adminFreeman Razemba
Senior Reporter
Delegates attending the 21st Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) regional Chemical Weapons Convention yesterday toured Environmental Management Agency (EMA) laboratories in Harare to have insight into the work being done to ensure chemical safety and security in the country.
The purpose of the meeting, which began on Tuesday, is to assess Africa’s implementation of the convention to identify priorities as well as come up with appropriate responses to issues observed.
It is a build up to the annual meeting of national authorities from around the world traditionally held during the last quarter of the year at the OPCW Headquarters at The Hague, the Netherlands.
Due to the success of the Government’s engagement and re-engagement efforts, the country has since the coming in of the Second Republic, hosted numerous international meetings as the world warms up to Zimbabwe’s efforts to re-integrate into the global family of nations.
Government said the hosting of the meeting in Harare was yet another demonstration of the strong relations between Zimbabwe and the OPCW.
In an interview during the tour yesterday, Mr Solomon Abebe Haile, OPCW’s Senior Coordination and Planning Officer Implementation and Support Branch said they had learnt a lot on what was happening in the country’s laboratories and the infrastructure capacity.
“We have here national authorities for Chemical Weapons from 43 countries from Africa and for the last two days we were sitting in a hotel room conducting meetings and we were discussing a range of issues that touch upon also technical matters and we found it necessary to come here (at EMA) and do this tour because we have to link up whatever we were saying during the meeting.
“We were saying in the meeting room about what’s happening in the laboratories in reality so that people can make connections between the convention, what it does to ensure chemical safety and security and what the technical people do in the laboratories,” he said.
He said they had managed to understand the laboratory capacity and the infrastructure capacity that Zimbabwe had created.
“We have also learnt about the capabilities of the professionals, particularly I was delighted to see women professionals, understanding the technicalities of chemistry and providing very detailed descriptions of what they do and how the laboratory operates. So I think people have managed to match what is being said in the hotel room and what is happening in reality, in the field of chemistry, so that was particularly useful,” Mr Haile said.
EMA director general Mr Aaron Chigona also said EMA was a member of the international convention on Chemical Weapons and they also provide support to that convention.
He said their laboratory has also received various equipment from the same organisation which they were keeping specifically for tracking unknown and known chemicals which can be found in the environment.
“We were also requested by the Government to take these people to come and also have a look at what we have in terms of capacity.
So they are here to tour our lab as part of their touring, we also realised that we have a mobile lab which is our hazardous substance response vehicle which we are showcasing here, which we think augments the reason why we are the agency responsible for pollution control, from both chemical waste and even hazardous substances.
“So they are here specifically to learn as well as to give us what they are also learning in their areas and the good part is that Africa is well represented here,” Mr Chigona said.
The Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into force on April 29, 1997 aims to eliminate an entire category of weapons of mass destruction by prohibiting the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, transfer or use of chemical weapons by states that have acceded to the convention.
So far 193 countries have acceded to the convention with only Israel, Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan missing.
States parties are obligated to take necessary steps to enforce the convention at domestic level, that is to make sure that no private persons or companies make these weapons or their ingredients on their soil.
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