Dying rivers dry up livelihoods
MUREWA, 25 April 2012 (IRIN) – Thousands of poor Zimbabweans have turned to
illegal panning for precious minerals, but environmental and water experts
say their activities are contributing to the drying up of rivers which many
communities rely on for their livelihoods.
“Siltation of rivers is becoming endemic in the country, particularly in
regions where there is acute illegal panning of minerals, especially gold.
Rivers have been reduced to rivulets,” said the Zimbabwe National Water
Authority (ZINWA) in a November 2011 statement aimed at drawing attention to
the country’s “dying rivers and water bodies” and their impact on downstream
communities.
Illegal gold mining is common along rivers that run close to the Great Dyke,
a hilly mineral-rich belt which cuts across most of the country, and is
concentrated in Mashonaland Central, West, East and Midlands provinces.
Diamond panning is associated with the Chiadzwa District of Manicaland.
According to John Robertson, a Harare-based economic consultant, people
began turning to gold panning in large numbers in the early 1990s when the
country was hit by poor harvests due to droughts and job layoffs resulting
from the government’s economic structural adjustment programme.
“The damage caused by illegal mining is enormous. It is a vicious cycle as
people are taking to panning in order to earn a living, but in the end their
activities are causing untold degradation,” Robertson told IRIN.
Monica Mapeka, a 24-year-old single mother of two from rural Murewa
District, about 100km northeast of Harare, the capital, regularly visits the
banks of Mazowe river, a tributary of the River Zambezi which passes through
the area, in search of alluvial gold. Armed with a pick, shovel and
container, and clad in muddy overalls, she joins hundreds of other illegal
gold panners popularly known as `makorokoza’ in digging up the riverbed.
From dusk until dawn, she and two other women work together to mix the earth
they have dug up with water and move it in circular motions in containers
until they are left with small quantities of mud containing shiny yellow
particles of alluvial gold.
“On a lucky day, we get something like two ounces that we sell for US$40 and
share the money. If you work hard enough, it’s easy to get rich,” said
Mapeka. “We are single mothers and have to do something to fend for our
children and other members of the extended family, otherwise we will starve
and walk in rags.”
Mercury pollution
In an effort to concentrate their yield, the `makorokoza’ often mix the
residual ore with mercury, a practice that Steady Kangata, the education and
publicity manager for the Environmental Management Authority (EMA), said
created a health hazard for people and animals downstream.
“Mercury has the tendency to accumulate in the bodies of animals and humans
who consume it, and in the case of people, if it gathers to a certain level,
it can cause hair loss and the breakdown of the nervous system,” he said.
In recent decades, Mairosi Mangwende, 60, also from Murewa, has witnessed
Mazowe river degenerate from a fast-flowing waterway which was too deep to
cross during the raining season, to a muddy trickle. The activities of the
illegal miners have marked the river bed with deep holes and gullies where
the water collects in small rivulets that quickly dry up. The large amount
of soil they dig up is eventually washed away by rain, silting up the river
downstream.
“Almost throughout the year, we would get fish to eat at home and sell but
that is no longer the case,” said Mangwende. “The cattle and goats are
suffering because they cannot drink this muddy water.”
He added that households used to own as many as 50 cattle, but that it had
become rare for a family to have even eight beasts, partly because of the
scarcity of drinking water for livestock.
Vegetable gardens that used to dot the river banks had also virtually
disappeared, said Mangwende, and households could no longer rely on the
income they earned from selling produce from riverside gardens.
Diamond mining
Zimbabwe’s largest river, the River Save, which flows east towards
Mozambique and the Indian Ocean, is another victim of illegal mining.
Diamond mining at Chiadzwa, where thousands flocked after the discovery of
alluvial diamonds in 2005, has contributed to the drying up of the river and
the many communal livelihood activities it supported such as gardening,
smallholder irrigation projects and bricklaying.
ZINWA has called for stiffer penalties for illegal mining and urged greater
joint action with the mines ministry, EMA and the Wildlife Management
Authority, while EMA has carried out joint operations with the police to
arrest the illegal panners.
According to Mapeka, such efforts have had little effect: “There is so much
poverty and some of these police officers take bribes to let us continue.”
Climate change
According to a 2010 report on climate change vulnerability and adaptation
preparedness in Southern Africa commissioned by the German organization,
Heinrich Böll Stiftung, rising temperatures and droughts are also playing a
role in the drying up of Zimbabwe’s rivers.
The report predicted that rates of evapo-transpiration from river basins
will continue to increase as temperatures rise while runoff was projected to
decline, with the Zambezi Basin the worst affected.
“It is often the case that when people’s livelihoods are threatened, as has
happened in the case of rivers running dry, they tend to look for
alternative survival opportunities that the environment can provide,” said
Unganai. “For instance, they invade the forests and cut down trees, leading
to deforestation that in turn causes massive runoff that further silts up
the rivers.”
Robertson said siltation was reducing water volumes in downstream dams and
would eventually affect agriculture. “We still have commercial farming
activities that are fed by existing dams but siltation will finally affect
them, leading to hundreds of families losing their sources of income when
breadwinners lose their jobs,” he told IRIN.
Communities that have been heavily dependent on rivers for their livelihoods
need to be helped to look for other sources of income away from the river
courses, said William Nduku of the Forum for Environmental Education.
“Faced by dying rivers, the best option is to relocate livelihood activities
from those water bodies to the homesteads through the provision of communal
water points such as boreholes which can be effective in communal or
smallholder market gardening while also providing water for livestock and
other uses,” he said.
[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]