A peculiar case of gold fever got a Zimbabwe man arrested this week. On the hunt for nuggets, he decided it was in his best interest to dig underneath a railway track.
Unfortunately for him, his dangerous and illegal prospecting ambitions will result in up to a decade of prison time.
“An artisanal gold miner was arrested by loss control personnel on Sunday while digging for gold under the railway tracks in Mvuma,” the National Railways of Zimbabwe said in a social media statement Wednesday.
The African railroad service has sent a team of engineers to examine and repair the damage before any trains pass over that section of the track again.
“It is an offence under the Railways Act to prospect for minerals within the railway reserve and is punishable by up to 10 years in jail,” the organization added.
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Zimbabwe journalist calls it a sign of the times
A representative from the nation’s Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG) told a local publication that the incident was merely a symptom of larger issues of inequality plaguing the country’s mining and resource sectors.
“This incident reflects a deeper crisis,” CNRG communications officer and freelance journalist, Donald Nyarota, explained to popular media outlet ZimEye, “communities are destroying national infrastructure out of desperation while mining companies extract billions without developing the areas they operate in.”
He says the root causes of such actions need to be confronted by the government, mining authorities and companies.
“Communities are increasingly resorting to desperate and unsafe mining practices due to exclusion from formal mining benefits, widespread poverty and the lack of development in mineral-rich areas,” Nyarota added.
There are an estimated 1 million artisanal miners in the country at the moment. A high rate of unemployment has driven many residents to take up small-scale gold mining to make ends meet.
Zimbabwe is one of many nations that has been choosing to stockpile gold in recent months. The African country’s reserves rose from 800 kilograms last year to over 3 tonnes this year. Gold currently accounts for over 30 per cent of Zimbabwe’s export revenues and about 7 per cent of the nation’s GDP.
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