Safety training for artisanal miners
CHINHOYI University of Technology (CUT) is set to partner Government and other stakeholders in the mining sector in training artisanal miners on safe mining methods and safety.
To that end, CUT has started the process of opening a Mining Faculty in Kadoma that is expected to offer training to artisanal miners in a move expected to assist in reducing mining disasters.
This follows several mining disasters that have claimed many lives over the past few months, the latest being the Battlefields disaster where the bodies of at least 26 miners have been retrieved from underground so far.
In his address at the Kadoma Economic Development Monetary Policy breakfast meeting yesterday, CUT pro-vice Chancellor (Business Development and Resource Mobilisation) Professor Zororo Muranda said that opening of a mining campus in Kadoma was strategic.
“As a University we happen to be collaborating with the council (Kadoma) here, they have given us land for putting up the faculty. There is an issue of miners dying while searching for gold at Battlefields and Eldorado,” he said.
“We want to put a proposal to Fidelity Refinery and Printers as the biggest beneficiary of the gold coming from artisanal miners to cooperate with us and the mining sector in training of artisanal miners.”
Speaking at the same event which brought together businesspeople in Kadoma and other stakeholders, RBZ deputy director economic research division Dr William Kawila said Zimbabweans should be united to rebuild the country.
“The policies introduced by Government including the Monetary Policy should be supported by everyone and people need to do away with so much anger which does not take us anyway.
“We will never achieve this if people are pulling in different directions. The degree of polarisation is too high maybe if we find a way of moving away from that we would be more constructive in whatever we do,” he said.
In a speech read on her behalf by the director in her office Mr Douglas Chiwiro, Mashonaland West Minister of State Mary Mliswa-Chikoka, said the province had more to learn from Kadoma Economic Development Forum.
“We applaud you for holding such an important meeting in our province. It dovetails with what the province is planning in a few days to come, we would be holding a Mashonaland West Business Indaba in Chinhoyi,” he said.
Kadoma Economic Development chairperson Mr Langton Mabhanga urged local business people to take off their inferiority complex jackets as there is no one who would built the city better than themselves.
Kadoma Economic Development is a brainchild of Kudzanai Vere.