Ward 17 community leaders in Pumula in Bulawayo have re-engaged the management of Hualin Quarry Mine, a Chinese owned company that is mining in their community to discuss how residents can benefit from the resource extracted in the area.
The community leaders who convened the meeting at Methodist Village on Tuesday raised concerns that some “unscrupulous” individuals were going behind the backs of the community seeking favours from the mine management at the expense of the community.
The leaders said the community development projects they had envisioned at the start of the mining activities are not happening and residents were opting for the mine’s closure.
Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA) organising secretary for Ward 17 Nqobizitha Moyo, said he was one of the stakeholders present when the mine was first introduced to the community but the benefits they hoped would occur had not yet been received.
Moyo said as community leaders, they decided to re-engage the mine management and see how this matter can be resolved going forward.
“We understand there are people who have been coming to you behind closed doors with their own requests that do not benefit the community. This is the reason why we called this meeting to come up with a proper structure that we will present, then have orderly communication. Anyone who is going to come to you outside the stated committee would not be sincere,” Moyo said.
“We want to fix problems that have been existing and have a way forward. There are some leaders and stakeholders who are not here now, but we will give them feedback on what has been discussed here. We want a proper way of doing things to make sure we benefit as expected.”
Another leader, Celani Sibanda, reiterated that the company needs to rehabilitate the road as moving heavy vehicles contributes to its dilapidation.
“We do understand that you have projects that you are doing at the moment, but these are menial projects in comparison to the amount of work you are doing and amount of money getting from our community. Your loaded heavy trucks move on our roads, damaging them. We expect you to fix them. We don’t want food, we can buy food for ourselves. What we want is something tangible, something that we can leave for the next generations,” Sibanda said.
“There are also people with livestock in our peri-urban areas. Their animals are being affected by the dust coming from your company, may you do something about the land and environmental pollution that is happening here.”
St Peters community leader, Juliet Bethule, said they consulted prior to the start of mining and expressed their goals but have not seen those.
“We were shown copies of the Memorandum of Agreement that was signed and during our submissions we mentioned roads and water assistance, if the records are retrieved all of this can be confirmed. Currently we have not yet seen how you are helping the community. We want to benefit from our resources. As it is, we do not have water, can we at least have boreholes drilled to alleviate our water challenges,” Bethule said.
The Chinese Company Director, known as ‘Sunflower’, said the company is already engaged in some Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes and they are willing to do more should there be adequate communication.
“We want to do more but communicating is a bit confusing. We are approached by many people. We don’t know which group to work with because they are too many. So far we have been lending a helping hand to the vulnerable groups, the elderly, orphans and People With Disability (PWDs). We have been helping orphans at Zimkids for a while now, we give them groceries every month, that is a commitment we made to ourselves,” he said.
“We are willing to do bigger projects, like road construction as you are saying. But the challenge in these projects we need to have clearance from the city council and the government. If we are to just embark on them, we may find ourselves on the wrong side of the law. We hope that communication will improve between us.”
Sunflower said the company will commit to drilling a borehole for the people in the peri-urban area to help them with access to water.
“On this day, we are committing to drill boreholes for the community. But because water is hard to find in this area, we will not dig many. If we can dig one that we are certain will draw enough water for the people,” he said.
“We also understand that you are complaining about dust and air pollution and you are suggesting that we must use water to dampen our operating environment but we all know that water is scarce in this area. We are also worried about the health implications because we spend all our time in that mine so we understand your concerns.”
The company director added he understood the plight of the people and challenges they faced.
However, he said people needed to understand that the company was “as good as a start-up.”
“We have invested at least US$3.5million but to get it back would take a while. Business is slow in Bulawayo. We may have to go for at least ten years before we recover this money. So we need you to be patient with us. We are a private company and when we give to the society we need you to know that we also need to make profits,” Sunflower said.
