A boom in illegal gold draws tens of thousands to Africa’s Klondike
With unemployment in Zimbabwe at 90pc, mining has never been so popular, write Roland Oliphant and Peta Thornycroft
Still glistening in the residue of toxic mercury solution, the metallic flake looks more like a silvery fish scale than a precious metal. But for Emmanuel Sithole, the toenail-sized scrap of gold in the palm of his hand is a modest contribution to his monthly income.
“That’s about $15 right there. Not much – it’s always a matter of luck, but you should be able to get that from a shovel full of earth,” he explains.
Weary, covered in dust, and in his mid-20s, Mr Sithole is a typical makorokoza – one of hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans driven by a catastrophic economic crisis to literally scraping a living out of the country’s dark ochre landscape.
Zimbabweans have mined gold since at least the Middle Ages, when the kingdom the modern country is named after rose to wealth and power on the trade of precious metals.
But the informal mining sector here has exploded since Robert Mugabe plunged the economy into chaos by reappropriating white farms in the early 2000s. There are now thought to be more than 500,000 informal – and technically illegal – miners, and they are now producing more gold than the entire formal sector.
And the makorokoza have become so important to the economy that Emmerson Mnangagwa, the incumbent president, has praised the small-scale sector and said they will play a key role in achieving his manifesto pledge to increase national production to 100 tons a year.
“This year we expect the small-scale sector will produce 60 per cent of the gold and the total will definitely be more than the previous record of 27 tons in 1999,” said Mukasirii Sibanba, of the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association.
“At that time production by smallscale producers was about 5 per cent of total gold. So this sector has grown massively.”
In the first decade of the 21st century, Zimbabwe suffered what the World Bank believes was the fastest peacetime contraction of an economy in history, and some of the worst hyperinflation since the Weimar Republic. The government abolished the national currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, in 2009 when it reached $35quadrillion to US$1.
Today, the economy has made a modest recovery. But about 74 per cent of the population is still living on less than $5.50 a day, and the unemployment rate has been estimated as high as 90 per cent, although there are no truly reliable figures.
Many Zimbabweans have responded by becoming “vendors”, trading basic household items in informal street markets, or resettling on formerly white-owned land to farm tobacco, maize, or other cash crops.
But others joined a massive, illegal gold rush. Msasa, the chaotic mining outpost 30 miles north of Harare, where Mr Sithole, 26, currently works, is as rough and ready as any town of the 19th-century Klondike.
A collection of lean-to huts and corrugated tin roofs sprawls along the foot of a hillside peppered with hand-dug mineshafts, the air thick with the dust of crushed ore and smoke from the open-sided huts that serve as processing mills.
The streets are filled with weary men in their 20s and 30s, and a handful of women who run makeshift shops, cook food and provide for the men’s other needs.
On the hilltop above, men are lowered into narrow shafts up to 260ft (80m) deep on an improvised pulley consisting of a length of rope attached to a plastic bucket just about big enough to lodge one foot in.
The brown rubble they excavate is hauled up in the same bucket and lugged down the mountain to the “millers” – who operate in open-sided huts and charge $3 per wheelbarrow to roast the ore over open fires, crush it, and rinse out the gold in a mercury solution.
The going rate is $42 per gram, and the profits are – theoretically – shared equally between the half-dozen or so men in a “syndicate” and, if they have one, a sponsor who provides equipment such as generators, pneumatic drills and explosives.
Miners interviewed by The Daily Telegraph said that in a good month, if they worked non-stop and had a lucky streak, they could take home up to $800-$1,000 a month in rare hard currency.
“As a farm labourer, I’d be making maybe $50 or $80 a month,” said Brian Dokoroa, who has been working the mines of Msasa for 15 years. “Here I could make $50 a day. So there’s a reason we do this. It is not just better – it is probably the best work in Zimbabwe.”
But not everyone achieves such returns. Several other miners The Telegraph spoke to said they made only $400 a month.
It is back-breaking and dangerous work. Mercury poisoning, cave-ins, or simply falling down a shaft during the night – the gold fields are worked 24 hours a day – are constant hazards. Banditry is rife. Gold fields in Kwekwe, in Zimbabwe’s midlands, have become notorious for machetewielding gangs of extortionists.
The illegal sector has become so crucial to the economy that the government has begun to look the other way. And miners in Msasa told The Telegraph that once-routine pressure from the police has vanished completely since Robert Mugabe was deposed in a bloodless military coup in November.
The end of harassment by the police has made Mr Mnangagwa popular among many of the miners here. The few who were prepared to tell who they would vote for said they would be backing him at the presidential election today, in which he faces Nelson Chamisa, of the Movement for Democratic Change.
Mr Sithole said for many here there is a cautious sense of optimism – whatever the outcome of the election.
“Our parents left school and could expect to find a job and be able to earn a living to raise a family. But now you’ve got a whole generation … that has missed out,” he said. “It has to get better than this.”