Gold is Zimbabwe's chief export, worth close to $1.2 billion in annual foreign-exchange receipts. Around half of the country's 33-tonne output comes from artisanal and small-scale miners, whose work is largely poverty-driven and rural — but, as the investigation lays bare, has been captured by wealthy elites and turned into a conduit for illicit financial flows.
Working across several outlets, the team set out to explain why the sector is so vulnerable. Stephen Tsoroti and Ankita Anand, writing in The Mail & Guardian, traced the patronage networks, the absence of accountability and the widening inequality that the trade both feeds on and entrenches. They identified the source markets and the players within them, named institutions operating beyond the reach of the law, and showed how few checks and balances apply compared with other competitive sectors.
Mazhar Farooqui, writing in the UAE's Gulf News, followed the money. Miners are required by law to sell their gold to Fidelity Printers and Refiners, owned by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, yet they receive only 55 per cent of the payment in US dollars and the rest in near-worthless RTGS currency. Many have responded by smuggling instead — fuelling turf wars that have claimed hundreds of lives along a route running from rural Zimbabwe to the Middle East and across much of Central Asia.
The clearest mark of the investigation's reach came in September 2020. Environmental groups in Zimbabwe drew on the report in presentations to the Cabinet, which then ordered a ban on riverbed and alluvial mining and directed holders of mining titles to obtain environmental clearance.
Read the full story here.
