As the Africa Mining Indaba gets under way in Cape Town on Monday‚ activists and mining-affected communities will be staging their own alternative mining indaba in the city‚ as has been a tradition for the past eight years.c

The organisers for the alternative indaba said it would serve as a forum to raise concerns about challenges in mining-affected communities.

 They described the Africa Mining Indaba as a “gathering of the rich and unaffected‚ which will deliberate strategies on how to consolidate their mining profits and sweet-talk government officials into submission”.

 “All this will be‚ and has been happening without the communities affected by mining activities of the same executive who will be at Africa Mining Indaba.

“It is for this reason that for the past eight years‚ communities and people affected by mining have been organising themselves and convened the Alternative Mining Indaba (AMI) to articulate the suffering of ordinary people at the same time corporations and governments are meeting at CTICC (Cape Town International Convention Centre) to form partnerships and design strategies to consolidate their profits‚” the organisers said.

 They added that the Alternative Mining Indaba was a space created to bring to the fore the issues faced by communities and explore areas through which civil society organisations could support communities affected by mining.

 “The Alternative Mining Indaba (AMI) raises the issues that the Mining Indaba deliberately refuses to raise — the issues about poverty of communities adjacent to mining activities‚ the lack of adequate job creation‚ the environmental impact of mining activities on these communities as well as general sustainability after mining operations‚” they said.