Kenya’s mining sector ripe for reforms

Whose responsibility is it to ensure occupational safety in workplaces where these poor and rural-based miners work?

I, working together with investigative journalism house, Africa Uncensored, have been running a training programme aimed at mentoring and encouraging young journalists to take a keener interest in reporting issues in the extractive sector.

We are training them on how to conduct ambitious enterprise and investigating reporting on the plight of artisanal miners in Kenya through unobtrusive observation of activities and working condition at their workplaces and through first- hand experiences and interaction with the miners where they work.

The findings of their investigations paint a very sorry picture of exploitation, especially of women miners.

In one story, I was amazed to learn how women artisanal miners in Kakamega face financial exploitation; cultural discrimination and hazardous working conditions. The women are forbidden from having access to mining shafts due to a superstitious belief that gold disappears when women access these tunnels and holes.

Read: Catastrophic mine failures risk small-scale mining sector

Another story by a budding reporter from Siaya County narrated how exploitation of artisanal miners is facilitated by a barter trade system in which women toil for hours only to paid by being given raw ore or soil- a currency of payment known in the local language as ‘lowo’. It is a very opaque system because the artisanal miner must accept payment in that form despite the fact that she cannot tell the value of the soil.

In yet another story, a young reporter in Migori county came up with sensational tales about underground mining tunnels where Chinese companies have surreptitiously dug horizontal tunnels that cut across peasant farms without their knowledge.

There are gripping tales in Migori about how peasants have been reporting that gold exploration has caused wells and aquafers to dry.
Indeed, the story of artisanal mining in Kenya is a long sorry tale about how gold prospectors exploit peasant landowners, leaving behind ugly gulleys and abandoned quarries.

It is also about how brokers exploit the poor by tampering with weighing scales, and how the poor are unable to press for their rights because most of the activity in this sector is unregulated.

I therefore ask: if it is this bad, why does the number of artisanal miners keep increasing? I read a study by the Association of Women in Energy and Extractives in Kenya that estimates that Kakamega alone has 40,000 women artisanal miners.

The reason why poor rural folk keep flocking into a sector with such exploitative working conditions is clear: the lack of alternative livelihood options.

How transparent is the regime for licensing gold prospectors in Kenya? How comprehensive is the regime governing the sharing of national revenues with multinational mining corporations and are the so- called production sharing agreements we have signed, especially with petroleum exploration companies, still fit for purpose?

Payment of royalties remains a big policy issue of concern. How much do we get from the multinationals in terms of royalties and is there transparency in what the government collects?

Under the law, mining companies are required to sign Community Development Agreements that commit them to spend a specified portion of their incomes in development work in the locations where they operate.

Yet when you scrutinise these agreements, what you see are lopsided deals designed to grant privileges to the multinationals at the expense of the communities. Committees charged with monitoring compliance are packed with community representatives who are unable to interpret the accounts of these companies.

Do these committees have capacity to monitor compliance by these mining companies? The mining sector is ripe for reform.

The writer is the former managing editor of The EastAfrican