Mining & Trade News

Long lasting solution required to deal will illegal mining

The problem of illegal mining and smuggling of precious minerals has been rampant for many years in Malawi with the Government continuously failing to deal with it.

Small-scale Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASMs) hotspots such as Makanjira in Mangochi and Kasungu have existed for over a decade with the Government employing different measures to stop the miners but to no avail.

The solutions that have been used by Government to deal with illegal mining but failed include use of force through deployment of Malawi Defence Force (MDF) soldiers and the Police Mobile Force unit of the Malawi Police Service.

We, therefore, received the news that Government has once again deployed MDF and Police officers to deal with unarmed informal ASMs as a surprise. We agree with Natural Resources Justice Network National Coordinator Kennedy Rashid who is quoted in our article on Page 16 that the involvement of soldiers in the exercise is being associated with potential human rights abuses because they are not trained for law enforcement and judicial processes unlike Police officers.

Experience with this option of using force to stop illegal ASM mining before has shown that these miners run away from mines at the sight of the police and soldiers but always return to their work places when officers leave the sites.

This clearly proves that use of force is not the solution to address illegal ASM mining in Malawi but as President of the Federation of Artisanal and Small-Scale Miners in Malawi Percy Maleta says in our article, Malawi needs a lasting solution to this problem that will ensure that the miners are able to continue with their work responsibly while government collects royalties and taxes from the trade.

As Maleta says, Government needs to engage the miners, give them the required licences, and form cooperatives to easily sensitise them on sustainable and responsible mining practices that do not harm the environment. Arresting artisanal miners certainly contradicts the government's efforts to formalize illegal ASM mining through formation of cooperatives.

Malawi has been losing revenue from unregulated small-scale mining of gold and other precious minerals for a long time. Government needs to engage the miners to embark on these long lasting initiatives that will protect these precious minerals, lives that are being lost through accidents due to unsafe mining practices, and the environment.

Bans on issuing of licences to ASMs and exportation of raw minerals when Malawi lacks facilities to process minerals mined by the ASMs are a nonstarter.

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