Sand Poachers Fueling Environmental Harm in Zimbabwe
Nesbit Gavanga, 36, and five of his colleagues use shovels to load trucks with sand in Chitungwiza, which is right next to the highway.
The six men are apparently in the sand-poaching industry and openly confess that they have been fighting environmental officials to reduce land degradation. The group’s informal sand quarry lies 25 kilometers southeast of the Zimbabwean capital Harare.
Gavanga and his associates have been sand-poaching for years, as the gang has never been officially employed.
Gavanga, along with others, invaded a parcel of land in Chitungwiza, to begin mining sand around eight years ago.
“This patch of land has given us money over the years, and we can’t afford to leave it. We are here to stay, and we are here to turn the sand into money,” Gavanga told IPS.
Gavanga doesn’t seem to be bothered by the immense damage he and his associates have caused on the huge swathes land they have invaded at Chitungwiza.
They care about money and Gavanga has been able to build a large customer base with his colleagues over the years.
“We just bring our picks and shovels here, and customers come with their trucks, and we fill the trucks with the sand we sell. Yes, this isn’t our land, but we have to survive from it even though (the authorities say) we are not allowed to mine,” 34-year-old Melford Mahamba, one of Gavanga’s colleagues, told IPS.
Gavanga stated that they make between 30 and 40 US dollars per day from the enterprise.
This is bad news, however, for the environment.
Because they are able to harvest river sand, sand-poachers have left huge scars across Zimbabwe. These poachers leave behind uncovered pits.
Their customers are desperate individuals building urban homes.
According to the Environmental Management Agency (EMA), Zimbabwe’s statutory body responsible for ensuring the sustainable management of natural resources and protection of the environment, approximately 1694 hectares of land are affected by sand-poaching in the country, with Harare contributing to over 850 hectares of the statistics.
The EMA has not been able to stop the sand poachers.
“Authorities chase us away from the places we mine for sand, but we always return in no time, even as they arrest us at times. We just bribe the officials and continue with the business,” Mahamba said.
Environmentalists like Happison Chikova, based in Harare, blamed Zimbabwe’s poor economy for the land degradation unleashed by sand poachers.
“These people have no jobs. They believe that by selling sand soils, they can escape poverty and bankruptcy. They only make the environment suffer as they get very little money that hardly changes their lives,” Chikova told IPS.
For Mahamba, however, the profits are substantial.
“The profits are huge since sand sells for 6 to 8 US dollars a cubic meter. We sell to clients using their own transport,” said Mahamba.
In reality, the costs of sand poaching are very low and they only have to pay the bribes paid to the police.
For example, Chitungwiza’s council authorities are not fully equipped despite conducting regular raids against sand poachers.
“We conduct raids on sand poachers, but we don’t do that always due to insufficient resources, and so the sand poachers always go back to their illegal activities. It is like a cat-and-mouse game,” said Lovemore Meya, the Chitungwiza Municipality public relations officer.
For environmentalists like Chikova, sand poachers “damage vegetation while they dig out wide and deep pits which subsequently get flooded each rain season.”
Environmental lawyers claim that the practice contributes towards climate change in Zimbabwe amid growing sand poaching.
“Sand poaching increases Zimbabwe’s vulnerability to flooding in areas receiving high rainfall, with the practice of sand poaching also threatening wetlands, but sand poaching also affects water availability downstream, which then affects water use for climate adaptation purposes,” Ray Ncube, an environmental lawyer in private practice, told IPS.
EMA statistics showed that 9.5 million square metres of land in Zimbabwe had been affected by illegal sand poaching as of December 2019.
As vast swathes of land fall to degradation, environmental activists like Kudakwashe Murisi in Masvingo, Zimbabwe’s oldest town, has blamed the country’s polarized politics for enabling sand poachers to do so as they please with the environment.
“Sand poachers are often youths with links to the ruling Zanu-PF party, obviously shielded by their political leadership, making it difficult for anyone to call them to order when they start digging up everywhere for sand soil,” Murisi told IPS.
In power for 42 years, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) is this Southern African nation’s governing political party.
IPS UN Bureau Report
Source: ipsnews
