'Lithium Dreams, Colonial Realities: How Zimbabwe’s Mineral Wealth Is Being Hijacked in Plain Sight’ 10 May 2025

Dozens of families in Bikita were asleep when the trucks arrived. Under cover of darkness, surveyors from a foreign mining firm, flanked by local officials, placed red flags in a line that would later become a perimeter fence. Within days, the villagers’ fields — some farmed for generations — were declared part of a lithium mining zone. No one had seen an environmental impact assessment. No one had been compensated. The world needs lithium. It is central to clean energy, electric vehicles, and battery storage. But as this investigation by The Eastern Herald reveals, the human and environmental costs of that transition are being buried in silence.

Internal documents and court filings obtained by The Eastern Herald show that more than 3,200 hectares of rural land were reclassified without public review. In several districts, Executive Orders enabled land transfers to Chinese-owned firms operating through offshore shells — without consent from local councils or landholders. A leaked audit from the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority shows more than $1.1 billion in lithium-related income left the country between Q3 2022 and Q1 2025. The funds were routed through tax-friendly jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Mauritius, allowing mining firms to minimize tax exposure.

…Leaked employment logs show only 13.7% of technical roles in Chinese-run lithium sites are held by Zimbabwean nationals. Despite training geologists domestically, the country imports engineers and labor from China — often under blanket visa exemptions. While China extracts the resource, Western corporations profit from it. Tesla, BYD, and Volkswagen use lithium processed in China, originally mined in Zimbabwe. Yet no Western OEMs currently audit the origins of this raw material. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act does not require traceability if refining happens outside the bloc. Human Rights Watch has labeled Zimbabwe a “compliance blind spot.”