The bittersweet reality of Chinese investments and the plunder of Zimbabwean lives and dignity

Tendai Ruben Mbofana

This morning, I received a distressing and heart-wrenching plea from a reader that serves as a haunting window into the life-threatening conditions many of our fellow citizens endure daily.

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This reader reached out to share the harrowing reality at a Chinese mining company operating in Gwanda, where young Zimbabwean men and women are being driven by sheer desperation into the jaws of blatant exploitation.

Out of a total lack of employment options, these workers are forced to accept any terms offered to them, often signing one-sided contracts that protect only the employer while their own fundamental rights are trampled into the dust.

The footage shared with me depicts a scene that should be unthinkable in a modern nation.

It shows workers performing high-stakes structural welding deep inside mining shafts without even the most basic safety gear or harnesses.

There was no induction and no oversight, just the cold demand for labor at any cost to human life.

One is left to wonder if there have ever been any inspections from the department responsible for health and safety, or if these young lives are simply considered collateral damage in the pursuit of profit.

Welding structural steel in confined spaces like mining shafts demands extreme caution, yet here, workers face severe injury or death from falls, sparks, and toxic fumes with zero protection.

This disturbing concern raised by the reader reminds me of a profoundly unsettling discussion I had only yesterday with a renowned academic in Hong Kong who closely follows my work.

He reached out to hear my thoughts on Chinese investments in Zimbabwe, particularly their impact on environmental, social, and governance standards.

In our most frank discussion, he relayed a set of justifications used by these companies that I found deeply insulting to the people of Zimbabwe.

He told me that in his research, he had encountered several Chinese-owned companies in Zimbabwe who claimed they only offered short-term employment contracts and poor salaries to locals because the employees did not want long-term stability as they supposedly loved a nomadic life.

They further claimed that if they gave long-term contracts, the workers would simply run away from work shortly afterward.

As if this were not condescending enough, I found even more outrageous the claim by these investors that the reason they paid Zimbabweans lowly—and at times never paid at all—was because once these workers were paid, they would allegedly abscond from work and disappear for days to go drinking.

Some, they claimed, never returned.

If this is not a blatant attempt to dehumanize an entire workforce, then I do not know what is.

Such claims reveal a deeply troubling stereotype about Zimbabwean workers—one that portrays them as unreliable or undisciplined.

This kind of thinking easily becomes a convenient justification for poor wages, short-term contracts, and disregard for labour rights.

This attitude explains why they treat our people as second-class citizens in their own country.

They find absolutely nothing wrong with flouting the country’s labor laws by underpaying or refusing to pay their workers while forcing them to work under unsafe and unbearable conditions.

Based on numerous reports, these bosses are not even averse to physically manhandling their workers—as evidenced by the sadistic 2024 incident in Bindura where miners were filmed being suspended from a front-end loader bucket by their Chinese supervisors—or, in the most extreme cases, shooting them to death for demanding their rights, as seen in the recent 2025 tragedies in Mutoko and Filabusi.

This is how low they think of us.

​It also explains why these investors have had the audacity to evict local communities from their ancestral lands—stretching from the coal fields of Dinde to the lithium-rich mountains of Buhera—often desecrating the graves of our ancestors without explicit consent, fair compensation, or any meaningful development.

While these companies make millions from our natural resources, they feel entitled to freely poison vital water sources like the Matezva Dam with chemicals, mutilate our mountains—as seen in the devastation of Redcliff and Boterekwa—and degrade our land until it is a scarred shell of its former self.

Across Zimbabwe, similar complaints have been raised by communities, civil society organisations, and environmental watchdogs regarding mining practices linked to foreign investors.

The situation at the mining company in Gwanda is merely a localized symptom of this national disease.

The one-sided contracts and the lack of accountability are part of a broader pattern of regulatory failure that leaves the Zimbabwean worker defenseless.

The most tragic part of this unfolding drama is that those in authority are doing absolutely nothing to rein in these operators who appear to have become our new colonial masters.

It is a painful realization that those in power are either directly benefiting financially from these opaque operations or are simply too afraid of Beijing to take any firm action.

We are witnessing a massive regulatory vacuum where local authorities, the National Social Security Authority, the Ministry of Environment, and the Ministry of Mines seem to have abandoned their statutory mandates.

Zimbabwe already has laws that should prevent such abuses, including the Labour Act, the Mines and Minerals Act, and the Factories and Works Act, which require safe working conditions and proper oversight in hazardous workplaces such as mines.

By allowing this to continue, the government is essentially complicit in the abuse of its own citizens.

We cannot allow this new form of oppression to take hold in a sovereign nation like Zimbabwe.

We must refuse to be treated as a frontier for extraction where human life is cheaper than the minerals being pulled from the earth.

The current trajectory is a betrayal of the struggles that defined our history.

We need to resist and reject this new form of imperialism with the same vigor that our ancestors used to fight foreign domination.

We need to reclaim our pride as a brave nation.

It is time for the government to stop prioritizing foreign capital over the blood and sweat of its people.

We must demand that every investor, regardless of their origin, respects our laws, our environment, and our dignity.

It must be acknowledged that Chinese investment has played a significant role in Zimbabwe’s mining sector, bringing capital into an economy that struggles to attract international financing.

However, investment should never come at the cost of human dignity, environmental destruction, or the abandonment of labour protections.

If an investment requires the sacrifice of our youth in unventilated shafts or the displacement of our elders from their land, then it is not investment; it is plunder.

The reader who reached out to me regarding the situation in Gwanda asked if anyone was watching.

The answer must be a resounding yes.

We are watching, and we must speak out until the silence of the authorities is broken.

We must ensure that all relevant authorities are held accountable for their negligence.

These young lives are worth it, and our national dignity is worth more than any opaque investment deal that treats our people as expendable tools of extraction.

We must stand together to ensure that Zimbabwe belongs to Zimbabweans and that the era of being treated as “nomadic” or “unreliable” laborers in our own land comes to a permanent end.

The struggle for social justice and accountability is not just about wages; it is about the right to work in safety and to live with the dignity that every human being deserves.

• Tendai Ruben Mbofana is a social justice advocate and writer. To directly receive his articles please join his WhatsApp Channel on: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaqprWCIyPtRnKpkHe08