MBOMBELA – In one of the most rural parts of Swaziland today a village uprising has reached its climax as villagers have risen up against their traditional authorities and their local source of employment, a mine partly owned by the king.
The village is called Ndunayithini, the mine, Maloma.
While the recent unprecedented uprising is related to the villagers’ perceptions that the chiefs in the area are standing in the way of job opportunities, the deep ill feeling towards the mine can be traced to years of lack of social responsibility and continued negligence of environmental concerns by the mine. The villagers have lamented the fact that since the mine’s inception, the village has not improved it’s social conditions.
If anything, the mine has caused great harm to their environment and personal property. High rates of unemployment, lack of basic facilities such as clean running water and scant educational facilities have resulted in a high HIV prevalence and crime amongst the youth in the area.
The operations of the mine have also cause sever damage to houses located close to the mine as their brick walls have cracks due to the routine blasting which goes on in the mine. Despite knowledge of this, the mine has never shown any sympathy with the local residents, as its only concern is profit.
It is due to all these underlying negative effects of the existence of a mine in their vicinity which caused the residents to show their displeasure by rising up to stop operations.
While the local media has chosen to focus on the one issue concerning the chiefs’ unfair labour brokerage activities, the residents continue to seeth at the deeply unsympathetic and naked social irresponsibility shown by the Maloma company, which Mswati remains a major shareholder in.
