Black mountain closure is ploy to displace owners - PF

THE holding onto dump sites, popularly known as black mountains mines by the UPND government is a ploy to displace the original youths who had been oper ating from there, PF chair person for Publicity and Media Raphael Nakacinda has said.

Mr. Nakacinda said that the unfortunate part about the UPND government was that all the decisions they make only favoured the elite.

In September last year Mines Minister Paul Kabuswe suspended mining activities at all dumpsites until there was sanity in the operations.

Mr. Kabuswe said the gov ernment wanted sanity and order to be restored in the operations while it promotes small-scale mining in the dumpsites.

He also said that there was need to create a legal framework for youths to fair ly participate in small-scale mining.

And Mr. Nakacinda said the government wanted the dumpsites to be benefitting the foreigners and a few elite who were in the ruling class.

He said that there would be no economic benefits to youths anymore because the policies Government was putting in place would only benefit a few in the ruling class. Mr. Nakacinda said the government should un derstand about the issue of the black mountain was that most of youths on the Cop perbelt depend on small- scale mining from the dump sites which should not take them forever to put in place because at the moment they were sitting on other people’s livelihoods.

“People depend on mining on those black mountains then why suspend the works for this long?” Mr. Nakacinda asked. Mr. Nakacinda said what had been challenging on those dump sites was the way of structuring the operations.