‘Zimbabwe Independent Legislator Takes on Chinese Companies for Worker Abuse’ 8 July 2019

A Zimbabwean legislator is taking on Chinese companies that he says aren’t adhering to local laws and are abusing workers in the African nation. China’s investments in the country should be reviewed, as they are skewed in favor of the Chinese, Temba Mliswa, an independent member of Parliament for Zimbabwe’s Norton Constituency, told The Epoch Times. “They [Chinese companies] don’t comply with our labor laws. They are causing environmental degradation, they are violating human rights, and are involved in corruption. If Chinese investment is so good for Zimbabwe, why is the Zimbabwean economy still struggling?” Mliswa said.

“Our government has been signing deals with the Chinese, but at what cost? Some of these Chinese companies are not honest. They claim to be brick molding when, in actual fact, they are mining gold. Our leadership is letting us down,” he said. Mliswa has vowed that “the days of Chinese companies in Zimbabwe are over,” adding, “God will command us to take back our resources.”

China’s investments in Zimbabwe have been growing in the past decade, but former Zimbabwe Finance Minister Tendai Biti recently warned African countries about China’s “unorthodox methods of lending to African countries.”  “They [Chinese] also tend to take some shortcuts; their due diligence is a mixture of politics and economics. So there’s no set objective standard when it comes to Chinese loan contraction. But Chinese debt is huge and Chinese debt is now populating the balance sheets of most of these African states,” Biti said, during a conference entitled “Southern Africa’s Debt Conundrum” in Johannesburg, on July 2.