In gold panning sites, extracting gold is about digging than filling pits.
The pits left by gold diggers from within and abroad scar waterways, farmlands and forests.
“I need money to feed my family, but the future looks scary. Gold harms our land,” says Misheck Garaja, digging into Chitimbe stream in Balaka.
The damage has alarmed some gold diggers to start planting bananas in the pits that dot streams and riverbanks.
They hope the bananas will spread their roots and suckers, slowing rainwater and silt that choke streams.
“Rainfall sweeps the loose soil into abandoned pits, silting Lisungwi River, which flushes debris into the Shire,” he says.
Mining since 1970s
The scorched bananas mirror a desperate attempt to mend the environment under siege from unregulated mining.
The pits and silt have left streams shallow, all over the place and prone to flooding.
Meanwhile, authorities seem to have left fast-spreading gold mining unregulated as the environmental damage worsens.
In Balaka, dozens dig ore daily in a gold rush dominated by wealthy cartels, including politicians and foreigners.
“We grew up hearing Malawi has no gold, but merchants from Europe came with heavy machinery in the 1970s and employed over 100 locals, who shared the equipment when the owners mysteriously disappeared with the gold,” says group village head Chitimbe.
The sneaky mining activity disputed founding president Hastings Kamuzu Banda’s rhetoric that farming was Malawi’s sole goldmine.
“Government acknowledged the existence of gold in 2004. I was among 25 locals it trained for two weeks for local communities to benefit from gold mining. But it’s a raw deal,” Chitimbe recalls.
The rip-off includes mining investors who show up alongside government gatekeepers from Lilongwe and Balaka District Council, only to disappear without filling the pits and paying for the degraded land.
“The pioneers left us with the knowledge we still use to pan gold, which is our main source of livelihood, but the rest leave pits and holes,” he says.
The area boasts four holes drilled by explorers from the Geological Surveys Department and 18 by Mota-Engil.
In 2019, a Chinese firm, called Plinth, brought 44-foot containers and acquired a vast stretch government officials surveyed for gold mining.
Chitimbe recalls: “The surveyors registered 89 people for compensation and we signed consents, but they cut the list to 16. In November 2019, a council official asked us to allow them to start mining immediately, but we demanded our payout first and the government officials assured us that we would be paid.”
“They dug up tasseling maize, trees and fertile soil, but payouts did not come. We accepted to wait because it was the festive season, but they disappeared one by one and in pairs—as if going for holidays—following the Covid-19 outbreak in China. They didn’t come back.”
The village head was one of the firm’s six watchmen who guarded its assets—including two loaders and an excavator—without pay for six months.
Together with a driver, they shared solar lights that now illuminate Chitimbe’s homestead and the neighbourhood.
“Even government didn’t come to explain the future of the mine. They only returned to introduce Fortune Hills, another Chinese company—maybe the same one. We asked them to compensate us for our fields?
“However, the officials told us only the land was ours, but the minerals underneath belonged to the State. We felt powerless as the investors who claimed to dig samples drilled several holes three-metres and carried truckloads of soil for gold panning.”
Chitimbe asks mining authorities to stop disrespecting the rural folk.
“They didn’t even say sorry to villagers who constantly stormed my home, accusing me of swindling them of millions from the Chinese who excavated in their fields,” he says.
Truckloads of soil gone
According to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, Malawi loses about 30 tonnes of topsoil per hectare annually due to alarming loss of green cover.
Unregulated mining accelerates the damage in hotspots like Chitimbe.
Peter Chagunda, 34 laments: “The so-called mining investors and their friends in power left my maize field destroyed. I don’t know what they had agreed with the chief, but I just found an excavator clearing my crops.
“They dumped barren rocks in a fertile streamside field that once produced bumper harvests for my family and for sale.”
Today, the father of two digs about two tonnes of rocky soil to get a milligram of gold.
“Oftentimes, I get none,” he says. “Still, I have to plant a banana in the pits to avoid what happened in my field.”
