Jerabos, illegal mining gangs from Zambia's Copperbelt, sat down with President Edgar Lungu at State House in Lusaka in 2015 and cut a deal.
Allegedly in exchange for electoral support and a reduction in violence, Lungu recognised them as legal miners and gave them Black Mountain, a substantial mining asset, in Kitwe. Lungu's Patriotic Front carried the key Copperbelt province in the 2016 general election.
Now the Patriotic Front is in trouble again: growth has slowed to 1.7%, inflation has risen by 15.7% over the past year, copper prices have crashed, public debt has grown to 88% of GDP and the commercial mining sector is in turmoil. The kwacha has tumbled by 24% since 2019 to the dollar, making it Africa's worst-performing currency.
As the 2021 election approaches, Lungu may cut another deal with the jerabos to hold onto power.
Black Mountain is a huge copper mine tailings dump in the middle of Kitwe. Now owned by Tianjin Maolin Technology Company and with substantial amounts of low-grade copper ore, it has been the site of illegal scavenging for decades.
During the early 2010s, violence became endemic as seven jerabo gangs from Kitwe's Wusakile neighbourhood fought over access to the tailings.
One figure loomed large over the war for Black Mountain: Youngson Kalobo. After emerging the victor, he became pivotal in the 2015 deal with Lungu.
When Kalobo died from natural causes in 2015, aged 37, his funeral procession included 50 Hummers. Thousands came to see his body laid out in a golden coffin.
The then minister of information, Chishimba Kambwili, attended his funeral along with Richard Musukwa, former Patriotic Front MP for the Wusakile constituency and the current minister of mines.
The outcome of the 2015 deal was that, at Lungu's insistence, the seven jerabo gangs turned into seven legal companies under one overarching company, Chapamo Mineral Processing. In 2018, Lungu allocated state-owned ZCCM Investments Holdings' 10% stake in Black Mountain to Chapamo.
The Copperbelt province minister at the time, Japhen Mwakalombe, denied the decision was political. It was, he said, about youth empowerment.
The Copperbelt human rights activist and popular musician Fumba Chama, known as Pilato, disagrees. He says "the jerabos had invested so much money in the campaigns for the Patriotic Front . so in trying to pay back that investment the government promised them a share of these dump sites".
By 2019, Chapamo had mined out the Black Mountain allocation. It now requires a new allocation.
Kelvin Tembo, chair of Chapamo, was a childhood friend of Kalobo and part of the 2015 State House deal. According to Tembo, Lungu was personally responsible for shifting the mindset of the jerabos away from gangsterism - "these were people that were known to be savages", he says - and providing a solution to illegal mining.
When the rock face at Black Mountain collapsed in June 2018, killing 11 miners, minister of mines Musukwa forced Chapamo to adopt safer techniques and security measures.
Samson Mpembwe started scavenging on the dump when he was 14 and rose up through the jerabo hierarchy to become the spokesperson for Chapamo. Mpembwe says he believes that without a new allocation there will be social unrest, unemployment and widespread criminality.
"It is my prayer that, even before we go to the election, we get empowered," he says.
Isaac Mwaipopo, executive director of the Centre for Trade Policy and Development in Lusaka, agrees that the 2015 deal has brought a reduction in violence in Kitwe, but he says the Patriotic Front government will make a new allocation to Chapamo so that it can "support party-related functions like fundraising ventures".
The Zambia Chamber of Mines is worried about the impact of crime on its members across the Copperbelt. Yewa Kumwenda, research and policy manager at the chamber, says jerabos invade commercial mines, cut down pylons, steal conveyor belts and electricity cables and hijack trucks carrying ore.
Boniface Mumba at the Centre for Environmental Justice, an NGO that specialises in small-scale mining issues, sums up the jerabos' philosophy as, "I can't be raised in a copper area and [be] poor. Whether I steal it, whatever form, I need to find myself, my hands lying on the copper."
Jerabo spokesperson Mpembwe took Business Times and Kitwe journalist Mike Kaluba to a large sinkhole owned by Glencore's Mopani Copper Mines in Kitwe to show the working conditions of illegal miners. Instead of miners at work, there was a hostile protest: the small-scale miners had been evicted from the sinkhole by police and were displaying their anger with crowbars and beer bottles.
The miners all had the same story: Mopani Copper Mines was using the police to evict them, and the sinkhole was their mine. Their appeal to the Patriotic Front was direct.
One of the miners, who gave only his first name, Mwape, said: "We are asking from the government, from the bigger boss, from the president himself, to remove these policemen, to leave us alone as we are here."
Kaluba later told Business Times that the police had arrived to prevent two rival gangs from clashing over "ownership" of the sinkhole and that Youngson Kalobo's brother and jerabos leader Simeon had watched over the entire fracas from a distance.
Asked about the protest, Chapamo chair Tembo claims that, in order to prevent people from mining the dangerous sinkhole, Mopani had agreed to give offtake to the miners. The slag wasn't being delivered so the young men went back to the sinkhole.
Mopani Copper Mines disputes the miners' and Tembo's claims, saying the sinkhole was safely backfilled last year. An agreement had also "set out the provision of support from Mopani to enable the miners to start legitimate, income-generating activities. This includes numerous agriculture projects and a financial literacy training programme."
The Copperbelt is a murky place and the Patriotic Front will have to win the province to stay in power. In regard to a new deal between Chapamo and the president, Tembo says, "Yes, there's no 'no'. Just yes. We will get another allocation very soon."
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