Small-scale miners in Matabeleland are requesting more time to review the proposed Mines and Minerals Bill before the public consultative meetings begin next week Monday.
The dates for the public hearings have been set for February 27 to March 10, 2023, but small-scale miners claim there is not enough time to prepare because the proposed bill was only published last week.
Some of the issues to be addressed by the Bill include: making provisions for the indigenisation and localisation of the mining industry at the primary level of mining, introducing the concept of ‘strategic minerals’ to which special conditions will be attached by mutual agreement between the Minister and the State, and generally, making the procedures under the Act more transparent and allowing aggrieved persons a right of appeal to the Administrative Tribunal.
This issue was raised at a mining stakeholders caucus meeting held in Bulawayo on Wednesday ahead of the parliamentary consultative hearings, where small-scale miners claimed the Mines and Minerals Bill contains too many provisions and that they need to consult with legal counsel before providing effective input.
In an interview with CITE on the sidelines of the meeting, a small-scale miner from Gwanda, Junior Smit, stated they only learned about the Bill two days ago after a fellow miner informed them.
“We are into mining and we do our own charity work. We are required to pay various amounts of tax and that is unfair on our part. Not all gold miners make the same amount of money. Everyone operates from different areas and the value of their output is different. For us to be put in the same category it is very difficult. We only got to know about this issue two days ago after a fellow miner gave us a heads-up. There are a number of issues that we need clarified,” Smit said.
“There are a lot of contributions we are doing in our communities but these are not receipted. Beyond that the government is demanding royalties from us. We assist in building schools, hospitals, roads but all this is not considered.”
Innocent Siziba of Matobo concurred they had not been given enough time to go through the propositions of the proposed bill.
“The current Act is about 60 to 70 pages, yet the new one is over 300 pages. We need more time to read the Bill. The Bill has also enveloped all the mining sectors and some of the suggestions made therein are not fair to the small-scale miners,” he said, stating that the Bill should be amended to separate miners based on their grades so that no one is overburdened with taxation.
“You cannot treat them the same way you treat large scale farmers. The small-scale miners are funding most of their community work from their pockets and overburdening them with taxes is not fair.
Mohammed Daka, a miner based in Bulawayo said the clauses in the Bill are counterproductive to their operations, therefore needed time to go through it.
“The government is encouraging more gold production but the laws are stifling us. We need more time to process all this that is being said in the Bill. We need time to consult our lawyers and have them simplify for us what some of these clauses mean,” he said.
A legal practitioner, Nikiwe Ncube-Tshabalala, highlighted a number of issues needing clarity in the proposed Mines and Minerals Bill 2023.
“A major challenge is the bulkiness of the Bill. It has over 300 pages and it only came out last week which gave miners and members of the public a short period of time to read, make meaningful contributions and to critique the contents,” she said.
As a result, Ncube-Tshabalala said small-scale miners are pleading with the responsible authorities to give them more time to go over the Bill, explain it to interested parties, and then provide meaningful input before it becomes law.
“Small scale miners are saying the requirements contained therein for them are hardly affordable. They are being grouped with large-scale miners which is one of the challenges in the Bill. The other challenge is that registration and contributions to certain funds are duplicated where they will be paying for or services they will be getting from other departments,” she explained.
“There are no checks and balances speaking to the money they are already contributing. They pay some amounts of money for community development but they realise that there is no development, for example, roads would still be not fixed and clinics are not built so they need transparency from the government and other responsible authorities.”
