ON the London Metal Exchange will reveal that the price of tin is between US$18,184 and US$18,530 per tonne – that is thrice the price of copper.
Tin is a soft, silvery white metal with a bluish tinge. Mix it with copper, then you get Bronze. Tin is widely used for platting steel cans used as food containers, in metals used for bearings and in solder.
But here in Chilobe, somewhere in Zimba’s Mapatizya area, artisan miners sweat it out and risk their lives to just get a kilogram of the mineral, which they sell cheaply to buyers from the cities.
One of the miners is Estely Siambalo. She is a 42-year-old mother of seven.
She, together with her children, including her youngest child who is only seven, come to dig in the pits.
It is a dangerous venture and the miners do not wear any protective clothing.
Estely has to involve her children if she has to increase her chances of getting enough tin to sell and meet her family’s needs.
“On a day, if I am lucky, I can get a cup or two,” she says.
A cupful of tin is roughly about 200ml and can weigh about three kilogrammes. “We used to sell it at K35 per kilogramme,” says Estely. “But that is after the buyers have sieved and separated the bad ones from the good ones. So, sometimes, what you thought was three kilogrammes can even come down to 1.5 kilogram,” she says.
It’s a huge gamble.
“Sometimes, it can take you a week to get a cupful of good quality tin,” says Estely.
And yet she has been mining in these pits since 1985.
Asked to point out at least one thing she has bought from the money she has earned, she cannot lift a finger.
“There is nothing significant. We just do it because there is nothing else to do here. The area is hilly and farming is not easy because of the stones and landscape,” she says.
She is not alone.
Similonga Makowa is also a regular at the site.
He says on some days, the site can have as many as 30 people digging for the tin with rudimentary tools such as shovels, chisels and hammers.
Some women can also be seen with woven sieves which they use to sieve the mineral in readiness to separate the good quality from the bad ones with a magnet.
Ironically, it seems Mr Makowa knows what risks come with mining from the site but he turns a blind eye to them.
“It’s not safe, I know. But what can I do,” he says. “That is why we need enough man power here to guarantee safety.”
Luckily for the miners, there has been no accident at the site.
“There is another tungsten pit nearby where the walls caved in and injured a woman. As for us here, we haven’t recorded any accident yet,” says the miner.
In a distance, sitting under a tree at the foot of a hill, is a buyer with a scale, waiting for the miners to bring out the mineral.
A brief chat with the man who only identifies himself as Biggy reveals that he was just an agent for an unnamed buyer.
“I just come to buy it on behalf of some people,” he says in a tone that was unfriendly and unwelcoming.
It was obvious he did not want to say more.
It is these compounding reasons that Caritas Zambia through a Swedish faith-based organisation, Diakonia, is working with the artisanal miners here to try and see how they can turn the tables and be able to earn more from the mineral than they are currently earning.
Chepa Lesa is programmes officer at Caritas Zambia. She says since the organisation discovered the group of miners here in June 2019, it has, with the help of Diakonia-funded Strengthened Accountability Programme (SAP II) project decided to step in and help.
“What Caritas Zambia is mainly doing in Chilobe is facilitating the attainment of a mining licence because when we went there initially, they were mining illegally and the price at which they were selling tin for was very low, at K35 per kilogramme,” she says.
She adds: “They also told us that it takes them days and sometimes weeks to mine that same kilogram and since we are well acquainted with the content of the Mines and Minerals Act of 2015, we knew that if they had at least gotten a mining licence, it would actually help them have that bargaining power, be legalised and be able to set the price for those minerals themselves.”
She wants the miners to quickly get a mining license if they are to benefit from the mineral.
Ms Lesa says the miners are being exploited by briefcase buyers because they lack proper documentation.
She says apart from Southern province, Caritas Zambia is also working in North Western, Copperbelt and Luapula where artisan miners face many challenges, among them safety and lack of proper equipment.
“As it stands right now, they have already registered as a cooperative and they are pushing for a licence and we shall be there to see how that goes,” she says.
Maimbo Kalenge is Diakonia country office programmes officer. She is happy that the group has obtained a cooperative certificate.
“So, we are hoping that with the coming in of the licence, the group is going to have more benefits accrued to them and we believe that when our communities are empowered, all other associated livelihood activities will be financed by themselves and they will be more reliant,” she says.
Joseph Poipoi who is the Chilobe mining group chairperson says officers from the department of mines in Choma have already been to the mining site to survey it and get its coordinates.
“All that is remaining is to get the consent letter from the chief [Chief Simwatachela] and we shall be good to go,” he says.
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