Further up the dusty track is Brenda Mukosai, who says that her husband, Joseph, suffers from "smoke in the chest" and can no longer work at the mine. We come to a larger shack where locals sell vegetables and fish. There are no buyers. Everything is caked with insects.
Later that day, I manage to reach Xu Ruiyong, the mine's deputy CEO. "I don't suppose I can do anything for you," he says curtly. "I am hesitant to have contact with any journalist. I have to hang up. Sorry, good-bye."
It wasn't always this grim for Zambia's copper miners. Just five years after its independence from British rule in 1964, Zambia was classified as a middle-income country, its GDP among the highest of any African nation. In 1969, with copper prices soaring, the country's socialist government nationalized the mines and set up a cradle-to-grave welfare system in the mining communities. Then copper prices collapsed. Between 1974 and 1994, per capita income declined by 50%, leaving this the 25th-poorest country in the world. In the late 1990s, prodded by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Zambia decided to reverse course and privatize. By 2000, the country's mines had been split into seven different units and sold off to various foreign operators. China's government took one slice in 1998 for what is believed to be $20 million: Chambishi. The terms and details of the deals were never made public.
One thing is known. As part of the Chambishi deal, the Chinese operators promised Zambia's government that it would have an independent environmental report done by the end of that year. It didn't appear until 2006, and when it did, it was damning. Among the highlights: illegal disposal of hazardous waste; failure to deliver a promised business plan for maximizing benefits to local Zambian businesses and suppliers; deterioration of the availability and quality of health services (despite initial vows to maintain them); failure to monitor air quality and prevent groundwater contamination (despite promises to do so); and a lack of training and development of Zambians. "The state seems to have developed political relationships with certain mining houses that mean that health and safety, labor, immigration, and environmental regulations can be ignored with impunity," concludes another recent study, "For Whom the Windfalls?", by copper experts from Oxford and Zambia's Copperbelt universities.
Populist opposition leader Michael ("King Cobra") Sata ran for the presidency in 2006 on an anti-Chinese platform. His campaign was so effective -- he was fond of deriding the Chinese as "infesters" rather than investors -- that it prompted Beijing to violate its oft-stated policy of "noninterference" by threatening to cut diplomatic relations if Sata won. He did not.
A fiery and sometimes wildly egotistical politician, Sata, improbably, eulogizes the Americans and British colonists, who, he says, left the country with a legacy of technology, civil service, and order. "The West refined the copper here and didn't leave an environmental mess," he says, sitting in his Patriotic Front party office in Lusaka. "When we took full control, they did not stop helping us. And they trained us to interpret that technology and gave us skills." Zambia's information minister, Mike Mulongoti, offers a less-rosy recollection of the colonial period: "The West left us nothing," he told me. "They were extracting [copper] and taking it away, and it's wrong for them to blame the Chinese for doing the same. You can't blame those who come afterward to try and take advantage of the situation. If it's good for the goose, it's not good for the gander?"
Nobody has a clear count of how many Chinese people are in the country. The government estimates 3,000; Sata says 80,000. Whatever the real number, there are up to a hundred Chinese-owned shops in Lusaka, and as tensions have risen, Chinese names above the doors have been frequently painted over or removed. Today, it's rare to see Chinese owners inside the stores; they may empty the registers each day, but they leave the locals to deal with customers. At one such shop, Zambia-China Mulungushi Textile, a Zambian manager behind the counter says flatly that "the Chinese are not good to work with." Pay is poor, and "if you have a problem at home and need money, they won't help you. They won't even give you an hour off to take your daughter to a health clinic if she's sick."
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Recent Comments | 10 Total
June 20, 2008 at 2:09am by Elliot Noteware
Wow what an intereting read, we will be tapped out soon.