Small-scale miners set to benefit from land

DEOGRATIUS KAMAGI

THE government has set aside 197,432 hectares of land to small miner’s country wide as a way to address number of challenges that have been facing the mining sector.

Addressing journalists in Dar es Salaam the head of Government communication at the Ministry of Energy and Minerals, Ms Badra Masoud said the land shall be given to all small scale miners who are registered and licensed by the ministry.

“This is done in accordance with the 2010 mining regulation cap. 16 which allows the energy and minerals minister to allocate the mining area for local miners. In this case the expected beneficiaries are supposed to file their application to the ministry in order to get legal permit,” she said.

She added that in this 2015/16 financial year, small miners shall be given a subsidy of 3.4 million dollars to enable them modernize mining ways and to be in position of getting direct benefit from the mining sector.

According to her, the amount has been brought by the government in collaboration with the World Bank (WB) and it will be given to the respective groups distributed in three different phases.

“At the beginning, the government offered about 500,000 Usd to 11 groups of small-scale miners during 2013/14 financial year, the second phase involved the provision of 7.2/- bn to 111 groups of miners and food vendors around mining sites,” she explained.

According to her, this move is deliberate effort by the government to improve working facilities and environment to local miners, as it has established stiff challenges facing small-scale miners in the country.

“The major focus of providing these subsidies is to ensure lives of small-scale miners are being improved and enable them to afford other costs of living,” she said and added that the government will be working very closely with the beneficiaries in order to ensure effective spending of funds that will be given.

Ms Masoud also said that the ministry will keep on training the local miners on better mining, steering from traditional to modern system in order to improve productivity and individual earnings.

“They will be given more training to enable them to cope with modern mining system and also to be able to escape from hazards that may result from local methods,” she said In another development, Ms Masoud explained that the ministry in collaboration with Geita Gold Mine (GGM), has managed to get all five bodies of small-scale miners who were buried alive after the tunnels they were digging collapsed.

“The incident occurred when they were extracting minerals to the area that is restricted due to safety reasons, they were five and we managed to recover all bodies,” she said and urged small scale miners to take security measures before they enter the mines.