Only 30 more years left for tanzanite

By Editor

 Introduced to the western world only in 1967, tanzanite is the world’s youngest known gemstone in terms of market presence. This rare gem is so rarer that it is found nowhere else in the world except in Mererani, Arusha Region.

 

Furthermore, industry experts like one of the world’s largest jewelers, Tiffany and Company (who christened the stone after Tanzania) say this blue-purple gemstone is 1000 times rarer than diamond. 

 

However, while the future of tanzanite trade is bright and full of luster experts warn that the tanzanite reserves ion Mererani are depleting and given the current rate of exploitation using modern mining techniques, the reserves will be exhausted in a mere 30 years only.

 

So in the span of its existence, 1967 to 2046 (if the estimates prove to be correct) what has the country gained from tanzanite given that this is the only country where the stone is mined. Reports suggest that Kenya and India have racked up far more benefits from tanzanite trade than Tanzania ever has and without intervention, ever will.

 

Lets review only one aspect of the issue, the humanitarian one. The area Mererani, is not a place of glitter and glamour as the rare tanzanite is, on the contrary, it is dry land, impoverished and downright destitute. There are few schools and fewer health facilities.

 

Infrastructures are equally depleted featuring rough dry weather roads, minimal to no water reserves hence agriculture is hardly possible except for a few small family patches. Mererani is by all measures,  one of the poorest and underserved townships in the country.

 

The workers in the tanzanite mines have for years worked with no protective gear, like farmers left to plough with age old hand hoes, these miners, despite the wealth they dig up, have been left to use hand pickles do dig up to 40 feet into the ground. Once down there, it is a human conveyor belt that carries the dug up dirt back up to the surface, a bucket at a time up a flimsy wooden ladder.

 

Because of the poor and inhumane working conditions, most of these workers now suffer from some form of trauma or another. Many have a myriad of respiratory diseases, alcoholic and have no alternative revenue generating activities hence a burden to their families and society.  This is a work force that would have helped to build the nation but now they are under educated and unfit of joining the community short of clinical help.

 

With only three decades left before tanzanite reserves run out, is it not time the government creates a tanzanite fund? The Fund could serve to secure health insurance for former tanzanite miners, to reeducate them, to purchase safety gear and mining tools etc.

 

Is it also not time the government considered prioritizing local companies in tanzanite mining rights? Because as things stand, whatever revenue the government has collected from the trade of tanzanite over the span of the last 48 years is not reflected directly in the area the stone is mined nor in the lives of the people who mine it.

 

Described as the fashion gemstone of the millennium and ranked second most favourite coloured gemstone in the USA after Sapphire, should not the township where it is mined be more than a large slum and its miners catered for?