Recent developments related to Barrick Gold, by some measures the world’s largest gold mining corporation, highlight the heavy dependence of Canada’s mining companies on the imperialist thuggery of the Canadian state for their continued operations and profits.
In April, the Globe & Mail newspaper revealed that Barrick had been ordered to produce as many as 120,000 documents to defend itself in a London UK court. It is being sued by Tanzanian claimants in respect to the killings and injuries of local villagers by Tanzanian police and security forces—paid, fed, and housed by the company—at its North Mara mine. “The claimants,” reported RAID, an anti-corporate malfeasance NGO, “include the family of a nine-year-old girl killed by a mine vehicle driven by police, and four women who were fired upon while gathering around her body. Barrick’s subsidiaries deny liability.”
Over the years scores of villagers have been killed or injured, but leaked documents expose that the Canadian state accepted Barrick’s denials at face value, concerned only to cover up the violence, lest it get in the way of resolving Barrick’s enormous tax and export problems.
The following month the Globe reported some of the sordid details of Barrick’s $190 billion tax and export dispute with Tanzanian authorities, exposing the intimate involvement of Canadian officials and diplomats in Barrick’s negotiations with the Tanzanian government. The Globe, as the principal mouthpiece of Canada’s capitalist ruling class, was determined to obscure the political and historical context of its own reporting.
The truth is that Barrick’s profitable Tanzanian operations only exist due to decades of relentless pressure exerted on Tanzania by the Canadian state, which took full advantage of the political bankruptcy and greed of successive Tanzanian bourgeois nationalist governments.
The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) first threatened to withhold food aid in 1985 if Tanzania refused to open up its economy to Canadian mining investments. Canadian state pressure played a major role in bullying Tanzania away from its policy of Ujamaa or agrarian “African Socialism.” In reality Ujamaa had nothing whatsoever to do with socialism. It was a reactionary nationalist and backwards-looking development policy pursued disastrously by the Tanganyika African National Union, (TANU), and then its political successor, the Chama Chai Mapinduzi (Party of the Revolution) after independence from British colonialism in 1961.
Subsequent “market reforms” demanded and imposed by imperialism combined with colonialism and state-led post-colonial national capitalist development have restricted Tanzania to a very low level of economic development. Annual per capita GDP is $2,200, and half the population lives on less than $1.90 USD per day.
Mining investment is held up by Canadian imperialism as a “solution” to the problem of African development. But the problems of African development are due entirely to capitalism and imperialism. Despite making investors in imperialist countries obscenely wealthy, Tanzania’s entire mining sector accounted for only 6 percent of its meagre US $62 billion GDP in 2020, including investment, wages and taxes. To compare, Canada’s 40 largest mining companies had revenues of US $124 billion in 2020, equivalent to 7.5 percent of Canada’s GDP, with most of this revenue flowing into Canadian markets from foreign mining operations.
Canada is Tanzania’s single largest foreign investor, focused on the removal of billions of dollars of mineral wealth per year from the country, for which the Tanzanian state has historically received a pittance in royalty fees. Similar in many aspects to the political leaders of the former Soviet Stalinist republics, CCM party officials today preside over a corrupt gangster state, with factions battling over control of various rent-seeking and bribe-taking schemes connected to the mining sector and government contracts.
Canadian pressure has only intensified this corruption.
In 1996, in the aftermath of International Monetary Fund (IMF) “structural adjustment reforms,” and after the threat of the withdrawal of hundreds of millions in development loans, “exploration” at what is now Barrick’s Bulyanhulu gold mine was undertaken by a Canadian company, Sutton Resources. Little real “exploration” was required however, as the area was already being mined by more than one hundred thousand small-scale Tanzanian miners, who had been encouraged by the old Ujamaa policy.
Then Canadian High Commissioner to Tanzania, Verona Edelstein pressured the Tanzanian government via diplomatic channels, on Tanzanian television and in the press into evicting the small-scale miners from the area to allow the Canadian mine to be built. In the violent evictions that followed, as many as 60 artisanal miners were buried alive when bulldozers filled in their pits. [1] Barrick subsequently purchased Sutton Resources and Bulyanhulu in 1999.
Barrick has enjoyed the constant support of the Canadian state ever since. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper notably used a 2007 trip to Tanzania to visit Barrick’s operations while Barrick was using scabs to break a strike of more than one thousand Bulyanhulu mine workers.
More recently, Canadian mining industry profits were assisted by the Tanzanian government’s abandonment of any fight against the COVID pandemic. Reporting on any COVID cases or testing in Tanzania is illegal. Former president Magufuli declared the pandemic defeated in June 2020, due to “prayer,” but died of COVID himself in early 2021, along with tens of thousands of uncounted Tanzanian workers.
In 2020, as the pandemic raged, Canadian minerals and mining imports experienced 2.5 percent growth, while the value of all other imports save agriculture shrank dramatically. The value of Canadian mining assets abroad increased by 3.5 percent in 2020. Gold miner’s profit per ounce was a record-setting $828 in 2020.
According to a sub-secretary in a Latin American ministry of mines, “the Canadian ambassador here is a representative for Canadian mining companies.” [2]
Canadian imperialism and mining
Canada has 0.48 percent of the global population but is home to 80 percent of the world’s mining companies. The total value of Canadian foreign mining investments stood at $273 billion in 2020, according to Natural Resources Canada. Latin America is the principal target of Canadian mining investment, followed by the US, and then Africa.