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Diamonds fail to sparkle at Chiadzwa |
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Thursday, 23 June 2011 20:24 |
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Paidamoyo Muzulu/Wongai Zhangazha
NEARLY five years after large earthmoving equipment roared onto the serene semi-arid Chiadzwa to exploit diamonds, this relatively small and unknown community has nothing to show for its natural wealth.
Chiadzwa still remains a sleepy village of collapsing huts and isolated brick houses, with the exception of rumbling excavators and mills excavating the multimillion precious gems day and night.
The gigantic machines have scarred their mountainous landscape, and yet the villagers continue to trudge the dusty pathways leading to the dry Save riverbed, where they compete with livestock and wildlife for scarce drinking water.
Villagers still roam the mountainside fetching firewood as electricity remains a pipe dream, 31 years after Independence. The general poverty in the community contrasts sharply with the millions generated from the occasional auctions of gems mined at Chiadzwa.
Hopes of local communities were temporarily raised when government introduced the indigenisation policy aimed at transferring ownership of wealth to locals. Under the policy, foreign-owned companies are required to cede up to 51% ownership to locals.
However, implementing this policy is fraught with its own challenges, chief among them, legal issues. A few weeks ago, the Parliamentary Legal Committee ruled that the new regulations setting deadlines on the issuance of equity disposal plans by mining companies was unconstitutional.
Villagers have banded together to form the Chiadzwa Community Development Trust to help them secure benefits from the gems extracted from their community.
The trust has mobilised the Chiadzwa community in an attempt to assert its rights and benefit from the diamond mining. It has also become the community’s mouthpiece in negotiations with all stakeholders, including donor and government agencies.
Chiadzwa villagers have had very little benefit from Anjin Investments, a joint company between the government of Zimbabwe and China, which has the lion’s share of the rich minefields.
Anjin has displaced close to 300 families from the Chirasika area of Chiadzwa to an Arda farm in Odzi and compensation for the displaced families is just a three-roomed brick and mortar house. The company has also promised to create a viable community in the new settlements by providing social infrastructure like schools and clinics.
However, the locals are complaining that they were not being given opportunities to work at the mines or the proposed diamond cutting plant being built on the outskirts of Harare in Mount Hampden, nearly 400km from the mines.
Meanwhile some of the villagers are embroiled in a fierce struggle with controversial diamond mining company Mbada Holdings over the company’s plans to exhume 24 bodies for reburial to expand its mining activities.
Two affected families, the Kusenas and Manyeres of Ward 29 Betera Village, have refused to have bodies of their relatives exhumed without first receiving full compensation and an assurance that they would be reburied at a place of their choice.
The families are demanding US$3 000 per body and the reburial to be in Arda Transau in Odzi to where displaced families are being relocated.
According to the villagers, Mbada offered to pay US$150 per grave as compensation and this has infuriated the families.
Mbada Holdings has indicated that it will rebury the bodies in a local area which would not affect its mining activities.
A spokesperson of the two families Tichafara Kusena said on Tuesday that they were not going to succumb to a shady deal with Mbada Holdings if their demands were not met.
“Mbada Holdings approached us for the third time now, saying they wanted to exhume bodies of our relatives so that they can construct a dam to help them in their mining activities. They said they were working on a tight deadline and wanted to complete the dam by June 29, but we have not reached an agreement over the compensation they want to pay us. We can’t just rebury our relatives without them compensating us. Moreover, they want to rebury them at a place where we do not want. We can’t leave them here (Marange) as we suspect that once it becomes a protected area, we won’t have access to them,” said Kusena.
Kusena revealed that of the 24 graves earmarked for exhumation, 21 graves (10 adults and 11 children) belonged to the Kusena family while the remainder was of the Manyere family.
“Our understanding is that they first went to headman Betera, who demanded US$1 500 and two oxen, they then approached spirit medium Muperere who also demanded US$1 500 and they agreed to pay him. They offered us US$500 per grave and threatened that if we refused, they would give us what they said was a government amount of US$150.”
Mbada diamonds spokesperson Ignatius Mazura confirmed that the diamond company negotiated with villagers over exhumation of graves.
“We have discussed with the communities and agreed on the compensation, the process and place to relocate these graves. Traditionally, in relocation programmes, communities would like to ensure that the graves of their ancestors are relocated with them. To that end, all graves belonging to the community to be relocated shall be exhumed through mutual consent in strict cultural and traditional norms,” he said.
Such issues as the reburials may be a side issue but the bottom line is that the Chiadzwa’s diamond Eldorado has failed to spur infrastructural development in this poor community except to trigger a wave of human rights abuses and the displacement of whole communities from their ancestral land to make room for the expansion of mines and their security.
Reports of diamond smuggling and incidents of human rights abuses in the area rife. The arrest of senior mining authorities on corruption charges and endless reports of atrocities by the military have become a norm at Chiadzwa.
This sad reality has replayed itself in Africa as communities warred against each other for control of natural resources. Angola, DRC, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria have been ravaged by civil wars for control of resources such as diamonds, oil and timber harvesting.
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