The story of Ngozi Mine
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Pretoria, South Africa. decolonaility2016@ gmail.com. lamented the behaviour of waste buyers saying they wanted to take the waste for free or pay less to the Informal Recycling Assistants who toil day and night in order to make ends meet.
“We have a challenge of buyers of the waste material. Those who buy want to pay less or get the material for free yet they make a killing from recycling the waste,” he said.
Mr Ndlovu, however, urged those companies that buy waste material to provide protective clothing to the Informal Recycling Assistants since they would be working for them in a way.
“Since these people are working in a dangerous environment, dressing appropriately and using personal protective clothing can help minimise pesticide exposure and reduce the risk of pesticide poisoning,” he said.
Mr Ndlovu urged the Bulawayo City council to segregate waste, which was hazardous to be out of reach of the scavengers.
“In terms of safety, city council must segregate the dumpsite for dangerous materials, especially chemicals and electrical gadgets for proper disposal not to allow people to have free access,” he said.
Responding to distress calls of the informal recycling assistants, Bulawayo City Council senior public relations officer Mrs Nesisa Mpofu said, “The council is finalising a Reduce, Reuse & Recycle (3R) policy document that will address issues of empowering Informal Recycling Assistants and revitalising the recycling industry in Bulawayo.”
Mrs Mpofu said the city council was holding monthly meetings with the Informal Recycling Assistants where issues such as occupational health were discussed.
“It should be noted that Richmond Sanitary Landfill (Ngozi Mine) does not accept chemical waste unless that waste has been analysed in an accredited laboratory and a suitable method of rendering that waste harmless to the environment and humans has been specified and done,” said Mrs Mpofu.
Mr Ndudzo said NWC have agencies at Ngozi Mine dumpsite that were on contract and provided with basic skills and protective clothing.
“If you go to the dumpsite there are people working for us. You will identify them with company work suits and gloves for protection,” he said.
A chemist, Mr Farai Samuriwo said toxic substances found in dumpsites posed a wide range of health hazards such as irritation, sensitisation, and physical hazards such as flammability, corrosion, and explosivity.
“Chemicals are dangerous, differing only in the degree of toxicity, and are potentially dangerous to people if exposure is high. Some are known to cause cancer,” said Mr Samuriwo. IN HIS introduction to Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, O’ Malley writes that “if one is to revolutionise human society in the interest of its perfection and welfare one must understand its nature, workings and failures, one must impart this understanding to others, and one must somehow effect the translation of this understanding into organised political action which will transform society in the interest of the common good.
The unity of theory and praxis means the inseparability of these three efforts in genuine social criticism” (O’ Malley, 1970: xiv).
Commenting on the period after the Soweto student uprising of 1976, in 1986, scholars Saul and Gelb characterised the apartheid state as being mired in an “organic crisis” because of the existence of “incurable structural contradictions” of an ideological, political, and economic nature.
The idea of “organic crisis” comes from Antonio Gramsci who, as Stuart Hall in 1988 notes, “warns us in the Notebooks that a crisis is not an immediate event but a process: it can last for a long time, and can be very differently resolved: by restoration, by reconstruction or by passive transformism”. Moreover, “organic crises . . . erupt, not only in the political domain and the traditional areas of industrial and economic life, not simply in the class struggle, in the old sense; but in a wide series of polemics, debates about fundamental sexual, moral and intellectual questions, in a crisis in the relations of political representation and the parties, on a whole range of issues which do not necessarily, in the first instance, appear to be articulated with politics, in the narrow sense, at all.
That is what Gramsci calls the crisis of authority, which is nothing but the crisis of hegemony or general crisis of the state” (Hall, 1988).
This academic polity struck my mind this week as I penned the epilogue of this sensational series which has had student bodies in Zimbabwe rethinking their roles in contributing to the political discourse of our country. I would assume that the students’ leadership meditates on their academic contribution to politics in and outside the campus as ambassadors of pedagogic logic which is a powerful tool in influencing societal progress. It was high time the student bodies reconcile with their mammoth task of reorienting themselves and be able to differentiate between being loyal to the republic and being exploited. So as the subaltern adage goes “he who pays the piper calls the tune,” student bodies have become an academy of pipers, and that should stop.
Flashback . . . Students were an important part of the pre-independence nationalist struggle in Zimbabwe. Through the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland Students’ Representative Council (SRC), students belonged to the intelligentsia, which assisted in mobilising and disseminating information on the struggle. During the 1970s when the liberation war was being waged from outside the country and when most political leaders had gone into exile, the student unions filled the vacuum.
In 2015, Blessing Makunike narrated that the university campus became a breeding ground for political leaders where democratic struggles found a voice.
He recollects that the attainment of independence heralded an integral phase in the development of student unionism. SRCs at the University of Zimbabwe and at a handful of higher education colleges were transformed by the authorities into institutional bodies with recognised responsibilities.
They became involved in programmes that focused on students and their experiences, including social advisement, student health, recreation, alumni and fundraising, etc.
He tells us that Student Representative bodies ceased to be part of a political vanguard contesting state authority in order to become part of the project of national healing, reconstruction and development. Because of their elitist appeal, the student representative bodies became “privileged actors” in the state-led thrust for national development. History then clogs that the Zimbabwe National Students Union (Zinasu), students became a key stakeholder in Government planning and policy implementation. The liberation of the captured: Any
meaning to it? Flashforward . . . 2017 was packed with a lot of political action one being the phenomenal letter which Alister Pfunye the then president of Zinasu wrote to the president of MDC-T Mr. Morgan Tsvangirai divorcing Zinasu from the