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Wellington Takavarasha

Senior Business Reporter
CLOSE to half a million small-scale miners are set to benefit from the government’s $100 million mechanisation facility with operators now working on organising themselves into syndicates in order to access funding.The Zimbabwe Artisanal and Small-scale Mining Council (ZASMC) has hailed the government for concluding the $100 million Chinese equipment deal that is set to equip its members and boost production output.

Mines and Mining Development Minister Walter Chidhakwa is on record saying the government was seized with modalities of shipping the machinery from China to Zimbabwe.

ZASMC president Wellington Takavarasha yesterday told Business Chronicle that members   of his organisation had started grouping                                 themselves into syndicates as part of the process to formalise artisanal and small-scale miners’ operations.

“As you might be aware the government is amending the Mines and Minerals Act and it’s one of the requirements in the draft Act that as small-scale miners we formalise our operations so that we benefit from government programmes such as this mine mechanisation,” he said.

“Small-scale miners are set to benefit from the $100 million Chinese equipment deal through their respective syndicates, whose registration throughout the country is on-going.

“In addition, those that will benefit from the mechanisation programme are those that have empirical evidence of production.”

ZASMC claims to have a membership of at least 500,000.

With empirical evidence of production,  Takavarasha said potential beneficiaries would need to repay back the loan for resources under the facility.

He expressed optimism the facility would transform small-scale mining and enable operators to shift from using rudimentary methods of mining to technology driven ways of extracting minerals — thus boosting productivity.

In the past, productivity by small-scale  miners especially in the gold sector plummeted due to lack of basic mining machinery to  extract the mineral whose seam was now far below the ground.

At its speak, the small-scale mining industry contributed about 60 percent of national gold  output.

Official statistics show that output from small-scale gold miners, which used to contribute four percent to Zimbabwe’s Gross Domestic Product in the 1990s had improved to 16 percent of total gold output in the country.

Since 2010, the small-scale gold mining industry has been contributing about 26 percent of total gold  output.

Of the six tonnes of gold produced between January and July last year 1.3 tonnes translating to 21 percent were produced by artisanal miners.

Zimbabwe Miners’ Federation president Trynos Nkomo and the Bulawayo Miners’ Association advisor Ishmael Kaguru could not be reached for comment as their mobile phones were not reachable by the time of going to print yesterday.