Mine recovery uplifts villages

LAWRENCE OOKEDITSE
Correspondence | Friday July 9, 2010 00:00

Here, at the confluence of the two villages, which a couple of years ago tussled over the naming of the African Copper holding, lies a copper mine - Mowana mine. I stand here at the gate that leads to the dirty-green heaps of soil and rocks from under the earth.

Not only that, it is a gate that opens to the hopes of many people in these villages - both miners and those who do not directly work for the mine. As production sales recover, smiles are returning to the faces of many of these people, whose humble surroundings, have not broken the close ties they enjoy. Economic recovery has nourished the financial side of things.

Up until African Copper restarted operations a few years ago, the ancient mine had been reduced to lying fallow and forming part of grazing lands for the two villages. With its resuscitation came prospects of economic boom for the two villages but the global economic recession played a hand in the serious cut in operations at the holding.

Frustrations became the order of the day as a number of people lost jobs and businesses lost income from the heightened consumer spending. The housing market was also affected as demand depressed.

'Things are getting better as you can see. It was bad last year but now production is going on and people are getting hired,' a youth activist in the village, Mmoloki Gaopatwe says. 'Many people had lost jobs because of the slowdown in the economy and companies such as Moolmans were unable to sustain their stay. Things are better now as more people are being hired,' says the young man, dressed in Wild West country boy attire.  

The mine though, for many locals, still employs rather cheap and unskilled labourers more than it does professionals from the villages. 'Well, the thing is it looks like the mine is small so they only employ uneducated people from the villages,' a miner says and adds, 'I think the mine is still small. So it does not have the capacity to attract most educated people'.

'There are a few people like artisans and other such because the mine does not pay as much as others do. They do not pay as much as BCL or Tati Nickel.  In fact, even Soda ash pays better than them so most people who are qualified from here would rather work at Sowa or in Francistown. So from the villages they hire mostly uneducated people through their 'yes and no' system,' Frank an employee in the armed forces says.

This notwithstanding, there are still signs of elation. As more 'unskilled labourers' get hired at the mine, the villages' economies feel a positive impact, after all, most people who reside in the villages fully are those who are hardly likely to get sustainable employment anywhere else. Therefore, coupled with remittances from the cities, the modest wages at the mines make life more bearable for most families.

'With more of these people going back to work things are getting better for many families. Our worry has always been that the youth here do not have avenues for entertainment as well as employment thus spend days loafing about and indulging in various home brewed beer that turns them into helpless drunks. So, with the mine hiring people again things are improving for these guys and their families,' Gaopatwe argues. Not only do those individuals get jobs, they spend their income within the village thus trickling down their wages to many others.

Challenges remain though. 'We also feel we should have a situation in place where the chiefs are not too involved in the recruitment process. They are arbitrators and we wish for a situation where aggrieved people can take problems to them for arbitration but not where they are interested parties,' a youth political activist, Uyapo David argues.   He further says they are doing their best to ensure the recruitment process remains open and to the benefit of all deserving people, especially the youth.

Of course whenever money rolls in the enterprising capitalist investor is sniffing somewhere thereabout. It is no different here. As you enter Mosetse village, a local businessman is setting up a lodge. A couple of years down the line, such a project would have been viewed as unsustainable. Deeper into the village as well, noticing the boom in the housing market, someone has constructed a whole complex for purposes of accommodating largely mine workers.  On the backdrop of this construction boom, another businessman, Joe Linga, had the ingenuity to setup a brickyard. Thus, most construction schemes use bricks from his project.

More exciting though is that Mosetse village has also seen a major face lift. Like many other villages in Botswana, structures here used to be predominantly mud and wattle. This is fast fading as most homesteads now have better housing as most structures are more durable and not so susceptible to collapse at the onset of a minor storm. There is more.

While in the past, a television set was a rare commodity, today innumerable families have a set and the sight of satellite dishes on many of these roofs tells a story of an economic revolution of sorts. While groups of people used to communally huddle around a television set at some prominent villager's house, in most cases the television would even be moved outside the house in order to accommodate more people, today it is a more intimate family thing as many families have the motion picture at home.

That picture, at some point a symbol of American consumerism's triumph, here signifies much the same. Today, thanks to the electrification of the village, a noisy generator in the background is not a distraction to the television ritual; neither are most people watching Chinese Tai-Chi or Kung fu records; they are receiving live pictures. Talk of integration into the global world. In the past, connection with the entire world was via radio and many kids did not have access to the world of motion pictures.  At individual family level, it appears people are thriving. Problems experienced are largely not of their making such as the near unpalatable salty water, lack of a well maintained road running through the village and perhaps a few streetlights.

The recession came and brought its own burdens even to a small village like Mosetse, perhaps to show just how much impact global events can have on even remote areas somewhere far from the cities where major global decisions are made. The good picture though now is that of recovery.