In just ten days, seven miners have died in underground collapses across Zimbabwe. As families mourn, a pattern of regulatory failure and lack of corporate liability continues to shield politically connected claim holders from justice.

On the morning of May 6, three men descended 100 metres into the earth at Temstan Mine in Pickstone, Chegutu, looking for gold.. A boulder dislodged above them.. Their bodies were recovered and taken to Chegutu District Hospital mortuary.. The Zimbabwe Republic Police confirmed the deaths.. Investigations, it said, are ongoing.. The men who hold the mining claim at Temstan were not in the shaft.. They never are.. Five days earlier, on May 1, two

artisanal miners died at Elvington Mine’s Mutohwe Shaft in the Gadzema area of the same Chegutu district.. Nine men had been working underground.. Five escaped.. Two more were left trapped.. Josphat Jaji, the permanent secretary in the Office of the Minister of State for Provincial Affairs, confirmed the deaths.. The claim holders at Elvington were not underground either.. Forty-eight hours before Temstan, on May 4, four men died at Sabi Vlei Mine in the Mazvihwa

area of Zvishavane after a shaft collapsed in the rain-saturated Midlands soil, swallowing them into a 40-metre drop.. Three died instantly.. The fourth died in hospital trying to escape.. Zvishavane district development co-ordinator Darlington Chokera called it a tragedy for the local community.. Keep Reading Govt moves to tighten mining laws, tenders Chief Ndiweni pushes for sanctions against absconding ministers Chegutu mine tragedies: Seven dead, once charged And on May 1, at Guernsey Gold Mine

in Goromonzi, two more men were buried alive in a tunnel collapse.. After eight days of rescue operations complicated by unstable ground and heavy rains, Pardon Ruvengo 23 years old was brought out alive.. His colleague, Innocent Mhere, 21 years old, was retrieved dead.. In 10 days across four mines in three provinces, seven Zimbabwean men are confirmed dead.. No mining claim holder has been charged.. None is expected to be.. This is not a

string of accidents.. It is a structure.. My Zimbabwe’s investigation into Midlands artisanal mining found that the vast majority of these sites are controlled by what the sector calls gold barons politically connected claim holders who register the mining rights, extract the economic value, and never set foot underground.. The men doing the actual mining are contract workers, paid per gram of gold recovered.. They have no written employment contracts, no safety training, no emergency

rescue provision, and no legal right of refusal.. Hunger is the alternative, and hunger, in Zimbabwe’s interior, is not a metaphor.. The arrangement is not merely informal.. It is, in practice, a liability shield.. The claim holder profits from the production.. The artisanal worker absorbs the physical risk.. When the shaft collapses, the worker dies.. The claim holder is above ground and under Zimbabwe’s existing enforcement regime, faces no meaningful legal consequence.. This newspaper has

found no record of a single mining claim holder being prosecuted following a fatal collapse at their registered site in recent years.. On May 8, the day the Temstan deaths were confirmed, Mines and Mining Development deputy minister Caleb Makwiranzou responded on behalf of the ministry.. His remarks were revealing for what they explained away rather than what they answered.. “Those accidents happened at illegal mining, unfortunately, because they are illegal, we were not monitoring

those mines.. However, even then, we can only be saddened by the fact that there was a loss of life.” Makwiranzou told reporters.. Read that again: the ministry’s defence for failing to prevent seven deaths in 10 days is that the mines where those deaths occurred were unregistered and therefore, by ministry logic, invisible.. Makwiranzou then announced that the government had increased the frequency of inspections and reduced the monitoring timeline, sending inspectors on a

more regular frequency.. Seven people died in 10 days.. The inspections were increased after the deaths, not before them.. The ministry offers the remedy as if it were not also the indictment.. The question that was not asked, and which this newspaper now formally poses: how many fatal collapses occurred at sites the ministry was monitoring?. And in how many of those cases was the registered claim holder prosecuted?. Zimbabwe’s principal mining law the Mines

and Minerals Act [Chapter 21:05], enacted in 1961 gives the mining commissioner authority to inspect registered sites and, in cases of violation, recommend cancellation of mining rights.. The Act also empowers the Minister to cancel mining titles for a range of offences.. What the Act does not clearly and robustly establish is criminal liability for a claim holder whose registered site kills a worker through negligent infrastructure.. The claim holder’s legal exposure if any runs

primarily through the general criminal law, not sector-specific provisions.. Mines and Minerals Bill was published in the Government Gazette on June 25, 2025 and, as of this writing, has still not been passed into law.. This matters because the ministry’s preferred description “illegal mining” does real work in this accountability vacuum.. If a site is unregistered, there is no claim holder of record.. No claim holder of record means no legal party to prosecute.. The

deaths become, officially, tragedies without authors.. But this framing deserves scrutiny.. Who sent the men into the shaft at Temstan?. Who profits from the gold they find?. The answer is not nobody.. The gold barons are known in the communities where they operate.. Their political connections are not secret.. That they remain off the record is a choice the state makes, not a fact of nature.. The statics behind the deaths The scale of this

crisis extends well beyond the past ten days.. Between January and May 2025, Zimbabwe’s authorities recorded 59 fatal mining accidents, resulting in 70 deaths compared to 58 accidents and 72 fatalities in the same period in 2024.. In 2023, mining accidents claimed 237 lives across 212 incidents, making it among the deadliest years on record for the sector.. The Mazvihwa collapse in early May fits a grim precedent.. In October 2025, four men Alton Sibanda

(25), Prince Gobvu (19), Kenneth Mhandire (24), and Tapiwa Meskano (26) were killed at a collapsed shaft in Mazowe.. In November 2025, seven more were trapped to death at Base Mineral Block Mine in Silobela.. Six from Kadoma died in a flash flood that month.. Three more died in Mhangura in February 2026.. Each collapse follows the same architecture.. Each produces the same official response.. Each investigation remains ongoing.. No claim holder has been charged..

The accountability gap The government has a preferred answer to the crisis: formalisation.. Register your operation, the argument goes, and inspectors can reach you, train you, and protect you.. Makwiranzou made this case explicitly on May 8.. It is not a bad argument in isolation.. But it inverts the actual problem.. The men dying in these shafts are not dying because they failed to register.. They are dying because the people who profit from their

labour the registered or politically protected claim holders above ground face no enforceable obligation to maintain safe shaft infrastructure, provide emergency rescue equipment, or carry liability insurance for the workers they send underground.. Zimbabwe Miners Federation spokesperson Dosman Mangisi has previously acknowledged that corruption pervades the sector, telling this newspaper’s predecessors that “miners are complaining every day” about accountability failures in the Ministry of Mines.. Civil society groups, including the Centre for Natural Resource Governance,

have documented the pattern of politically connected operators using their connections to insulate themselves from legal consequence.. Meanwhile, the government’s own $12 billion mining economy ambition rests partly on the artisanal and small-scale sector which already contributes more than 60 percent of gold deliveries to Fidelity Gold Refinery.. The men producing that gold are dying in the shafts that generate it.. The men collecting the proceeds are alive, above ground, and uncharged.. What this newspaper

is asking This investigation raises specific questions that require specific answers.. We have submitted formal requests for response to the following: To Makwiranzou: How many mining claim holders have been criminally prosecuted following a fatality at their registered site in the past three years?. What is the legal obligation if any of a registered claim holder to maintain shaft support infrastructure?. Are claim holders required to carry liability insurance for artisanal workers operating on their

claims?. To ZRP spokesperson Paul Nyathi: Are the “ongoing investigations” at Temstan Mine and Elvington Mine examining the conduct and legal obligations of the registered claim holders, or only the immediate physical circumstances of the collapses?. To the Ministry of Mines public register: We are seeking the registered claim holders for Temstan Mine (Pickstone, Chegutu), Mazvihwa/Sabi Vlei Mine (Zvishavane), and Elvington Mine (Gadzema, Chegutu).. To the Zimbabwe Miners Federation (Dosman Mangisi): What legal protections, if

any, do artisanal contract miners have against claim holders who fail to maintain safe working conditions?. The men in the shaft Innocent Mhere was 21 years old.. He spent eight days underground before his body was recovered from Guernsey Gold Mine.. Pardon Ruvengo, also 23, survived beside him.. We do not yet have the names of the three men who died at Temstan Mine on May 6 police have withheld them pending notification of next

of kin nor the names of the four who died in Zvishavane, nor the two from Elvington.. Their families know who sent them underground.. The communities around these mines know who holds the claims.. The ministry knows how to read its own register.. Seven men are dead.. The people who profited from their presence in those shafts remain unnamed in every official statement.. That is not an oversight.. It is a policy.. This investigation is

ongoing.. If you have information about the ownership of mining claims at Temstan Mine, Elvington Mine, or Mazvihwa/Sabi Vlei Mine, or if you are a family member of any victim of a mining collapse in Zimbabwe, contact this newsroom securely.. Related Topics

Zimbabwe mining, artisanal mining, mining accidents, gold barons, Chegutu mine tragedy, mine safety, accountability