07 Apr 2014

As more tipper trucks pass through the village, more frustrations and setbacks engulf this community.

Situated about 30 kilometres from Gaborone, Mmankgodi is a village whose harmony is fading away every time there are sounds of trucks to and from its nearby bushes.

And to make the situation more unpleasant, such trucks emerge loaded with sand. This automatically rubs salt on the resident’s sad sand mining story, writes BOPA’s Katlego Gaobotse and Bonang Masolotate.

Located in the Kweneng District, the village has lived to curse every sand mining activity taking place in its vicinity. “Oa ba bona, ba bo baa go utswa motlhaba, ke magodu dio tse,” vented Kgosi Toko Tshwaile as a six tonne truck vanishes into the forest.

Though vented out of frustration, Kgosi Tshwaile has no regard for licensed operators or illegal operators. To him, all have committed the same crime and continue to commit it, hence all are thieves destroying the community’s natural flora.

“We have long stopped giving people permission to mine our land. We do not know where they are taking these permits from,” he pointed. At the core of his frustrations is that whether illegal or legal, the effects of mining activities around the village are the same.

The land is not being rehabilitated and what frustrates the community is that the same people they rejected because they failed to rehabilitate the land after mining are the same who are issued with permits to mine.

Surprisingly, Kgosi Tshwaile knows the majority of these illegal and legal sand miners as well as the furrows they have dug. But he points out that their effort to curb the problem is defeated as authorities turn a blind eye on the environmental impact.

Hence the villagers continue to live with a sad mining story. “Dikgomo tsa rona di wela mo teng mo, we do not know who is giving these people permits,” he added.

The mining activities apart from destroying the grazing land also threaten to thwart the expansion of the village pan. According to Kgosi Tshwaile, one of the areas already destroyed by both legal and illegal miners was reserved for Botswana Power Corporation (BPC) for the construction of a power plant.

“We had already agreed to give BPC this land,” he emphasised. While the frustration is written all over Kgosi Tshwaile’s face, it is obvious the impact would be expensive to rehabilitate.

Nevertheless, this does not stop tipper trucks which have imposed themselves as common characters to frequent the village. In the past, there were efforts by the community to impound those mining without licenses but they were eventually defeated by the system.

According to Kgosi, those illegal miners were fined a mere P1 000 which they paid immediately and never ceased to mine. “Batho ba ja lefatshe la Mmankgodi, lefatshe la Mmankgodi le senyegile,” said Mr Tswabi Leinane who is one of the frequent miners there.

Though he is in possession of a legal licence to mine, Kgosi Tshwaile disputed the authenticity of the license. “Tshenyo e ntsi and there is no denial about that,” Mr Leinane chipped in to shift the attention from the documents, which he apparently leased from a fellow contractor.

Land overseer and village elder, Mr Mosweu Lesife pointed that the whole phenomenon have brought great suffering and aguish to residents because they wonder what their village is going to become in the next coming years.

Apart from mining, he points to heaps of litter in the area that has turned the usually quiet area into a dumping site. All these he said, damages the land and will be too expensive to rehabilitate.

An environmental conservationist, Ms Flora Mmereki outlined that the impact of ruthless sourcing of natural resources such as sand is widespread in the country.

“The government should consider hiking penalty fees for these illegal miners,” stressed Ms Mmereki who is also editor of Wena environmental magazine. She stressed that charges should be done to match the gravity of the devastating effects caused by disregard of mining of earthly products.

“When you degrade land, it may take up to 100 years for it to recover,” she stressed. To further curb the problem, she called upon the government to institute an environmental rehabilitation fund for smaller projects such as sand mining.

Another intervention could be for the community to police their own resources, she said. But in the absence of those, tipper trucks, dust, open pits and gabbage remain common features of Mmankgodi. ENDS