by STAFF WRITER
FOR THE elderly women of Mushenjere village, Zimbabwe’s grand industrial future is a wall. Erected by Dinson Iron and Steel Company (DISCO), it encloses all the arable land they once farmed. Four years on, they have not planted a single crop.
The wall is part of the Dinson Industrial Park, a flagship project that Zimbabwe’s government touts as a cornerstone of its re-industrialisation drive.
But for about 22 families from Mushenjere, many of them subsistence farmers in their eighties and nineties, the steel plant has brought only hunger and dust.
They are among an unknown number of displaced households who say they were pushed aside with little more than empty promises.
Compensation, where paid at all, has proved meagre. Because the land was classified as state land, families received money only for structures and trees – not for the loss of their livelihoods.
At the relocation sites, six boreholes drilled by the company have reportedly run dry.
Only three families have been moved into new houses, and those, though complete on the outside, have developed internal cracks, according to the Centre for Natural Resource Governance (CNRG), a watchdog.
Survival depends on irregular handouts: US 200 every month, payments that recently stopped for more than five months until villagers protested.
The company’s public face tells a different story.
CNRG alleges that journalists are routinely invited on choreographed tours of the production facilities, while the cracked houses, dust-choked zones and abandoned villages are kept off the itinerary.
The concern has reached the Ministry of Lands, which reportedly called a senior Zimbabwean manager to order for engaging communities outside official government processes.
Workers, too, say they are left in the dark.
The company, they say, once hired a doctor to carry out medical tests on employees, but the results were never shared. They are kept at the safety office.
Any life-threatening condition found remains a secret known only to management.
For the elderly women of Mushenjere, secrets matter less than water and soil. Their walled-off fields have become a monument to a familiar African paradox: development that destroys the very lives it is meant to raise.
CNRG is now demanding government intervention, from independent housing inspections to the release of workers’ medical records.