MARTIN MUSUNKA
A RECENT Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW) report on First Quantum Minerals (FQM) and its human and environmental impact has inaccurately portrayed to the international community a mining company hell-bent on short-changing Zambians and riding roughshod over a helpless, powerless government.
In its February 19 Daily Maverick article titled ‘Poverty, Toxic Water and Disease as Zambian Mine Offers No Hope of Social Transformation,’ SARW declares right from the outset:
‘Instead of growing hope, Zambia’s Kansanshi Mine’s corporate social responsibility programme is undermining the hope of poor communities. The mine does not attach significant importance to the economic and social transformation of mining communities, and most of the company’s corporate social responsibility activities reflect a total lack of seriousness in conceptualisation, design, financing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation’.
The report proceeds to list perceived deficiencies in FQM operations, portraying a close-fisted and uncharitable corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme that offers low-quality social service programmes in health, education, agriculture, entrepreneurship and other arenas.
The SARW, a project of Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, creates an impression that FQM and its subsidiary company Kansanshi Mining Plc are cheating and deceiving hapless residents of Solwezi, pretending to consult with their traditional rulers while speeding to implement its own inconsiderate and inadequate programmes.
Simply put, first-time readers of such information regarding the North-Western Province mining sector are bound to conclude that FQM operates entirely on ill will and is dragging the surrounding mining area populations into a black hole.
It is notable that Dr Greg Mills, who heads the Brenthurst Foundation and has visited Kansanshi and Kalumbila and the surrounding communities over the past 10 years, disagrees with the scathing SARW report written by Edward Lange and Claude Kabemba.
In his February 20 write-up in The Daily Maverick, Dr Mills states: ‘Read Edward Lange’s review of his own Southern African Resource Watch report, Living in a Parallel Universe: First Quantum Versus the Mining Communities in Zambia, and one would believe that First Quantum, the largest investor in Zambia, was an evil extractor, not a long-term stakeholder’.
Quite tellingly, his article is entitled ‘Southern African Resource Watch and Zambia: What Are They Trying to Achieve?’
Dr Mills further asserts: ‘Yet it is the report’s authors who are living in a parallel universe in presenting such a shoddy piece of work which remarkably did not include an interview with the mine itself or even space for First Quantum to present its perspective. Perhaps that should be expected of a simple hatchet job riddled with factual inaccuracies and bogus assumptions.’
LOPSIDED REPORT
One would immediately doubt the veracity of the report from the onset, as the authors, in their introduction, fail to correctly identify who owns Lumwana Mine, claiming that FQM owns three mines in North-Western Province, including Lumwana Mine.
FQM does not and has not owned Lumwana Mine; Lumwana is owned by Barrick Gold Corporation, which has now merged with Randgold. FQM owns two mines in North-Western Province—Kansanshi Mining Plc and Kalumbila Minerals Limited.
More important, the authors of the report did present a questionnaire to FQM, ostensibly to obtain answers that would throw valuable light on the mining operation. However, contrary to basic journalism ethics, the whole body of responses was ignored, and Lange and Kabemba took off on their own trajectory—possibly a sponsored course of action.
FQM has confirmed receiving the questions and responding to them, but all blatantly ignored. In choosing to disregard all answers given by FQM, SARW was being grossly unfair to the other party by failing to fulfil a basic tenet of journalism: balance the story.
If the SARW decided to ignore the answers they received from FQM, how authentic and authoritative did they expect to be in their report?
For instance, in their report, Kabemba and Lange state they are not sure of the value of assets that FQM inherited but go on to attach figures without authentication from the relevant authorities, which is an affront to the investors and the Government of Zambia, which owns 20 percent of Kansanshi Mine through the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Investment Holdings (ZCCM-IH)
The report is clearly riddled with gross misinformation, which creates an uncomfortable situation between FQM, local communities and the government by questioning the role the state plays through the Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA).
The report refers to air, soil and water pollution caused by FQM’s tailings dam expansion project. No reference is made to any health study or findings on the matter; only anonymous statements from the community are offered.
Further, no statistics are offered to support claims that diarrhoeal diseases and lung diseases are prevalent or on the increase.
The report alleges that ‘Kansanshi Mine prides itself on its social investment model and the positive impact it has on communities. However, the SARW report found that there is a disparity between what is in the company sustainability report and what is found on the ground.
‘First Quantum does provide services to communities, but the report questions the quality of these services. Clearly, the company is doing a number of things in communities, such as building schools and clinics, sinking boreholes, agriculture, and recreational initiatives. The SARW research team was shocked by the poor quality, the inadequate scale, and the flawed philosophy behind these initiatives.
‘These investments are visibly not intended to transform the lives of people, but rather to maintain and perpetuate poverty and underdevelopment.’
If the authors believe that the philosophy behind the CSR projects is flawed, they have a duty to demonstrate in what way it is flawed.
The report also accuses government of failure to perform its duties: ‘The monitoring and governance of environmental policies by both government and ZEMA are weak. One wonders why a government and its environmental agent would neglect the environmental problems facing mining communities in Solwezi.
‘Is it simply negligence, or lack of capacity, or both? Is FQM above the law, so that nobody (including government) can question its behaviour? The government is largely to blame, as it seems not to care about the welfare of its people and can only visit them during election campaigns.
The above narration found on page 7 of the report insinuates that the government does not know what it is doing and only cares about people’s welfare when it is seeking votes—an injurious implication made with no supporting evidence.
SHODDY REPORTING
Clearly, the authors of the report had a hidden agenda. Though reporting a negative perception of Kansanshi Mine’s involvement in the community in which it operates, SARW had spurned an invitation to visit the mine site and obtain facts and figures.
They instead chose sneak into Solwezi to meet some residents.
Among the information that Kansanshi emailed to SARW but that was not mentioned in the report is that Kansanshi Mine’s total capital investment is about US$1 billion; fulltime employment levels are about 5,000, with half that number drawn from the local community; river waters inside the mine are tested daily; and river waters outside the mine are tested weekly.
Other answers were explanations related to the consistent testing of ground water through a series of 48 water testing boreholes, inside and outside the mine, on a monthly basis and the fact that Kansanshi Mine has achieved zero discharge into the surrounding communities, a rare feat in the mining sector.
With regard to compensating communities, Kansanshi Mine informed Kabemba and Lange that compensation rates were set according to government crop compensation rates, but the mine exceeded the stipulated rates in all cases, with the value of the total compensation topping US$ 1 million.
In summary, if the authors of the report had good intentions to present a fair and well-balanced report, they would have incorporated the information provided by Kansanshi Mine rather than taking a path to embarrassing themselves.
Courtesy of SUMA SYSTEMS.
Yes indeed, it was not a report worth its salt, must have been written by a trib.al on behalf of SARW, probably that disgraced trib.al at university of pretoria. You can tell that it was written by a trib.al from its remarkable emptiness. Trib.al Hacks is our example of emptiness.
…trib.al Hacks is Zambia’s share of trib.al thinking and emptiness.
The report is not one-sided or flawed. Someone will need be blamed for the impact of mining on the environment, in this case its FQM. Therefore its FQM responsibility to help the community around there, not these peanuts they dish out. When they are done mining, no one can settle there, no agriculture will be possible and animals are already affected.
There is no mine that can achieve zero discharge of effluent around the community. Someone is manipulating figures somewhere. Chemicals used in the copper business are not friendly. We are better off doing agriculture than mining.
All these huge piles are a result of mining. All mines try to minimize the discharge of effluent by returning water to underground or whatever for reuse in operations, return waste or sand to fill voids or leveling ways. But they can only do so much so some of the stuff will have to be managed on surface. And greetings to Martin, it’s been long.
To me this is the usual stereotypical depiction of Africa steeped in poverty and disease narrative that some in the West would rather believe. The reports authors get more recognition regurgitating the usual “Africans are victims” story. I have been to Kansanshi before and after the mine development. While no one can claim that Kansanshi is entirely without blemish, the portrayal in this report seems to me to pander more to the reporters prejudices rather than any true reflection on the ground.
When I just saw a paragraph referring to Dr Greg Mills of Brenthurst Foundation, I stopped reading. I thereon made my conclusion that Martin has been paid by these Neo-Colonialists to defend their position. Dr Greg Mills, who happens to be the Oppenheimer family lapdog is a compromised person to say anything credible on how these mine owners are short changing us. In any case, Martin Musunka is a good sports writer/reporter/editor. Where the hell did he learn to investigate and write on mining/business issues?