By Jonathan Mbiriyamveka
A rusting sign wired to a fence near Sabi Star Mine says everything the villagers of Mukwasi have been trying to tell the authorities: NOTICE — DO NOT DRINK THE WATER. On 6 July 2026, their message finally reached the heart of Zimbabwe’s legislature.
When the Buhera Residents Network Trust appeared before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate Change and Wildlife on Monday, it came armed with maps, laboratory tables, photographs of injured workers — and the lived testimony of communities who say lithium mining has upended their water, their health, their land and their way of life.
The oral evidence session, chaired by Hon. Sam Matema, was convened to hear a petition titled “Environmental Degradation, Water Pollution, Water Overabstraction, Worker Injuries and Internal Displacement of Local Communities: A Case of Sabi Star Mine in Buhera.”
Leading the delegation, Mr Leonard Mabasa told the committee that the network’s submission was not an attack on mining itself. Zimbabwe’s mining sector, he acknowledged, is the cornerstone of the economy, with lithium among its most prized exports.
But at Sabi Star, operated by Max Mind Investments (Zimbabwe) (Private) Limited in the semi-arid south of Buhera, the residents say the cost of that prosperity is being paid by villagers who never signed up for it.
Water that turns reddish brown
The most visceral evidence concerned water. Mr Mabasa described a borehole drilled by the mining company in Mukwasi Village, roughly 60 metres deep and sited within households.
Villagers report that water drawn from it turns reddish brown when left to settle. Some have abandoned it altogether, digging their own wells and boreholes they consider safer. A small stream running from the mine dump area through the village gives off a pungent smell.
The network sampled boreholes, wells and the stream — working, notably, alongside the Environmental Management Agency (EMA) itself. But the process was fraught. The first set of samples was reported lost by the EMA laboratory; a replacement set was collected, and some of those results were never shared with the community.
Where results were released, the network says it can draw a firm line to the mine only at specific points — water collected immediately outside the tailings dams feeding nearby streams, where cadmium, lead and mercury were among the parameters of concern.
On the groundwater, Mr Mabasa was careful not to overstate the case, telling the committee the reddish discolouration in boreholes could not yet be authoritatively traced to the mine.
For comparison, the petition tabled results from Shengxiang Lithium Processing in Goromonzi, where a slug spill towards the Nora River catchment recorded arsenic at 3.7 mg/kg and lead at 13.58 mg/kg — hundreds of times above WHO maximum permissible levels for drinking water of 0.01 mg/kg for each.
Dust, noise and grey-haired schoolchildren
Beyond the water, the delegation painted a picture of daily life transformed by an industrial operation. More than 80 haulage trucks a day thunder along the road from the mine, raising dust so thick that, in the words of one presenter, schoolchildren emerge looking like grey-headed elders.
At Mukwasi Secondary School — barely 20 metres from the mine road — computers donated for ICT lessons sit idle, clogged with dust. Mabangwe Primary and Secondary and St Albans schools face the same conditions.
Clinic records at Mukubu and Chiweshe, the delegation said, show cases of pneumonia and respiratory illness recorded since mining activities commenced around 2022 — though Mr Mabasa again drew a careful distinction for the committee between pneumonia, for which clinic records exist, and pneumoconiosis, the incurable occupational lung disease that can take six or seven years to manifest.
From five hectares to 300 square metres
Perhaps the most emotive testimony concerned displacement. Forty-one families have been relocated to make way for the mine: eighteen within its vicinity, twenty-three to Murambinda Growth Point.
Families who once farmed five hectares of communal land now occupy stands of 300 to 350 square metres — smaller than the 450 square metres their agreement forms promised.
When that anomaly was acknowledged as a “technical blunder” by the Rural District Council and the mine, affected households were compensated with land valued at US$20,000, allocated in October 2025 — which some disposed of in January this year for US$18,000.
The human cost, the delegation argued, goes beyond square metres. “They no longer have land. They have lost their livelihoods. They have lost their identity. They have lost their culture,” the committee heard.
Relocated families in Murambinda cannot cultivate crops or keep cattle, must buy everything they eat, and hold no title deeds to their new houses. Some deny that the signatures on their consent forms are their own.
Water shortages plague the resettlement area, where residents fear cholera. And for the eighteen families relocated within sight of the mine, freshly installed mining pegs in their yards raise the spectre of a second displacement.
One presenter described the choice given to villagers as “choosing between a devil and a devil” — remain on a sliver of your former land beside an expanding mine, or start again in a peri-urban settlement with no fields at all.
Hon. Matema reminded the committee of the weight of the moment: Zimbabwe currently chairs the Kampala Convention on internally displaced persons, and displacement occasioned by development projects falls squarely within it.
“Governments have responsibility to protect and assist,” he noted.
‘It’s cheaper to pollute and pay a fine’
Why has enforcement failed? The network’s answer echoed a refrain increasingly heard across Zimbabwe’s environmental civil society: the penalties are trivial. Water pollution offences fall under Level 14 fines capped at US$5,000 — a sum the petition describes as less than 0.1 percent of corporate revenues, its real value halved by inflation since 2009.
“It’s cheaper to pollute and pay a fine,” Mr Mabasa told the committee, “than to put in place mechanisms to prevent pollution.”
The network also took aim at Section 108 of the Environmental Management Act, which restricts public access to Environmental Impact Assessment reports. Despite writing to the Director-General and eventually engaging lawyers, the community obtained only an EIA certificate — not the report containing the binding conditions.
The delegation argued the restriction contradicts Sections 62 and 73 of the Constitution and should be reviewed as unconstitutional. They further proposed that EMA, rather than mining companies, select EIA consultants, since a consultant hired and paid by the developer “cannot be both referee and player.”
What the residents want
The petition’s prayer to Parliament is ambitious: a national inquiry into mining and water security, occupational safety, displacement and livelihoods, focused on lithium, chromium and gold — the most water-hungry minerals, with lithium processing consuming between 400,000 and two million litres of water.
It calls for legislative reform of the Water Act, ZINWA Act, Environmental Management Act, Pneumoconiosis Act, Mines and Minerals Act and Communal Lands Act, plus a new Statutory Instrument on water pollution with tiered fines of up to US$250,000, mandatory environmental bonds and community funds.
It also urges diversification of Zimbabwe’s lithium export markets — currently concentrated in China, the UAE and South Africa — and the development of ambient water quality standards, an initiative EMA has begun but which the network says must be anchored in legislation.
The delegation was careful to note the mine’s corporate social responsibility efforts — a clinic, boreholes and housing at Murambinda — though one member dismissed dust suppression limited to shopping centres and schools as “greenwashing.”
‘Not a witch hunt’
Questions from the committee probed the evidence hard. Hon. Tafanana Zhou asked how many residents the network represents; Mr Mabasa responded that the Trust represents the interests of the 33 wards of Buhera District. Hon. Wellington Chikombo and other members pressed on the criteria used for relocations, the valuation process, medical records linking illness to the mine, and whether the stand-size shortfall was the fault of the mine or the Rural District Council — a distinction the delegation conceded it could not settle.
Members also asked why the community had not approached the High Court; Mr Mabasa explained that the network chose engagement — with traditional leaders, EMA and now Parliament — before litigation, mindful that mining also contributes to the economy.
The delegation was supported by Mr Hardlife Mudzingwa, present in a technical advisory capacity on matters of policy and law.
Closing the session, Hon. Matema was at pains to stress impartiality. The committee, he said, is “not on a witch hunt.”
It will receive oral evidence from Sabi Star Mine and travel to Buhera to reconcile the submissions with conditions on the ground before making an informed decision — guided, he said, by Section 73 of the Constitution, which guarantees every Zimbabwean the right to an environment that is not harmful to health.
For the people of Mukwasi Village, that reconciliation cannot come soon enough. The sign on the fence still stands. The water still turns reddish brown. And the trucks still roll — more than 80 a day — past schools where the computers gather dust.
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