By Staff Reporter
Chiadzwa villagers are still wallowing in poverty despite the discovery of vast diamond wealth that has been under expropriation for close to 20 years by various mining conglomerates, a development that the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) has expressed great concern about and repeated its call for authorities to address.
Investigations by The Weekly on Monday revealed that this year alone Marange is pencilled to produce 6 million carats of which 15% are gem quality, earning more than $300 per single carat and the trend has almost been like that over the decades.
However, the communities have virtually nothing to show for it. The roads are still in an advanced state of decay, and key infrastructure like the Marange Clinic is in a deplorable condition while no meaningful investment has been made in the education sector. The dangerously narrow bridge between Hot Springs and Anjin Investments where Headman Patrick Chiadzwa perished in a head-on collision with an Anjin Investments bus in 2012 has not been widened.
Whilst raking in hundreds of millions of dollars from Marange annually, the government has not invested in alternative livelihoods in the community. The Nyanyadzi irrigation scheme is dying whilst a lot more can be done to create a new irrigation scheme in the drought-prone Marange community. This will ensure sustainable livelihoods that will outlive diamond mining.
The villagers still bear the brunt of walking long distances due to transport problems which could have become a thing of the past if proceeds from the diamonds had been revolved in developing the area. Declaring Marange, a protected area has also worsened the transport blues for the Marange community as transporters dread the heavy security presence and the cumbersome paperwork required to get a permit to ply the Marange route. Consequently, only the brave and the daring still operate the route but at double the fare.
George Nyamaropa, the CNRG head of programmes revealed that the organisation is deeply concerned with the situation in Marange and said CNRG has approached the government at the highest level but there is no political will to address the mining-induced poverty and human insecurity in Marange. He revealed that CNRG will soon be approaching Parliament with a petition requesting an urgent address to the Marange crisis.
“We are worried that Marange is now almost a forgotten area, yet it continues to produce diamonds that translate into hundreds of millions of dollars. The community there has waited for too long to benefit from the gems. As CNRG, we will leave no stone unturned in making sure that the present Parliament acts on the issue so that the Marange community benefit from their diamond wealth,” he said.
The Marange diamond fields in Zimbabwe have been a topic of significant controversy and discussion in recent years. The discovery of diamonds in Marange in 2006 attracted attention due to human rights abuses, artisanal mining activities, and a lack of transparency by the government and the mining firms.
In 2010 CNRG Director, Farai Maguwu was arrested and detained for 5 weeks for demanding accountability for the human rights abuses in Marange. Consequently, Zimbabwe was suspended from selling its diamonds until it met the KP minimum standards, including demilitarization of the diamond fields. Although the government committed to a phased withdrawal of the military from Marange in November 2009, the soldiers remain stationed in Marange, 14 years later. Private security guards still use torture as a method of punishing artisanal miners.
“It’s important to recognize that the situation in Marange has been complex and subject to ongoing changes. Diamond mining has not benefited the community in Marange and there is a need to address this problem,” he said.
CNRG has been constantly working against the exploitation of communities by plundering their resources without ploughing back. ‘
The organisation has since put together a Right to Say No campaign that is empowering communities to resist exploration of natural resources in their areas without their free, prior, informed and continuous consent and direct benefits to them.
CNRG is also assisting communities to develop their own development plans which spell out their priorities in the wake of mining. We are convinced mining is a profitable business with severe social and environmental effects on communities. Hence it is critical that communities, that bear the externalized costs of mining also share in the benefit thereof.