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OpenChinese Investments In Zimbabwe Yield Minimal Benefits For The Country - Eddie Cross
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s official biographer, Eddie Cross, has said Chinese nationals have increasingly targeted Zimbabwe to secure raw materials for their industries, intending to eventually return to China.
According to Cross, there are now more than 85,000 Chinese nationals residing in Zimbabwe, but he said these people are not permanent migrants; rather, they all plan to return to China eventually.
In a recent article on his website, Cross asserted that China’s move to establish a presence in Zimbabwe is driven by the need to relocate steel production away from China due to trade restrictions from the US and Europe.
He also suggested that the Chinese are looking to transfer environmentally polluting industries to Africa, seeking to capitalize on the continent’s natural resources while avoiding the environmental constraints imposed at home. He wrote:
We have the best Chrome deposits in the world, 9 billion tonnes of it worth a conservative US$100 trillion.
We have enormous Lithium reserves and they are loaded with other critical minerals that are in fact worth more than the Lithium and we do not understand what that means.
We applaud them because shortly we will be exporting 5 million tonnes of lithium concentrate a year to China, worth perhaps US$4 billion in new export earnings, four times our famous tobacco crop, but missing the fact that it might contain other metals and minerals worth many times more.
A quarter of our gold output goes to China and we have no idea about how they are doing that or what is involved, but the evidence of open cast mining, large investments in milling and extracting machinery for the small-scale mining industry here which is among the most important in the world, is everywhere.
They ignore environmental regulations and leave behind a moonscape of countryside that looks like a World War 1 battlefield.
They are exploiting our finest coal reserves for their smelters and steel production, even exporting their surplus
Cross said the exploitation of Zimbabwe’s raw materials by the Chinese began after the discovery of diamonds in Marange. He said:
It all started when we discovered the Marange diamond fields and they joined forces with our old army generals and created a company that was eventually responsible for 80 per cent of the production of raw diamonds there.
I estimate that US$30 billion in raw diamonds has been produced between 2008 and today. At one stage we were larger than Botswana as a diamond-producing State.
The Chinese company that was involved was a tiny, rural corporation in China, owned by the Red Army. Today it is a multinational corporation with a whole bevy of top-class hotels, a private Jet and headquarters for Africa in Mozambique.
Our old Army Generals all benefitted greatly, just look at the homes many of them have built in this country, the physical evidence of Chinese-owned real estate in Harare is everywhere.
The people of Marange still wallow in poverty and the active diamond fields do not have a single kilometre of the tarred road although they have an international standard airport which can receive large aircraft to fly products out and bring people and equipment in…
What concerns me, is that none of this activity has any application to the needs of Zimbabwe. When I investigated the Marange diamond fields in 2012, as a Member of Parliament, I was able, with relative ease, to get the production information I needed for 5 of the 6 mining companies involved.
Why, because they all employed Zimbabweans and I got daily output figures and even quality data (19 per cent Gemstone quality) and even sales data. The last remaining miner was Chinese owned and operated and they employed no Zimbabwean staff.
Cross argued that while Zimbabwe gains some benefit from exporting raw materials to China, the Chinese derive far greater advantages, all while causing significant environmental degradation. He said:
The benefit to Zimbabwe of this level of Chinese activity here is evident. They buy the majority of our tobacco, our ferrochrome exports run to tens of millions of dollars a year.
Drive past Hwange Colliery, owned notionally by the Government but in fact now largely a Chinese asset. The smokestacks of coke batteries belching into the atmosphere.
The queues of heavy-duty trucks carrying coal to local and regional markets. The road north and south now smashed and barely usable.
There is little or no value addition except for the primary production phase. There are no plans to invest in a Lithium refinery to produce a product suitable for use in the production of batteries.
Even the steel plant is only producing steel billets for export to China for conversion into finished products.
International sanctions may force them to produce steel for sale to manufacturers in the West but for the time being they are producing a product for export in primary form.
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