(NEWZIMBABWE) Minerals receipts oversight must extend to private mines

Minerals receipts oversight must extend to private mines
10/02/2012 00:00:00
by Tafadzwa Calvin Sengwe

THE Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association will be holding a planning session to establish a Zimbabwe chapter of the ‘Publish What You Earn’ campaign in Harare on February 15, 2012. This is indeed a noble idea.

The objective of this campaign is to lobby the government and the mining industry to make public their transactions in respect of recipients of all payments made which includes purchases, consultancy work, statutory payments etc.

This concept will, in the main, eliminate the practice of corruption. If organisations are made to publish their revenues and how they spent their money, then funds committed for vice activities like corruption will be easily identified.

Publish What You Earn then increases accountability and transparency as no organisation would like to tell the public that they are involved in corruptive activities.

It is commendable that the government of Zimbabwe has already embraced this concept. Through the Ministry of Mines, the nation has been told how much is to be expected out of the diamonds sales from Marange diamond fields, details of the foreign investors involved and quantum of diamond sold. These announcements by Mpofu are unique as they have never been made since the arrival of the Pioneer Column.

However, it is worrying to note that multinational corporations who pride themselves as champions of corporate governance claiming to uphold the principles of transparency and accountability have shunned, for a long time, this noble concept.

For example, mines around the country – despite having been in business for the past fifty years – have never published how much they have mined, how much and to whom they have sold the minerals and how much profit was remitted out of the country. No records have been proffered to the public on how much these big companies are paying in taxes to the relevant authorities. It is all shrouded in secrecy.

It is high time organisations like mines published these statistics so that local communities from where they extract these minerals know how much these companies are making. The hope is that these mines would increase investments in local communities rather than expropriate all profits to their parent companies.
Transparency and accountability should not only be demanded of the government but all organisations.

In December 1999, Global Witness published a report called A Crude Awakening, an exposé of the apparent complicity of the oil and banking industries in the plundering of state assets during Angola’s 40-year civil war. It became clear that the refusal to release financial information by major multinational oil companies aided and abetted the mismanagement and embezzlement of oil revenues by the elite in the country. The report concluded with a public call on the oil companies operating in Angola to ‘publish what you pay’.

It was clear, however, that the lack of transparency in the extractive industries was also a significant concern in other resource-rich but poor countries. Therefore, in June 2002, Global Witness along with other founding members, CAFOD, Open Society Institute, Oxfam GB, Save the Children UK and Transparency International UK, launched the worldwide PWYP campaign, calling for all natural resource companies to disclose their payments to governments for every country of operation.

The small founding coalition of NGOs was soon joined by others such as Catholic Relief Services, Human Rights Watch, Partnership Africa Canada, Pax Christi Netherlands and Secours Catholique/CARITAS France, along with an increasing number of groups from developing countries.

In Zimbabwe, coincidentally, the campaign is being launched at the height of political contestations on the Marange diamond fields receipts. This is interesting. Mining in Zimbabwe has been happening since 1890 to date. The focus on mining must not seem to be confined to the three existing diamond mining companies but an open campaign must be directed to the entire industry.

There has been deafening silence in the past by civil society on the exploitation of mineral resources by Western-owned mining houses. In fact, we started to see civil society interest in mining when the government of Zimbabwe took over the Marange diamond fields. There is nothing wrong at all with civil society having oversight on the Marange diamonds, but that oversight must not be confined to this area only.

We would want Shamiso Mutisi and Farai Maguwu, prominent civic rights activists, to do assessments at Zimplats, How Mine, Murowa diamonds etc. This noble campaign must not be abused for cheap political mileage but executed in a manner that forces all mining houses to account for their proceeds.

The launch is going to be held two days before the European Union meets to review the sanctions regime on Zimbabwe. The campaign will be contemptuously dismissed if it only focuses on mining activities where black capital is involved and ignores western-owned mining enterprises.

Tafadzwa Calvin Sengwe is a Human Rights and Environmental Law Director with Resources Exploitation Watch. You may contact him on tcsengwe@yahoo.com