Mining decline hits workers hard

The sudden closure of mines in Zimbabwe five years ago is still having a negative impact on the livelihoods of thousands of former employees. Forty-four year old Sara Muwati was among the 1,300 workers who lost their jobs when the Mhangura copper mine in Mashonaland West province shut down in 2000. "Ever since we were retrenched, after the mine closed, life has been miserable for me and my family, not to mention many other people who were employed by Mhangura," she told IRIN. A mother of five, Muwati worked as a clerk at the mine offices in the small town of Mhangura for 15 years, some 150 km northwest of the capital, Harare. Her husband, Tom, had been an underground miner since 1979. When the operation shut its doors they received retrenchment packages totalling Zim $82,000. The Muwatis used the money to rent a bottle store in the city centre, but poor patronage forced them to abandon the venture, setting off a string of financial problems. 2000 was a difficult year for Zimbabwe's mining sector - a second straight year of negative economic growth, high unemployment, a 60 percent inflation rate and a crippling shortage of fuels and spare parts had started to damage the operations and viability of the manufacturing and mining sectors severely. All gold had to be sold to the central Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, with payment in local currency at a fixed rate, which was lower than the rate at which companies could buy foreign exchange. Three major mines and several small operations ceased operations, including the Connemara, Eureka and Venice mines. Worker unions said the loss of the mines had been a disaster for former employees and their families. "The sudden and swift closure of mines that took place in the late 1990s, particularly from 2000, present well-documented cases of suffering and misery for the majority of those who were employed in the mining industry," Collin Gwiyo, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) deputy secretary-general, told IRIN. ZCTU attributed the spate of closures mainly to the reaction of donors and investors to the government's controversial fast-track programme of violent farm seizures in 2000. "The land redistribution programme, which entailed the forced removal of white farmers from their properties, gave rise to the perception that the country is a risky, unfriendly destination for investors," said Gwiyo. Research carried out in July 2004 by the Labour and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe, in conjunction with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German-based foundation, revealed that the mining sector had also been dealt a body blow by declining global mineral prices. "The fluctuating international commodity prices have hit the (mining) sector hard, resulting in erratic variations in production and foreign currency earnings," the report noted. It also pointed out that domestic economic trends had contributed to the slump in mining activities. "The massive depreciation of the local currency in the 1990s resulted in soaring input costs, thereby undermining the viability of most mineral producers," the report observed. While the capital-intensive mining industry provided six percent of total employment in 1980, data from the Central Statistical Office showed that this figure had fallen to a paltry 0.8 percent by 2002. Although Muwati was among the fortunate few who were given houses as part of their retrenchment packages, everyday life remains an uphill battle. When their liquor business collapsed, she and her husband decided to look for employment elsewhere. "Tom moved from one mine to another doing piece jobs [contract labour]. His visits back to Mhangura became less and less frequent and, after a year, he stopped coming home. I then heard that he had taken another wife," said Muwati. Confronted with the task of fending for the children alone, she sold second-hand clothes from a stall set up outside her home. However, clients were few and far between, because the other town residents had been equally adversely affected by the closure of the mine. Then she tried smuggling foreign currency from Mozambique to Zimbabwe and selling it on the parallel market. Two of her sons took to illegal gold panning and one of them was maimed in a brawl stemming from a quarrel over the ownership of a gold claim at an abandoned mine, while her daughter took to prostitution in the tourist town of Kariba. When IRIN visited Mhangura town, once characterised by roaring blast furnaces, all that was left were mounds of slag left over from the operation. The neglected water and sewerage systems suffered constant breakdowns, causing a health hazard to the residents. "The mine used to subsidise the education of our children, and when it closed there were massive dropouts. There have been many deaths because the mine hospital was closed and the nurses were also retrenched," said Muwati. Two leading banks, Standard Chartered and Barclays, moved out when the mine shut down and the few remaining shops took advantage of reduced competition to hike their prices. Similarly, former employees of the Venice gold mine, about 50 km northwest of Kadoma in Mashonaland West, complained of the hardships they had endured since the mine closed. "Most of the people here are unemployed and survive by doing odd jobs and selling second-hand clothes. But most of the youths have been kept going by gold panning in the disused shafts," said Goodman Marufu, a shop assistant in the small business centre of Venice town. Over the past three years, Marufu said, former employees of Venice who could not make ends meet had trekked back to their rural homes.