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Rumbidzayi Zinyuke Manicaland Bureau
ARTISANAL miners in Manicaland have said the use of agents in the sale of gold to Fidelity Printers and Refiners has contributed immensely to the continued leakages being experienced in the sector.

Government decriminalised sale of gold to Fidelity Printers and Refiners by individuals last year. However, many miners use middlemen to sell their gold as a way of avoiding hassles associated with selling through the formal channels.

In separate interviews, miners in Odzi and Marange said agents were ripping them off. Mr Edwin Gurudza, from Marange, said some of the gold sold to agents did not reach Fidelity Printers and Refiners, as it was being smuggled out of the country.

“Most artisanal miners use agents to sell their gold to Fidelity Printers, but because there are no receipts to account for gold sold to the agents, there is a lot of gold that disappears before reaching Fidelity,” he said. Small-scale gold miners have been making significant contributions of up to 45 percent to the country’s gold production in the past decade. Fidelity Printers and Refiners recently acknowledged that artisanal miners were being ripped-off by middle-men who buy gold at low prices. Manicaland Miners’ Association chairman Mr Lovemore Kasha in October this year said there was need for Government to harmonise laws.

“We need laws that work for us when they are crafted,” he said.
“So, while Government has been doing a lot of amendments to the Mining Act, we need to make sure that we benefit from it.

“Most artisanal miners operate on river bed and this is against the Environmental Management Authority’s laws. Because Government wants the gold produced by panners, they will continue to mine on the river beds.” The Zimbabwe Artisanal and Small-scale Mining Council (ZASMC) has been on a drive to register illegal gold miners countrywide to formalise their operations.

Formalisation of artisanal and small-scale miners’ operations is expected to go a long way in ensuring that gold from the miners in the sector was sold through legal channels. It will also bring sanity to the operations of a sector that has more than 600 000 small-scale miners and a further 700 000 of both registered and unregistered artisanal miners contributing to the country’s gold production.