Miners’ Wives Take On a Zimbabwe Coal Giant to Pay Up Forgotten Wages

Zimbabwe’s Hwange Colliery Company, founded in 1899, mines one of Zimbabwe's richest coal deposits, but it hasn’t paid wages to its thousands of workers since 2013. While the workers, predominantly men, have feared reprisal if they tried to fight for their wages, their wives, mothers, and sisters have adopted their grievances and, for years, laid sporadic sieges at the mine’s gates, protesting for the wages.

Last year alone, the company sold 1.5 million tons of coal to buyers in South Africa and Zambia. The colliery, whose majority owner is the government of Zimbabwe, is such a highly prized asset that the company’s stocks were, until recently, listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and the London Stock Exchange.

But decades of looting, alleged misuse of a $115 million loan, asset stripping and theft of coal stock by connected syndicates, and nepotistic appointments of unqualified friends to management roles have plagued the mine, allegedly preventing management from paying off liabilities like loans — or wages. While Hwange Colliery directors did not respond to Women Under Siege about why they haven’t been able to honor salary obligations, publicly, the company has repeatedly blamed financial woes, claiming it is selling coal at a loss and that it is besieged by local and foreign creditors to whom it owes up to $300 million.

All the while, hardships stalk the workers who dig the coal pits.

“We are pained by hunger,” said Sithoko Nale, 49, a member of the Hwange Colliery Mine Workers Spouses Association, an advocacy group formed to press for the unpaid wages of the women’s partners. Her late husband, a coal locomotive worker, died of tuberculosis in 2019. She says he was owed five years’ worth of missing wages: between US$7,000 to $10,000.

The collective unpaid figure is huge, explained Peter Mutasa, president of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), the country’s largest labor union. The ZCTU has supported the women for years, attending and facilitating in high-level talks between them, the mine, the government, and other stakeholders; the women on their own are not formally organized into their own union.

“Hwange Colliery workers have not been paid salaries for years and are owed in excess of $70 million,” he said. “As a result, they cannot access medical care, education for their children, or any other services that require money.”

Hwange Colliery, where the sprawling coal fields are located, is one of Zimbabwe’s most remote districts; it lies far off, some 600km away from the capital Harare. Even without pay, workers still show up daily because they fear losing the retirement pensions that have long been promised to them if they stop showing up for work. The workplace also provides meals and acts as a venue for networking and informal commerce — especially in such a remote area, where workers sell and barter fruits, secondhand gadgets, chickens, and clothes. For workers without wages, this makeshift satellite commercial activity is what brings food to their tables.

Some workers have also been known to pilfer small company items and sell them clandestinely to make ends meet.

The miners could be singled out for work dismissal if they openly protest, said Hwange Colliery Mine Workers Spouses Association spokesperson Thobile Shoko, who believes that the women want to protect their spouses and male relatives from being victimized by the colliery bosses.

And with the Zimbabwean government as a major stakeholder in the company, speaking out against missing wages could be seen as anti-government. “We are keen to spare men the scourge of threats and secret police visits,” said Netsai Banda, 38, whose husband was laid off in 2015 from a driller job and has never been paid his dues. She said that her husband was owed roughly $4,000 for two years of lost wages.

“Husbands, fathers, sons have not been paid for years,” Tendai Biti, a fiercely outspoken lawmaker and former minister of finance, told Women Under Siege. “Slavery cannot be permitted under any circumstances.”

The Hwange women likely reasoned that it was culturally and politically safer for them to protest. “Whenever women rise up to control a protest,” said Barbara Tanyanyiwa, the ZCTU’s National Women’s Committee secretary, “traditional leaders, law enforcement, and politicians tread carefully or simply run off. It’s culturally embarrassing and frowned upon in Zimbabwe for a man to be seen publicly arguing with women.”

Another reason why the women have taken up leadership of the struggle, added Shoko, is because of the residual consequences on the families. “Due to non-payment of salaries, their children have not been going to school or university; they do not have medical care; and for women whose husbands have passed on, they have faced evictions from company accommodation,” she said. The troubled coal company sees the evictions as a financial cost-cutting measure, while the women feel the measure is retaliatory.

Consequently, many of the women have resorted to prostitution. “Husbands come home hungry and helpless,” said Hilda Molo of the Hwange Women Pressure Alliance. “They no longer ask how their wives bring food to the table. Sex for food is even drawing in girls as young as 14. It’s terrible to think about it.” She said it partly explains why Hwange town has an adult HIV prevalence rate of 18 percent, compared against Zimbabwe’s national prevalence rate of 12.7 percent.

For a while, Hwange company managers dodged meeting the women at the gates, preferring instead to deploy court orders and police.

In 2013, around 100 women walked 20 miles to the Colliery general manager’s office to demand their husband’s salaries. They were met with riot police and brutally beaten, sustaining severe injuries.

In 2018, the Zimbabwe government claimed that the women’s protest was influenced by the political opposition and hostile civil society groups, a common defense used by the government before targeting those critics through arrest, beatings or surveillance. Petronella Kagonye, then-welfare minister, alleged before parliament that the women’s strike was not merely a labor grievance but an anti-government plot.

A vast array of menacing power squared against these brave women, not least of them the government, which controls the coal fields and has reportedly increased its stake in the company to 40 percent.

In February 2018, when the ZCTU sought the intervention of Zimbabwe’s president into the dispute, the government worryingly sent Obert Mpofu, who was then a police minister — as opposed a labor one — as its envoy. According to Farai Maguwu, director of the Center for Natural Resources Governance, Mpofu was the minister of mines when the company began to default on salaries. He was also responsible for appointing directors to the Hwange Colliery board.

“We are also concerned that the military and the police were roped into the meeting,” said Mutasa, the trade unionist. “This was a purely a labor dispute, and they should have stayed clear.”

A few months later, in May that year, when striking women were camped on the Hwange Colliery Company premises, soldiers from a nearby battalion threatened to destroy the tent.

The smoldering coal pits of Hwange Colliery are intertwined with the apex of political office. Winston Chitando joined Hwange Colliery Company in 1985 and ultimately led the company as its chairman from May 2016 to September 2018. He has been implicated in accusations of looting the coal company when, in November 2018, forensic auditors engaged by Hwange Colliery accused Chitando of financial impropriety.

According to a forensic audit presented to Zimbabwe’s parliament in August 2019, Chitando was implicated in an alleged scheme at Hwange Colliery that ranged from paying off journalists, hiring friends to key posts, and awarding coal haulage jobs to firms owned by associates. No action has been taken by Zimbabwe’s judicial authorities since the audit.

Chitando is now the minister in charge of Zimbabwe’s mining sector and Hwange Colliery is under his portfolio.

“Despite their fearsome power, we will continue to confront Hwange in hot, cold, wet weather until lump sum payment of about $10,000 paid per person,” said Nale.

In numerous cases, Zimbabwe’s high court has disallowed Hwange Colliery Company from expelling the women camped at its gate. Even then, overzealous police in Zimbabwe ignore court orders and arrest the women each time. This police behavior has been increasingly normalized in Zimbabwe. Each time, pro-bono human rights lawyers always rush to free the women from detention.

The courage of Hwange women may not have netted the financial payments that they’ve demanded, but their bravery has inspired other evictees from numerous mines dotted across Zimbabwe — be it in the coal, gold, or silver mines — to take on their employers or petition parliament to invite mining executives who default on wages and probe the reasons.

“It’s a matter of principle that every cent of unpaid wages must be pursued,” said Molo. “We can brighten prospects for a coming generation of mine employees.”