Hwange Villagers Arrested for Non-violently Defending Water Source

02/10/2025: Five villagers (4 women and 1 man) from Diki Village in Hwange Rural District, were arrested and allegedly beaten yesterday (01 October 2025) when they non-violently blocked a Chinese mining company from draining water from a local water dam. This is the third time this community has been having their members being arrested, questioned and later released for protecting their water source.

Voices for Water investigated the matter and established that the community built the dam in 1992 using their own resources and they have been using it to water their local irrigation scheme which caters for 73 farmers. However, the Chinese mining company ZhongJin Heli Energy has interest in using the dam water for their operations. They have been extracting the water without community consent, but of late they began constructing a pipeline and this infuriated the villagers. The villagers have engaged the District and Provincial authorities to no avail and they claim some members of the security sector have been stopping them from meeting with their traditional leaders and threatening them that this Chinese project is a ‘national security project’ and they should not interfere.

Chief among the community’s concerns include:

1. That currently their dam was not able to provide enough water for the irrigation scheme and additional extraction by the Chinese company will adversely affect their livelihood;
2. The Chinese company claims that it was 300 mega-litres of water for 3 months, however, the pump head they have installed is written that it pumps 600 megalitres of water per hour;
3. The local dam is about 7 metres dep, but the Chinese company had constructed an 18 metres deep mega reservoir of water where it wants to pump the dam water to. This creates anxiety to the community that this company wants to drain the dam dry;
4. This Chinese company is said to have been drilling boreholes around (some as deep as about 200m) and this has caused the local boreholes in the community, in the local primary school and the local clinic to run out of water;
5. There is another Chinese company which mines coal and has approached the community requesting to relocate the dam but the community refused. It is therefore the thinking of the community that this attempt to drain dry the drain is a ploy to create space for the other Chinese mine.

Voices for Water will be monitoring this development and continuously uncovering the critical issues around this water issue. It is important that communities non-violently defend their water sources against mining and commercial companies because water is a vital need of the communities. The Constitution of Zimbabwe provides for the right to clean, safe potable water for all and also provides for the right to non-violently protest (individually or collectively) against any decision of he government.