- Tuesday, April 23, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
GOLD constitutes a sizeable part of Tanzania’s export earnings and overtook tourism last year as the south-east African nation’s biggest foreign-exchange earner. But the country’s government loses huge amounts of gold through smuggling by transnational criminal networks, according to a report by Mohamed Daghar, regional coordinator — Eastern Africa, ENACT project.
And if views of experts like Luckystar Miyandazi are to be believed, gold-smuggling networks in Tanzania comprise local influential families who move the goods to contacts mainly located in countries like India, Kenya and South Africa, which are among the largest foreign investors in Tanzania’s mining sector.
According to the ENACT report, while the money could be used to improve the daily lives of ordinary Tanzanians, it is the smugglers who are making all the gains because of problems prevailing within the gold-mining sector.
Among the problems are conflicts of interest between multinational mining corporations and local small-scale artisanal miners and absence of enforcement of mining rules which sees the companies overlooking compliance. There are less than 10 foreign-gold mining companies in Tanzania while two-thirds of the country’s million-plus artisanal miners are employed in the gold sector.
Daghar claims that without the involvement of the state officials of Tanzania, it is almost impossible for the criminals to move gold. The country has changed its mining minister as many as three times in the past five years besides suspending, reshuffling and sacking several government officials in connection to gold smuggling but yet the menace continues.
“Last year, five state actors were implicated in helping a criminal network smuggle 27.4kg of gold worth $1.25-million in June and 15.4kg of gold worth $776,000 in December. In 2019, suspects were arrested also trying to smuggle 323.6kg out of the country,” he said in his piece.
The government of Tanzania has been caught between benefiting from foreign direct investment, dealing with colluding officials and balancing these with the complaints of small-scale miners.
It is not that the government is not taking actions to tackle the challenges in Tanzania’s gold-mining sector but the progress has been slow.
