The Hidden Cost of Zimbabwe’s Lithium Boom
Darlington Vivito bid farewell to his parents on a cold, drizzly evening in March 2023. He dressed warmly, preparing for the night ahead. At 22, he left the family’s modest homestead in Bikita, a rural district in southeastern Zimbabwe, and met his cousin at a shopping center. To avoid suspicion, they wandered through dusty grocery stores and country-style eateries. As night fell, the pair began their usual routine. After meeting up with several other young men, they hitchhiked out of town. Then, they walked 8 kilometers (5 miles) through thorny bush toward the Bikita Minerals mine, which holds the largest lithium deposit in the country. They sneaked in.
The roughly 1,500-hectare facility was patrolled by armed security guards in trucks and on foot. Vivito and his team sought out a secluded area of the mine, working by flashlight. They targeted heaps of lithium-bearing rocks that had been unearthed by mine workers during the day, searching for the best pieces as they piled up slabs of ore and collected smaller fragments into sacks. Under the cover of darkness, other illicit teams worked their own sectors as the guards prowled. Vivito tried to stay alert.
In a country rich in minerals but long plagued by widespread allegations of mismanagement and corruption, individual mining — with and without permits or licenses — is commonplace. Up to 1.5 million Zimbabweans are estimated to be involved in small-scale mining, with only around 15% holding permits. Some people mine informally on undeveloped land or in disused mine sites. Others, like Vivito, illegally enter corporate or government-run mines.
The electric-vehicle revolution has created a global rush for lithium, an essential component of EV batteries. Zimbabwe has one of the world’s largest lithium reserves and is the top supplier of the mineral in Africa. Its annual earnings from lithium exports surged from $1.8 million in total in 2018 to more than $80 million in the first quarter of 2025 alone, and experts still see untapped potential. Several of the country’s large lithium mines have been purchased or built by Chinese companies since late 2021.
The Bikita Minerals mine has expanded considerably under its new Chinese ownership. But while some locals have found employment, many others feel left out of the lithium rush. And some say they have no choice but to steal from the mine to survive.
China has the world’s top EV industry and dominates the global lithium supply chain: About 70% of all lithium is processed there. As other nations race to catch up, Beijing has leaned into its long-standing role as a major investor in mining in Africa. In Zimbabwe, China’s relations with the government are particularly close, dating to when it backed eventual dictator Robert Mugabe’s guerilla faction during the struggle for liberation in the 1960s. Mugabe’s successor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has supported Chinese takeovers of lithium mines, arguing they will bring economic growth for a country where close to half the population lives in poverty.
But many residents in mining areas in Zimbabwe say the relationship with China is one of exploitation. The lithium boom has created little benefit for their communities, they argue, and in many ways has harmed them. Residents say they’ve been displaced from their homes by expanding operations at Chinese-run mines with little or no compensation. They say farmland has been degraded and water supplies contaminated. Some residents have complained that well-paying jobs in the mines are often filled by workers imported from China or Zimbabwe’s cities, while unions have criticized conditions and pay. Security crackdowns at the mines have resulted in arrests of illicit miners.
“China is seeing Zimbabwe as a colony, and it has marked it as its territory,” Farai Maguwu, executive director of the Centre for Natural Resource Governance, a research and advocacy group in Harare, told Rest of World. Zimbabwe’s mining sector has long been allegedly intertwined with the financial interests of government and military elites. But Maguwu accused Beijing of helping to further an environment of unaccountability in which Zimbabwe’s leaders “don’t take action to protect the integrity of their own people” — echoing critiques of Chinese mining operations around the continent.
The Chinese Embassy in Harare declined to comment. The deputy communications director at Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Mines and Mining Development, Wilfred Munetsi, disputed charges of mismanagement and called allegations of elite corruption in the sector unsubstantiated. “The Ministry operates with transparency and accountability,” he told Rest of World.
On a local level, meanwhile, many Zimbabweans feel left out. “A lot of people who live near lithium mines would expect to benefit from this resource,” Grasian Mkodzongi, a senior researcher at the Nordic Africa Institute who focuses on natural resources and the energy transition, recently remarked. “Currently, local people are the losers.”
In an interview with Rest of World, he noted that mine owners were not solely to blame for this. A nationwide ban on raw lithium exports in 2022 effectively allowed companies with processing facilities to set prices. Combined with a subsequent plunge in global lithium value, this decimated Zimbabwe’s small-scale mining sector. “[Companies] worry that the illegal miners are undermining their profit, and the government of course wants to control it for the sake of revenue,” Mkodzongi said. Private mines, he added, have also seen a “heightened militarization of security.”
Rest of World spoke to informal miners in visits to communities around four lithium mines. The lithium they find is sold to middlemen, shipped abroad, and blended into the global inventory. But their main message was that a mineral boom they thought would be a blessing has instead brought pain. Miners like Vivito know their work is illegal — but do not feel it’s morally wrong. They believe they should be able to sustain themselves with the lithium buried around Zimbabwe. “That is the only way we can benefit,” said a 31-year-old illicit miner in the valley town of Shamva who asked to withhold his name.
Illicit miners risk accidental injury and death from falls and cave-ins, as well as encounters with corporate security. Women who work illegally in the mines told Rest of World they’ve been sexually assaulted on the job.
Vivito had dropped out of school three years earlier to help support his family, who were struggling to survive on subsistence farming. He tried and failed to get a formal job at the mine as a general hand, in sorting, and as a security guard. Eventually, he turned to illegal mining. He’d been doing it for about three months by that night in March 2023. According to a member of Vivito’s crew, the day’s work had been successful — they’d gathered a tall pile of lithium stones. But as they tried to leave the mine, they found a pickup truck with an armed security guard blocking their path.
“He started shooting,” Vivito’s fellow miner recalled. “Darlington screamed and fell.” Vivito had been shot in the head.
Set in the sprawling province of Masvingo, Bikita has a population of 177,000 that largely survives on subsistence agriculture, trade, and mining. Many of its vast hills and mountains hold deposits of vital minerals: lithium, tin, and gold, among others. For decades, these hidden riches have attracted miners of all kinds — from artisanal local miners who dig on public land to large players like Sinomine, the Chinese company that bought the Bikita Minerals mine in January 2022.
In recent years, the lithium rush has brought a new surge of activity to the district’s township centers, where businesses such as mobile-money shops and clothing and grocery stores cater to miners and mineral traders.
On a recent evening in Chinhamo, a township near the Bikita mine, the streets were lively as dancehall and Sungura music blared from rickety bars. A woman sold barbecue chicken and pork on one corner, while mine workers in uniform sipped large bottles of beer nearby. The next morning, as bartenders cleaned tables and swept floors, the same streets filled with hawkers selling clothing, blankets, and neatly stacked packets of scouring powder, a mining byproduct used for dishwashing.
The Bikita mine sits a few kilometers outside Chinhamo and is dotted with large dump sites. Under Sinomine’s ownership, its perimeter has expanded outward as it has added new facilities and open-cast pits. More vendors selling fruits and vegetables crowd the turnoff from the main road to the entrance.
Inside the sprawling mine complex, steel walkways and buildings made of corrugated metal sit beside pits of gray and orange earth. The mine employs 1,460 people, with an additional 1,400 employed by the company’s contractors, Collen Nikisi, a Bikita Minerals spokesperson, told Rest of World in a statement. Company policy stipulates that 80% of those workers should be recruited locally, he said.
“We offer local community members jobs that are safe, stable, and fairly compensated,” Nikisi continued, adding that the company is regularly audited by authorities for its labor practices. “We are also cognisant of the fact that our social license to operate is generated from the local community we serve.”
Nikisi said Sinomine has committed more than $30 million over two and a half years to community investment, including bringing electricity to rural communities, drilling boreholes to provide clean water access, road maintenance and construction, and support for local schools. “Bikita Minerals contributes to communities both directly and indirectly through the taxes and royalties we pay, the jobs we create, the local workforces we upskill, the local business opportunities we generate, the infrastructure we build and the education and community health initiatives we support.”
Zimbabwe’s mineral wealth has long been both a blessing and a curse. The British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes entered what was then the Ndebele Kingdom in 1888, with his sights on its vast, untapped gold fields. Rhodes and his British South Africa Company first deceived the king into giving them exclusive mining rights and then overthrew him. Rhodes called his new country Rhodesia, opening a bloody and destructive new chapter in Africa’s colonial history. Following independence in 1980, when Mugabe took power, mining remained the backbone of the national economy, but foreign companies controlled up to 95% of mineral output. In the years that followed, as tensions over land rights grew, Mugabe pushed for local ownership of mines, eventually mandating that each have at least a 51% stake held by Zimbabweans.
Much of the country’s mineral wealth remained underdeveloped, however, and the sector was poorly managed. Rather than seeking employment in mines, many Zimbabweans turned to digging on their own. Even today, deposits of minerals such as gold are often discovered throughout Zimbabwe, along rivers, in fields, and in disused mines. Locals pan in rivers, venture into abandoned shafts, and mine underground pillars left behind by bigger operations, which sometimes leads to cave-ins and entrapments.
Mountain Mujakachi, a former informal miner who now advocates on behalf of the community, is tall and gentle-natured. He met Rest of World in May at a slime dam built by Bikita Minerals. The dam collected milky water tainted by mining waste and filled a vast area, including what had previously been a drinking source for residents.
Now 32, Mujakachi moved to Bikita with his family as a child in the late 1990s, when informal mining was prevalent in the community. At the time, lithium was nearly worthless; it was primarily used in the production of heat-resistant glass and ceramics. When he wasn’t in school, Mujakachi would observe members of his extended family mining in a forest close to home. Sometimes he helped by fetching water and food and, eventually, learned to dig for minerals himself. “I became passionate about small-scale mining at a young age, after seeing how it could potentially change our people’s lives for the better,” Mujakachi told Rest of World, recounting how the trade became a way out of poverty for many.
For decades, locals mined informally at the Bikita Minerals mine for gold, tantalite, and emeralds, he said. Before its 2022 purchase by Sinomine, the mine was majority-owned by African Metals Management Services, a Mauritius-based company, and another firm led by a German investor. Security was sparse, Mujakachi and other locals said, and informal miners often worked without issue by scraping for leftover minerals in disused areas, selling what they found on the black market.
In 2017, Mujakachi began a four-year degree in development studies, inspired by his experience with mining. He paid for his education by mining on public land and at Bikita Minerals, before giving up informal mining and founding a local advocacy organization. “Mining has always been important for our community, and through it, there was potential for the lives of our people to change for the better,” he told Rest of World. He believed the government should issue more licenses to locals and invest in small-scale mining projects, while creating policies that pushed mining companies to be more socially accountable: employing more residents, developing infrastructure, and rehabilitating the environment.
As global interest in electric vehicles grew in the wake of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, then soared in 2021, Mujakachi and other informal miners began to focus on lithium. Chinese mineral dealers set up shop in the area, creating a buzz in the community, and there was a boom in the black-market lithium business. Mujakachi’s mining income spiked, even as more locals rushed to take up informal mining.
In June of 2022, Sinomine chairperson Wang Pingwei traveled from China to Zimbabwe to attend the company’s launch of the newly acquired Bikita Minerals mine, for which it had paid $180 million. President Mnangagwa — who’d declared Zimbabwe “open for business” to foreign investors after seizing power from Mugabe in a 2017 coup — officiated the event.
“As a responsible Chinese company rooted in this heartland, Sinomine will expand its investment, bring more jobs, [and] develop opportunities for locals,” Wang said, as Sinomine announced an additional investment of $200 million to expand production and vowed to help the community with better-paying employment and local investment.
Amid the new ownership and expansion of the mine came a ratcheting up of security. Sinomine erected fences and dug a trench around the mine’s growing perimeter, hired armed security guards, and worked with police to crack down on black-market digging.
Nikisi, the Bikita Minerals spokesperson, told Rest of World Sinomine “had serious cases of ore theft, and the company had to beef up security.” He said that over the last six months of 2023 alone, 50 illicit miners had been arrested and 25 trucks had been impounded, though he did not provide more current figures. A spokesperson for the provincial police did not respond to a request for comment on arrests.
For illicit miners, work became costlier and continued to be precarious. Three told Rest of World they now had to bribe guards or transport contractors to dig for minerals at the mine and move out what they found. Even so, many did not see their work as wrong. In interviews with Rest of World, two illicit miners who’d met Darlington Vivito at Bikita Minerals described him as innocent. “All he wanted to do was to make money so he could help his family, like all of us,” one said.
Six women told Rest of World they had been sexually assaulted while working illegally at the mine — a problem that predates Sinomine’s acquisition, but which, four of the women said, had worsened under its ownership. All of the women said they were sexually assaulted by security guards, while two said they had been assaulted by fellow miners. One woman, a single mother who asked not to be named, said she was introduced to illegal lithium mining in 2019, at age 17, when she was in desperate need of work. She recounted being sexually assaulted by a security guard when the mine was still under its previous ownership. Sexual assaults became more common, she said, after security measures increased under Sinomine. “It was [more] difficult to enter when the Chinese came, and that is when the abuses intensified, because we had to pay our way into the mine,” the woman said.
Her mother and sister both supported her allegations about repeated sexual assaults. Like other women interviewed by Rest of World, she said she felt unable to report these attacks to authorities. “We couldn’t and can’t report this because we were stealing,” she said. “We eventually accepted that this was what we had to deal with.”
This sentiment of not being able to report sexual assault or other abuse is widely held among illicit miners, said Leonard Mabasa of the Buhera Residence Network Trust, a nonprofit that advocates for Zimbabwe’s mining communities. “The majority of cases of abuse go unreported because miners are afraid to report them, knowing they are breaking the law,” he told Rest of World.
A spokesperson for the provincial police did not respond to questions about the allegations of sexual assault at the mine. Nikisi told Rest of World that Bikita Minerals had no documented cases of sexual assault, “with no reports filed at the on-site police base or through worker unions and local chiefs. The company emphasizes its commitment to addressing such issues via a robust gender policy and dedicated offices.”
Some locals in Bikita, meanwhile, say they’ve yet to see the benefits that Sinomine promised to bring to the community.
Ishmael Mudhe, a chief who oversees 100 villages in the area, told Rest of World around 900 locals had been placed into jobs in the mine, mostly in low-paying positions. He said Sinomine’s promises for local development, however, had not been sufficient. “We are not seeing any real development in the community from the Chinese company,” Mudhe said. “We need to see something that will cater for generations even after the mine ceases to exist.”
He added that the mine’s previous ownership had stronger relations with workers and the wider community, with a better understanding of local culture and values, and more effective communication with residents. He said the community wished the mine’s prior owners “were still in charge.” But he put the primary blame on the national government. “The Chinese are capitalizing on weak policies in the country,” he said. “There is no social responsibility by the company, and our laws are not holding them to account.”
“Workers are being treated similarly to how they were during the [Ian] Smith regime,” Mudhe added, referring to Zimbabwe’s last colonial leader before independence.
Munetsi, the Ministry of Mines official, told Rest of World the colonialism narrative “ignores tangible outcomes” like job creation, infrastructure development, technology transfers, and export profits. “Worker safety and fair labor practices are non-negotiable,” he said, adding that the government has measures in place to “explicitly enforce social responsibility.”
“We are aware of concerns raised in Bikita and have initiated a multi-agency investigation through our Responsible Mining Audit Initiative, which evaluates compliance with environmental, safety, and community engagement standards,” Munetsi said. “Where violations are confirmed, corrective measures will be enforced, including legal action and suspension of operations. We reaffirm that all investors — irrespective of origin — must adhere to Zimbabwe’s laws and our Responsible Mining Initiative, which mandates community development, environmental rehabilitation, and zero tolerance
