The Sunday Mail
Darlington Musarurwa Business Editor
SOMETHING is stirring in Africa’s mining sector.
The urge to control the exploitation of Africa’s non-replenishable mineral resources and taming the appetite of exploitative multinational mining companies, like popcorn, is popping up in various mineral-rich countries.
In Tanzania, shots have since been fired; in South Africa, the brawl is well underway; and in Zambia locals are slowly finding their voices, albeit faintly for now.
But nowhere is the clash between greedy miners and government as keenly and eagerly followed as in Tanzania.
It is simply epic.
On July 10, 2017, Tanzania’s President John Magufuli announced that he had signed mining bills that have far-reaching implications to the ownership of mining ventures, mining licences and contracts, including royalties.
Essentially, apart from hiking royalties of gold, copper, platinum and silver to six percent from four percent, the new mining regime makes it mandatory for government to control 16 percent in all mining projects.
While a moratorium on issuing out new mining licences has been declared, the new law gives Arusha the right, not only to review all existing mining licences with foreign investors, but to cancel mining contracts and renegotiate new ones as well, especially for natural resources such as gas and minerals.
The screws were tightened even further.
Mining companies no longer have the right to international arbitration. Tied to that is a drive to compel all the mining entities to list on the Da res Salaam Stock Exchange in order to enable wananchi to participate.
It is also designed to improve transparency as well.
The latest interventions follow the ban on export of gold and copper concentrates in March, which was meant to push for the construction of a domestic mineral smelter.
Similarly, South Africa, it seems, is in the throes of another mining revolution.
Exactly a month ago, on June 15, Pretoria gazetted a new and reviewed mining charter which requires black South Africans to control 26 percent of mining ventures.
Tentatively, the South African government had initially angled for a 51percent threshold, but relented after resistance.
But the new law gives Black Economic Empowerment shareholders in new mining licences their shares by requiring that loans to fund their shares should be written off by the end of 10 years — the time they are expected to have full ownership.
They also have to maintain their percentage shareholding without having to put in the money to follow their rights, if the company has a rights issue.
More importantly, in what experts now effectively call a “race stamp” on share certificates, the shares can only be sold to other black shareholders.
There are other requirements as well that seek to fundamentally upend the skewed ownership structure in the mining sector.
And this benign cancer is equally catching on in neighbouring Zambia, where local contractors are now increasingly calling for a significant portion of mining contracts.
Global mining houses fear that while this phenomenon — which experts call resource nationalism —seems to be endemic, it will soon become a pandemic, with its attendant deleterious effect on global white capital(ism). It’s war.
But in Tanzania it is now “war”.
Quite clearly, a revolution is not for the sluggards, for forces that are determined to reverse it are huge.
In similar fashion to Zimbabwe’s Fast-Track Land Reform Programme, Tanzania similarly bulldozed its new mining laws through parliament with obscene haste.
The bills were signed on the very same day the Tanzanian parliament concluded its session on July 5.
One might wonder why Magufuli who, despite being known for having a short fuse, is now behaving more like Julius Malema by pushing a seemingly disruptive leftist revolutionary agenda.
Well, audit findings based on investigations done in May indicated that Arusha could have lost a jaw-dropping US$49 billion in revenue from copper and gold concentrates in the 19-year period between 1998 and 2017.
In fact, the first audit committee reviewing exports of gold and copper concentrate said last month it had found 10 times more gold in Acacia’s containers than the company had declared, including undeclared minerals such as iron and sulphur.
Does this sound familiar with our own mining sector, where train-trucks are daily transporting ore to neighbouring South Africa, where smelters, some of which are owned by the very same companies that hold interests in local mines, charge a rent for smelting the same ore they are mining here?
By the way, Acacia is Tanzania’s largest gold producer, which is controlled by Canadian-based Barrick Gold, itself considered the largest gold miner in the world.
All these figures are just conservative.
In what could turn out to be an ominous statement to mining companies, Magufuli issued out a chilling statement before setting up the audit committee.
“There are many wars that are being fought in the world, including economic wars. Therefore, I am sending you to fight this war in the mining sector,” he said.
But white capital is unabashedly cunning, and this is not surprising.
It seems that every time white capital is cornered, it has a fully-fledged infrastructure that it invokes to push back reforms that are perceived to be potentially damaging “investors”.
But who are these investors and how are they benefiting the continent.
Just in the same way the recent South African mining charter was pooh-poohed by Cadiz fund manager Peter Major as “outlandish”, the Tanzania government’s claim that it had been swindled a fortune by mining companies was derided by Investec analyst Hunter Hillcoat as “implausible”.
It is the same with “moral prefects” of capitalism in the form of the ever-eager ratings agencies such as Fitch Ratings, Moody and Standard and Poor who play “little gods” by passing judgment — on behalf of Western and European capital(s) — on the appropriateness or not of actions taken by African governments.
But the abiding faith that these institutions have towards the neo-liberal world-view is not unsurprising.
It gets disturbing when our own black intelligentsia — who ironically seem to be more competent to take over and lead the revolution in the mining sector — become ready sentries of white capital.
Maybe it is because of the expensive whisky enjoyed in plush outposts in the remote mining districts away from the prying eyes of the dirt-poor populations.
Maybe it is the hefty pay packages, some of which are drawn down as allowances in havens such as Panama.
Some local mining executives reportedly earn eye-watering amounts that top $70 000 per month.
It is this class that most often crystallises into powerful mining lobby groups — the various mining chambers — that are quick to point out, at every turn, that governments have no business in business, particularly in the mining sector.
Zimbabwe — through Mugabeism (a philosophy that fearlessly challenges both political and economic Western and European hegemony) — has been a vanguard in challenging the exploitative neo-liberal global architecture.
Resource nationalism, indeed literally, arguably first took hold in Zimbabwe.
And this is why the country, in the eyes of those who are stubbornly opposed to its determined push to address the excesses of capitalism, should not succeed, for it will harmful template to their designs.
But judging by recent events a revolution slowly but surely seems to be well underway.
Here at home, basa richigere kupera: there is need to follow through the revolution to its logical conclusion.
Ordinary Zimbabweans in fact and in deed should benefit from their own mineral resources.
