By Dr. I.P.A Manning
On 5 February 2014, the MD of Zambezi Resources Limited, a Bermuda registered Australian company that is an Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) listed company who by their membership accept the Equator Principles (a credit risk management framework for determining, assessing and managing environmental and social risk in project finance transactions), issued a public relations blurb on the company website promising a green copper mine in the Lower Zambezi National Park – a classic oxymoron and an impossible promise to keep.
The MD Vanspeybroek would bring this to fruition he said, with the help of ‘local communities and environmentalists’. He went on to say that opponents of the mining such as myself have distributed a number of ‘factual inaccuracies’ to the media; and that on Friday 31 January we had not obtained an injunction against the mining – as was reported in the online Zambia Reports. This was startling news to me. Word soon came from Lusaka that the injunction had been applied for but as of earlier today not yet granted.
The Situation on the ground
The MD says he will create an initial 500 jobs for local villagers – obviously mostly members of the chiefdoms encircling the park, landholders under customary title owing allegiance to headmen and chiefs. They will now presumably leave their land and their wives and children – some 3,000 or so of them – and go off to live in a mine compound in the park. The impact of this on the social fabric of women and children living on the customary commons and having to deal with life with few government services would be considerable. Presumably pressures would increase the harvesting of the ever diminishing renewable resources so as to provide bushmeat and charcoal for sale, a crisis already existing because of the late delivery of seed and fertilizer for the women to grow the staple food, maize. To complicate matters, 36,000 ha of Chief Unda Unda’s customary land on the northern borders of the park has been alienated to a businessman and PF funder who had already obtained a large area of Chieftainess Mwape’s land. He has made a deal with a questionable REDD+ scheme involving donors such as USAID and the UK’s DFID, a landgrab by any other name. Sata gave his permission for this.
The MD of ZRL says he is working with the ‘traditional leaders, who are supportive of the project, to improve livelihoods and bring economic development to the area’. Yet he provides no proof for this assertion. On 18 Oct 2008, the Zambezi Basin chiefs, Chiawa, Chipepo, Simamba, Sinadambwe and the Luangwa chiefs, Mupuka and Mburuma, in obeisance to their living ancestors and guardians of the land, met and issued an historic declaration against mining for 17 chiefdoms of the Zambezi Basin.
http://www.wild.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/zambezi-mining_chief-call-to-action.pdf
Of course, miners will brook no opposition from headmen and chiefs and obviously went to work on them with ‘trade goods’ – much as the agents of Cecil Rhodes had done in the 1880s. Chief Mburuma and his Nsenga group formerly occupied the proposed mining site around Chakwenga from 1908 to 1952, then moved because of severe sleeping sickness. Under African religion and culture, they are responsible to their ‘living ancestors’ for the care of the land and the sacred groves. That responsibility is permanent. Chieftainess Chiawa – on whose game management area land (next to the park) is found the proposed Glencore Xstrata and ZRL Cheowa mine, is a notorious ‘business woman’ and former board member of the Zambia Wildlife Authority – the latter having responsibility for the park. Over the years she sold off numerous riverine plots without direct benefit to her subjects or with their permission. Paradoxically, the sale of traditional land to people wanting to start up tourist businesses has given rise to a vibrant low impact tourism industry – Protea Hotels already sent packing by us for wanting to build a massive conference center in a sacred grove on the Zambezi River.
The Destructive effect of mine will last forever
The MD of ZRL knows full well that if you destroy the forest cover of 250 km2 of the park, extract 160 tonnes of concentrate daily and ship it out by road, that those open pits will never be reclaimed, the poisons lurking for ever, and he long gone to his retirement home overlooking a now barren great barrier reef. He has absolutely no idea about the importance of conserving a flag-ship national park that is part of a transboundary conservation area of universal value to mankind – one half of it already declared a world heritage site.
The man maunders on about being keen to ‘engage with local environmentalists to ensure we can achieve a win-win situation’ . Who would these environmentalists be? Sorcerors? His justification for the mining is that ‘the mine site is in a remote, inaccessible and sparse part of the park, on the upper escarpment, more than 35 kilometres from the Zambezi River, with no surface water and consequently very few animal’. This is a statement of such staggering ignorance that one must face the fact that these miners are ecologically and culturally challenged to an enormous degree; quite beyond commons sense and logic. It’s the copper, you see, the gold, the money, the curse.
Parliaments response
The MD obviously did not read the report of the Parliamentary Committee on Lands, Environment and Tourism for the Second Session of the Eleventh National Assembly of Zambia (September 2012 – July 2013):
‘Your Committee recommends that the proposed mining project at Kangaluwi in the Lower Zambezi be rejected for the following reasons:
(i) the mining licence that Mwembeshi Resources (ZRL subsidiary) holds was issued without following the requirements of the law and procedure and is invalid and should be revoked;
(ii) there should be no mining in the Lower Zambezi National Park which should be reserved and preserved as a conservation area and heritage for purposes of tourism development;
(iii) the Government should ensure that the issuance of mining licences follows the legal and laid down procedures; further, the work of the inter-Ministerial Committee should be strengthened.’
ZEMA
Then there comes a surprise: the miners, he says, have listened to the concerns raised by the Zambia Environmental Agency (ZEMA), the parastatal under the Ministry of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection that turned down the mining in the first place. But where is that report? ZEMA, they say, have come to an accommodation with the miners and are happy to proceed. Yet ZEMA was kept out of the picture, the whole process gerrymandered by the Ministry and ZRL to achieve a compromise of sorts acceptable to themselves – all of it taking a year and a half.
The MD says ZEMA will monitor and supervise the whole process of mining and mitigation. Yet in the Public Accounts Committee on the Report of the Auditor-General 2013 (Pg. 100) they found that ZEMA is hopelessly dysfunctionl: without a substantive Director-General for a year, or a supervising Board for all of 2012, and notoriously weak in seeing that EIAs are implemented according to the requirements of the Environmental Management Act of 2011.
They gave some horrific examples: the heap leaching at Mopani Copper Mines (owned by Glencore Xstrata who also have shares in the park project); the Konkola copper mines pollution of the Kafue River; and the incomplete EIA produced for the Itezhi-Tezhi hydro electric scheme. ZEMA were also excoriated for failing to establish the Environmental Fund. The committee also picked out the fact that organisations were failing to carry out EIAs as required, advising ZEMA to write to the Road Development Agency – now personally run by Sata – and get them to provide annual work plans in advance so that the EIAs required could be delineated and RDA asked to provide them.
At present a tarred highway is in some stage of construction replacing the track along the Zambezi River, along that fabulous narrow alluvial band through the park with its plenitude of wildlife. No public consultations have been held let alone such silly requirements as environmental reports. It is Emperor Sata’s baby, possibly about to create even more damage than the greedy and irresponsible Australian miners. To presume that this limping parastatal, the Zambia Wildlife Authority included – who gave permission for mining in the first place, can in any way deal with Zambezi Resources, the mining and road developments, is an insult to Zambians, to us all. The committee concluded that ZEMA was unable to carry out its mandate.
Mercifully the market is going to pour cold water on the miners’ fevered brow. As the Zambian Economist reports, ‘Copper prices are headed for the longest slump in 20 years, on signs of weakening demand after manufacturing slowed in China and the U.S., the world’s top metals consumers’. But we cannot take anything for granted, in this, the plundercene epoch.
By I.P.A. Manning
I.P.A. Manning, Ph.D. is a former member of the Zambian National Parks & Wildlife Service for three tours spanning 30 years, and latterly a registered investor, deported in 2008 by the MMD government for opposing the landgrab of protected and customary areas.
The time has come that those of us who are erudite take up leadership positions.We can not continue letting illiterate,obdurate politicians continue to destroy our country. To the Australians please go back to your outback deserts.No one in Australia would allow a Zambian to dig an open pit in national game park.We shall fight you. Shareholders you will only lose your hard earned cash investing in Zambezi Resources.
I hear you ex-momma, but from where you are (US) can’t never, unless you want to do a “Prof. Chirwa”.
But coming back to the issue at hand, it is clear that the injunction submitted to the High Court “disappeared” by fiscal magic. It is also clear that the standard procedure in the process that eventually allows a mining company to mine has been flouted. Violently.
We are dealing with people who have only respect for the how much money they can make. These are heartless banksters who deport those who get in their way without a second thought. We must therefore deal with them just as ruthlessly as they do us.
Mulenga and Jelita, I’m not in the U.S and can’t help that my flag is ‘magically’ assigned an American flag.
But I agree that intellectuals would think twice about doing what Prof Chirwa tried to do for Zambia.But with technological advances there are several ways people abroad can help Zambia.If an Australian can dig up our game parks with just a few well placed phone calls from Sydney,surely 10 000 Zambians abroad can do wonders if they but tried.
Sata the idiot is at it again. MMD opposed this! Guess they are filling their pockets as PF know they are done come next election. Let common sense prevail.
I bet you that by terming it “green copper mine” they mean the green of the dollars.We poor zedians will then be left with a large pit,poverty and environmental damage.
Daylight robbery by a marauding group!
Mzee Kenyatta was quoted saying on whites /missionaries” They taught us to pray with our eyes closed and holding the bibles,when we opened our eyes after AMEN, we had the bibles in our hands whilst they had the LAND”Its oil from grass.
Hard to believe that this is happening in our very eyes! With all this information being laid bare before us, how is that we seem helpless to even cry for help for an outside activist group to intervene and intercept this rape?
There ought to come a time when victims of exploitation must say to themselves that ‘enough is enough’ and take the law into their own hands. Such time long expired in Zambia.
GREEN COOPER MINE? MY FOOT!!!
Another 90 Day promise by the New P.F, accomplices
1. On the Copperbelt, Zambians are being Polluted on a daily basis & Nothing is done as they are ” Cheap lives” game for profit.
2. Why another Mine, when we are always told by current Mine owners in Zambia they “Are forever making a loss”
3. I’ve yet to see Local people benefit socially & financially, rather than foreigners wit Fat Swiss & Offshore accounts.
THERES NEVER BEEN A FOREIGN OWNED MINE IN AFRICA THAT BENEFITED THE INDIGENOUS POPULATION.
All this boils down to is a “Western Ponzi Scheme”, “THE NEW ETHICAL COLONIALISM & SLAVERY” !!!
. AFRICANS WAKE UP!!
Its amazing that Our Opposition Leaders, who are supposed to be the holders of Democracy, providing our Nation with checks & balances, have been ever so Quiet!
Is it because they see a Gravy Train in the event they form the next Corrupt African Government?
“Green mining?” What a heap of rubbish, when you are clearing large swaths of land, digging large pits in the process displacing animals and human settlements, disturbing the whole ecosystem that has taken millions of years to reach stability and you coin it “Green mining”.
Fellow countrymen, the people behind this scam should never go unpunished, whether today, tomorrow or 10 years from now, someone has to pay for such kind of carelessness. what is happening to our beloved country sure. where are the men and women who can speak for the silent majority, our politicians in the opposition? where are you? this same company is Australian but registered in Bahamas!!! forget about them paying tax, there goes our riches, sovereignty and everything else, doomed country!!!
You are right: the movement requires political expression. The opposition parties, united or not, must respond to such issues and make a pact with a future concerned electorate on specific issues such as mining and the hydro electric schemes plundering our rivers in order to provide power for more mining, more pollution, more theft of Zambia’s resources. The days of 90-day promises is over. Politicians and the donors must follow a mandate set for them by the electorate, by citizens, not the other way around.
As Zambians we should stop misdirecting our energies fighting unworthy causes. We should be fighting to own maybe 50% of the mine since the copper is our in the first place except we are unable to dig it ourselves. Those who are making noise about the environment should lead by example by practicing open defecation since the toilet bowl, hand wash basin, taps and sewer pipes are made of materials mined from somewhere. Toilet paper is also made from trees!
#Spartan
Grow up, for once leave the discussion to some erudite bloggers keen to make a difference.
PF leader. Show that you an erudite blogger and not just a cadre by successfully rebutting my arguments and then I will quietly leave the discussion to you.
‘ the copper is ours in the first place’
Flip…who is being fooled here???? Ya its africa… came and tell us again the story of making oil from grass.
flip ….who is being fooled here??? Ya its Africa come and tell us the story of making oil from grass. And get your rewards
EXPLOSIVES and animals don’t mix well. Remember in the 1970’s & 80’s when traumatized elephants were crossing the Zambezi from Namibia & Rhodesia when their liberation struggle intensified. Elephants can feel vibrations from 100’s of miles away. That’s how they felt Tsunami of 2003 and started running to higher ground before it even hit the shores. Lets not lose this God given gift of freely roaming wildlife to these fools.
Marie-anne I like your face and anlysis of issues. Zambia has such brilliant and beatiful ladies. Go, Go Zambia and STOP this stupid idea.
Which Green Copper mining? I agree that the Opposition Parties have something to oppose collectively if they are to be relevant to the country. This is the time I miss Sata in the Opposition. He could not have let them go on with it. Action Aid please champion this cause for us before we lose our natural heritage.
…and we are too gullible to believe this? The bribes you are getting will shut you up when this company shows its true colours; polluters, poachers and exploiters.
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