By Lungelo Ndhlovu
Under the blazing sun, a group of men use picks and shovels to dig up a bushy patch of land outside Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, stopping every few seconds to scan the soil for signs of gold.
The 13 men, led by one carrying a metal detector, left open gullies all over the area in Filabusi, about 80km (50 miles) south of Bulawayo.
They told the Thomson Reuters Foundation they would dig wherever their metal detectors sensed gold, clearing bush and burning grass if they had to – even on someone else’s property. None of the men had a mining permit.
“Whenever you hear of a gold rush, you know serious money is involved. People literally pick up gold nuggets,” said Thomas Ncube, one of the miners whose name has been changed to protect his identity.
With Zimbabwe going through its worst economic crisis in a decade, desperate citizens are turning to illegal gold mining to make a living, officials say, sparking fervent gold rushes that can lead to violence and drive people from their land.
The problem has gotten worse over the past year, warned Robert Msipa, a district officer with the government’s Environmental Management Agency.
“In some recent cases police have (had) to set up bases, as such gold rushes are punctuated with machete violence,” he said in a phone interview from Bubi, the district he oversees in western Zimbabwe.
A spokesman for the national police force in Harare declined to comment.
There are no official figures on illegal gold-mining activities in Zimbabwe.
But Msipa noted that since September 2018, eight gold rushes involving both licensed and unlicensed miners have been recorded in Bubi district, one of the most gold-rich areas of the country.
Locals in other parts of Zimbabwe reported similar spikes in illegal mining in their areas.
In the country’s western Insiza district, farmers described how in October illegal miners burned most of their grazing lands to clear the way for digging, and then left behind vast open pits that injured cattle who fell into them.
Small-scale and illegal miners sometimes also add mercury to the soil to separate minute gold particles from other minerals, farmers said.
“They burn grass for their metal detectors to work and use mercury which is very dangerous to our livestock and humans,” lamented villager Soneni Ncube…
