Zambia’s gold must not bury the people it could employ

The Kikonge gold rush exposed more than a mineral deposit. It exposed the distance between a possible livelihood and a safe, lawful future.

OPINION / EVIDENCE & PERSPECTIVE · THE DAILY PULSE EDITORIAL

When people die around a gold discovery, the national conversation should not end with a warning to stay away. It must ask two questions together: how did people lose their lives, and why was there no safer route from that opportunity to a lawful livelihood?

Zambia's small-scale mining potential is not dead. Treating it as dead would let us abandon it. Our concern is the potential being wasted when unsafe work, opaque access and violent confrontations replace a credible path into the industry.

The deaths belong in the public record

Parliament's records describe the discovery of gold in the Kikonge area of Mufumbwe in May 2025, a rush to the site and subsequent safety and security incidents. In a 10 July 2025 parliamentary exchange, Home Affairs Minister Jack Mwiimbu acknowledged three deaths following the confrontation under discussion.

That is an attributed official account. It does not establish the complete sequence of events, individual responsibility or whether force was lawful. Conflicting reports from that period are precisely why an independent record matters. We should not combine deaths in mine collapses with deaths in confrontations as if they were one incident.

The Human Rights Commission's third newsletter of 2025 reported that it was conducting independent investigations into the Kikonge shooting and alleged rights violations. That is evidence that the deaths did receive investigative attention. We cannot honestly say there was no investigation.

Nor can we claim a completed public accounting from the material checked for this article. We did not locate a final published finding that resolves the shooting in those sources. That is a limit of our review, not proof that authorities have done nothing or that no such finding exists.

Enforcement is not the whole mining policy

A January 2026 National Prosecution Authority account shows that official attention to illegal mining in Mufumbwe continued. It records a provincial official's allegations about organised groups and networks exploiting the gold rush. These are institutional allegations, not convictions establishing the guilt of everyone mentioned.

The point is not to excuse unlawful mining or attacks on police. Safety, lawful access and the protection of officers matter. But a response centred only on clearing a site can leave the livelihood question untouched: what can an eligible local miner do instead, and how can they enter the sector safely?

A serious small-scale mining pathway needs transparent licensing, understandable decisions, training, safe working conditions and credible buyers. Public information should distinguish a pending application from an awarded licence and explain who has access to which area. Those are our policy proposals, not a claim that all such systems are absent everywhere in Zambia.

A gold rush should leave more than a cordon

The lost opportunity is not an amount we can responsibly invent. We do not have a verified estimate of the income or jobs Zambia forfeited at Kikonge. We can still ask whether a mineral discovery is generating durable local livelihoods, who benefits from legal access and what prevents safe participation.

For accountability, the questions should be equally concrete. What has the Commission concluded? What findings can be made public? Have the circumstances of the deaths been independently established? What remedy is available where wrongdoing is found? Protecting sensitive evidence need not mean leaving families and the public without an explanation of the process.

A country should not have to choose between disorder and excluding ordinary people from its resources. The better ambition is lawful participation with rules people can understand—and institutions that answer when lives are lost.

Gold can remain in the ground and still represent a possibility. A person killed cannot be returned to their family by the next investment announcement. Zambia's mining story must make room for both the opportunity and the obligation to answer for the deaths.