Yet the illicit and unregulated exportation of raw lithium ore threatened all this. Artisanal miners, who had rushed to mine and to informally sell this vital mineral to big foreign exporters, were unaware of the fabulous value of the mineral in the global market. Artisanal miners active in Midlands, Mashonaland Central and Mashonaland East provinces were selling lithium ore at ridiculous prices of as low as US$150 per tonne at most! Beyond our borders, the same ore would sell at above US$7 000 per tonne! There were no winners in the country. If anything, the country and its people were bleeding at a time when there was no law or enforcement mechanism to keep and guard the gates.
Within days, Government gazetted a law to stop this pillage. Still the smuggling of lithium and other strategic ores did not stop; if anything, the illicit mineral ore flows escalated. A more comprehensive response was thus needed. As I write, exportation of all raw mineral ores from Zimbabwe, including those of lithium, are now illegal, except with the permission of Government. This new law has to be understood together with another one on mining royalties.
From October last year, all mining companies exploiting designated minerals are required to pay half of their royalties to Government in actual processed minerals; the other half of royalties due to Government continue to be paid in cash.
This new policy means our country for the first time is beginning to stockpile strategic minerals, thus building reserves for current use, and for future generations. We thus started 2023 with a completely revamped minerals policy, a new one ever on our African continent and even beyond.
The world has since taken notice, with several countries in comparable circumstances hailing this bold move. Even mining companies are beginning to support the new policy, which I announced at Sabi Star Mine.
I went further. I reminded all mining companies to draw up and share with Government their mineral beneficiation plans.
I also reminded them to declare any other mineral by-products co-extensive with the main mineral for which they are licensed. All beneficiation plans have to be time-framed, and will be enforced to the letter. The benefits of this new beneficiation thrust will soon show when a new energy park takes shape in Mapinga, just outside Harare. The energy park is itself a precursor of things to come in our economy. I applaud all players in the mining sector and in industry who have readily embraced this new policy.
Why have we adopted this new thrust in mining? From colonial days right through to our Independence, Zimbabwe was exporting raw mineral ores to other economies of the world, principally those in the Western Hemisphere.
The justification for this in colonial times lay in the exploitative policy which divided the world into colonies and metropolises. The latter were even called “Mother Countries”!
Sir Godfrey Huggins, the then leader of the colonial Federation combining the then two Rhodesias and Nyasaland, figuratively called this a relationship of a horse and its rider. We, the satellite ex-colonies, were the horse; the white, so-called Mother Countries were the riders.
Yet it is quite hard to find anything maternal in such a one-sided relationship where owners of depletable resources are reduced to mere horses to be ridden by those in whose soil not the smallest particle of gold is found! But then, the times were colonial, in which case the law of conquest governed relations between the metropolitan centre and the colonial periphery.
What of now, a good four-plus decades into our Independence? What justifies the perpetuation of this rider-horse relationship, in the sphere of mining at the very least?
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