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Zimbabwe's great white hope
Thandeka Gqubule, Financial Mail
November 03, 2006

http://free.financialmail.co.za/06/1103/features/kfeat.htm

Zimbabwe is fighting to keep SA from banning asbestos imports

Munyaradzi Hwengwere, former spin doctor to Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, is in SA on a near-impossible mission - to stop SA from banning white asbestos.

He says he's here to save the livelihoods of the communities around two asbestos mining towns in the midlands of Zimbabwe. Hwengwere is on the payroll of Turnall, a Harare-listed company with British and Zimbabwean shareholders that manufactures cement and mines white asbestos.

The government of Zimbabwe also has a stake in the company, which provides a valuable source of foreign exchange.

The asbestos mines are facing closure in the wake of a threatened ban on asbestos products by SA. Legislation has been drafted and is now open for public consultation. It is expected to take effect in mid-2007.

SA is Zimbabwe's main market for the asbestos, consuming 40% of production. It is used mainly in roofs on low-cost housing, car exhaust pipes and irrigation systems. Hwengwere says closure of the mine would plunge about 100 000 people into poverty. Sources tell the FM that the mines are in dire financial strai ts anyway. They are faced with regular government raids and confiscation of any foreign exchange.

Local politicians are proving less than sympathetic to the banning lobby. Quite aside from the communities around the mine, the asbestos market is a lucrative one for the ruling Zanu-PF and its cohorts. Doors seem to be closing on Hwengwere as he tries to explain that there is internationally proved evidence that, because white asbestos is different in structure and chemical composition from its blue and brown siblings, it is not a health or environmental threat. He is distributing a self-produced DVD on the environmental safety of white asbestos.

Langa Zita, chair of the portfolio committee that has the final say on the banning, says the issue should be subject to government-to-government talks, in which she is willing to engage.

Another committee member says the Zimbabwean government has "left their industries and companies to beg and lobby SA authorities while they have not lifted a finger to aid them by talking directly to their counterparts in S A".

Hwengere has invited Zita and the rest of the committee to Zimbabwe to inspect more than 70 000 medical records compiled over a period of 40 years on the communities surrounding the Zimbabwean mines.

It is also understood that Hwengwere recently approached Mugabe, his former boss, at Southern African Development Community talks in Lesotho, and asked him to urge President Thabo Mbeki to intervene.

Environmental affairs deputy director-general Joanne Yawitch is adamant that the ban will go ahead. She points to a World Trade Organisation dispute over the issue after France banned imports of white asbestos from Canada. The world's largest producer of white asbestos lost in a tribunal, which confirmed France's right to ban imports.

Yawitch says the difference between white asbestos and the brown and blue kinds is simply that it kills you more slowly.

Disputes over asbestos have run their course locally too, and include huge settlements with asbestosis sufferers. Local manufacturer Everite has invested substantially in technology to produce safe alternatives. Yawitch says cheap Zimbabwean imports would undermine those efforts.

But the Zimbabweans grumble that the reason for SA's resistance to white asbestos is a form of silent sanctions against Zimbabwean industry. In this version, a powerful lobby comprising Everite, trade unions that say they are protecting their members' health and environmentalists has succeeded in lobbying the environmental affairs department.

While trying to save the mines, Hwengwere is also doing some repair work after landing a clutch of SA's mpowerment supremos in Chikurubi prison last month. Three executives from an empowerment mining group ended up on a concrete floor for the night while discussing the future of the mines.

Hwengwere had hoped to pull off a deal with the politically connected South Africans to protect the Zimbabwean market. But the executives were arrested and accused of plotting to overthrow the Zimbabwean government. It took a lot of fancy footwork and diplomacy by the SA ambassador in Harare and by Hwengwere to secure their release.

Since then, it's been difficult to entice South Africans to the mine.

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