which were emanating from Covid 19 challenges.
“These challenges are not peculiar to ZCDC but have been felt across the whole sector, it’s a situation that we are addressing actively.
“We have been optimistic in our outlook and we have resumed diamond sales so we are actively addressing those constraints, we can safely say we are finally navigating out of the woods,” said Chagonda.
Recently the company’s former acting chief executive officer Robert De Pretto who recently resigned from his post amid political interference spoke out against shocking levels of poverty and underdevelopment in Chiadzwa.
De Pretto was reportedly hounded out of the state entity and forced to tender resignation for irrevocable differences with top government officials angling to benefit from diamonds, ZCDC has since appointed Mark Mabhudhu as the new mining concern chief executive officer.
ZCDC has been facing viability challenges and owes its employees salaries since April, and at one time forced to seek a loan of approximately ZWL$2milion from a local bank to pay salary arrears.