In 2016, The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe set out to “decriminalize” illegal gold panning and encourage deliveries to its gold-buying unit Fidelity Printers and Refinery (Fidelity Printers).
The new policy meant that Fidelity would buy gold from artisanal miners on a “no questions asked” basis through mobile buying centres to be deployed across the country.
In the subsequent years, the Bank announced increased gold deliveries with small scale artisanal miners surpassing the contribution of primary producers.
However, as the country started experiencing acute foreign currency challenges in 2017, the Bank introduced a foreign currency retention policy on exporters which effectively changed the face of the artisanal gold mining industry.
In accordance with the foreign currency retention policy, exporters, including gold producers, were required to retain a portion of their revenues in foreign currency and liquidate the remaining sum into local currency to be transferred into bank accounts at the official rate.
Currently, gold miners retain 60% of total earnings in USD and 40% in Zimbabwe dollars.
This means that artisanal miners have to provide banking details or some form of national identification to receive the local currency portion for gold sales to Fidelity Printers.
What authorities downplayed was the impact this new measure would have on a significant number of undocumented players in this critical sub-sector.
For Morton Chisale (32) who has lived all his adult life as an illegal miner in several parts of Mashonaland Central, north of Zimbabwe, the new policy side-lined him.
Born in Centenary near Bindura town in 1990 as a second generation descendant of an immigrant mine worker of Malawian origin who arrived in colonial Zimbabwe in the early 1950s, Chisale has never been officially recognized as a Zimbabwean.
The discriminatory laws against migrant workers in colonial Zimbabwe, made it difficult for Chisale’s grand-father to acquire official documentation as a citizen, a fate that would befall his descendants in years to come.
At the time of both his grandfather and parents’ deaths no official documentation had been granted hence their deaths were not registered.
Now Chisale’s real difficulty is in proving his nationality as a Zimbabwean before he can be able to acquire a national identification document to open his bank account.
“I cannot be paid through a bank transfer,” says Chisale who currently operates in the Rosa area in Chiweshe where gold was recently discovered.
“There are many of us here searching for gold that don’t have IDs to open bank accounts or Ecocash accounts for various reasons. In my case, my parents originated from Malawi to work here and they died without registration. We don’t even have their death certificates and these are the documents I was told are need when I tried to get an ID in Bindura.”
According to a 2021 Amnesty International report titled “We are like stray animals,” approximately 300 000 people are at risk of statelessness in Zimbabwe.
Statelessness refers to a person who is not registered or documented as a citizen of any country due to a variety of reasons such as conflict and migration among others.
Affecting at least 4.3 million people globally, statelessness is a pervasive and grave human rights violation, says the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The Amnesty International report identifies two key historical events as major reasons for this phenomenon in Zimbabwe- colonial labour migration and Gukurahundi.
Studies on the genesis of contemporary artisanal mining in Zimbabwe show that laid-off former mine workers would come for mineral relics often found in abandoned mine shafts or mining dumps which would be sold in the gold parallel market.
A huge number of mine workers had migrated from Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia as Rhodesian authorities sought cheap labour.
But due to discriminatory laws at the time, some of the immigrants who decided to stay permanently could not be integrated as citizens of Zimbabwe.
As a result mainly of bureaucratic obstacles and high levels of illiteracy among these ‘foreign’ mine and farm workers, the majority of the never acquired Zimbabwean citizenship documents, or even any identity documents such as birth certificates.
An example of one restrictive law was the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2001 which introduced a prohibition on dual citizenship, so that people with dual nationality would automatically lose their Zimbabwean citizenship unless they renounced their foreign citizenship. Some migrants still had documents of their countries of origin which became problematic to acquire Zimbabwean citizenship.
Yet for those without any citizenship their descendants have largely remained on the peripheries of economic participation hence they have taken up menial jobs as artisanal mining.
Despite various financial inclusion strategies by the Central Bank, Zimbabwe remains a cash economy, as shown by 2022 census results that 73% of Zimbabwe’s 15 million population uses cash which contrasts sharply with 17% who use bank cards.
Mobile money users have also dropped to 10% due the local currency depreciation and very low transacting limits set by RBZ to curb illegal foreign currency deals undermining the Zimbabwe dollar.
Due to these factors, authorities have struggled to stop the flow of gold into the black market.
“The black market buyers offer us better payment terms and normally at a good price. They have cash readily available and pay foreign currency in full,” added Chisale.
According to the Central Bank, between 30 and 45 tonnes of gold is smuggled out of the country on a monthly basis, mainly by players in the artisanal mining sub-sector.
Zimbabwe has an estimated 4 000 gold deposits and some 500 000 small-scale miners across the country supporting up to three million dependents.
It is however difficult to ascertain how many artisanal miners are undocumented.
Addressing a Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Tourism in Parliament recently, RBZ Governor Dr John Mangudya said, “All artisanal miners will soon be required to be registered as part of efforts by the Government to formalise their operations, curb illegal gold dealing and protect the environment.”
While curbing gold leakages will come with immense benefits to the country in terms of export receipts to the Treasury, his sentiments could spell a turning point in the operations of undocumented miners.
“It is true we have incidents of this nature in the small-scale artisanal mining sector but these issues can really be addressed by relevant departments of Government that deal with such matters. Our hands are tied but we can only advocate for formalization of their operations as syndicates or cooperatives which is what we have been doing to ensure formalization,” said Zimbabwe Miners Federation (ZMF) chief executive officer, Wellington Takavarasha in an interview.
Nevertheless, Section 43 of the 2013 Constitution has a provision that makes people in Chisale’s circumstances Zimbabwean.
“Every person who was born in Zimbabwe before the publication day of the Constitution is a Zimbabwean citizen if one or both of his or her parents was a citizen of a country which became a member of the Southern African Development Community in 1992, and is resident in Zimbabwe,” the Constitution states.
However, due to lack of supporting legislation the clause remains ineffective and Zimbabwe’s stateless population’s condition remains unchanged.
“It’s an economic issue that has been dragging and needs closure. It’s the attitude of the civil registry and the state that needs amendment,” says Dr Musa Kika, a human rights legal expert.
“The drafters of the 2013 constitution were aware that many people in Zimbabwe were of foreign origin. They drafted that provision so that everyone gets citizenship or resident status of some sort. It’s an issue to do with the attitudes and approaches of our department of civil registries, not the law.”
The problem of statelessness is not unique to migrant workers as the Amnesty International report suggests.
For many years descendants of Gukurahundi victims who cannot produce identification details or death certificates of their parents whose lives were lost during the massacres in the early 1980s have struggled to acquire documentation as Zimbabwean citizens hence they remain on the peripheries of economic participation.
