Government to revive community share ownership trusts

Fairness Moyana in Hwange

THE Government is working on reviving dormant Community Share Ownership Trusts CSOTs) to ensure communities rich in natural resources benefit from them.
Community trusts were established by the Government in line with the indigenisation and economic empowerment legislation and policy frameworks as part of the national strategy to achieve broad-based indigenisation of the economy and economic empowerment of the previously disadvantaged communities.
The Hwange Community Trust was registered in 2012 and is among the 35 trusts that remain unfunded. Matabeleland North province had two trusts, Umguza and Bubi that received funding.
Responding an enquiry from Hwange East legislator, Joseph Bonda on the status of the CSOT in his constituency during a Question-and-Answer session in Parliament last week, Industry and Commerce Minister Mangaliso Ndlovu said the Government is working on reviving community share trusts.
“Madam Speaker, the first trust was registered and launched in 2011 and commenced operations in 2012. By the end of 2013, 61 community trusts had been registered across all 60 rural district councils and one urban community,” he said.
“Out of the 61 registered CSOTs, only 26 were capacitated and operationalised, most of them are not operational.”
Minister Ndlovu said the Government is committed to revive these dormant community share ownership trusts and ensuring their long-term sustainability through strategic enterprise development initiatives.
“Hwange, unfortunately, is among the trusts that have not yet received funding and therefore not operational,” he said.
Minister Ndlovu said community trusts acquire equity on behalf of their respective communities in companies involved in the commercial exploitation of natural resources in their areas.
However, due to failure by the companies to operationalise them through seed capital most of the trusts collapsed leaving host communities counting losses brought by the impact of mining on the environment.
“As the programme turned out, there was more focus mainly on gold and platinum-rich areas, which is where we saw community trusts that got funding at the time. Government, in 2019, had a policy adjustment on indigenisation on the 51/49 requirement with two key minerals remaining, which is diamond and platinum,” said Minister Ndlovu.
Mr Bonda argued that despite several investments in coal and lithium mining in addition to tourism, communities in Hwange district are not deriving much benefits from their resources.
“It is also very emotional to the people in Hwange considering the degradation that is happening from mining activities. What is the Government doing to promptly empower the people of Hwange?” he quizzed.
Minister Ndlovu acknowledged that the Government is aware of the developments and will soon engage with communities to ensure there is dialogue.
“We will be engaging all the communities where there is intensive mining because our permit rule is that communities ought to benefit beyond the royalties that these companies are paying to the local authorities,” he said.
“It is important to note that there is already an established royalty fee that they pay to Hwange Rural District Council hence, the community share ownership trusts were coming mainly as socio-economic projects for the communities in those areas.”