Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has cancelled every gold mining lease in the province and suspended all gold mining, Governor Faisal Karim Kundi announced at a press conference in Peshawar on Saturday, 14 November. Leaseholders and contractors have one week to remove their heavy machinery, and anything left behind will be seized. It follows the ambush in Kohat, where police returning from a raid on illegal gold mining at Darabo Kach were attacked on 11 November. Police and Rescue 1122 put the death toll at 11, including Deputy Superintendent of Police Haidar Zaman, with 12 wounded. Geo News reported 10 policemen martyred and 18 militants killed.
A ten-year lease for five weeks of gold
The governor put numbers on the trade he is stopping. About 90 kilogrammes of gold were coming out of the Kohat area every month, worth about Rs4.2 billion. One mining block had been leased for Rs4.92 billion for ten years. On the governor’s own figures, the whole ten-year price of the lease equals about five weeks of the gold coming out of the ground, and over the full decade that gold would be worth about Rs504 billion, more than a hundred times the lease price. Those are the governor’s figures, not an audited count, and no independent measurement of the trade exists.
Kundi said about 80 per cent of the money went to Afghanistan to finance terrorism and activity against Pakistan. He said operators paid militants extortion money for protection, and named the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan as receiving money from the Kohat mines, with Afghan commanders collecting the payments. Radio Pakistan reported that a Khwarji commander had been extracting Rs800,000 from local miners and up to Rs4 million from others. The operation ran across two mineral blocks in Kohat, C and D, worked by 8,350 tractors with tractor-trolleys, 1,730 heavy dumpers and large numbers of labourers. The Express Tribune counted about 49,000 workers, 3,000 excavators and 1,600 dumpers.
Twelve names, no charges yet
Kundi said 12 political figures had backed the illegal mining, and named some of them: former provincial minister Aftab Alam, Shehryar Afridi, Khurram Zeeshan, Sajid Iqbal and Naveed, described as the brother of a former chief minister. The Express Tribune also named Amjad Afridi. No first information reports had been registered against the people he named, so the allegations stand as statements by the governor, not as charges. He said accountability would apply to everyone, whether political or not.
A judicial commission will investigate the illegal mining and the Kohat ambush, and a task force named after the martyred DSP Haidar Zaman has been approved. Fines for illegal mining can now reach Rs2 million under the law, replacing the Rs25,000 to Rs30,000 penalties magistrates had been charging. A new policy for gold mining is promised within three weeks.
The legal gap in the announcement
What the announcement did not settle is its legal footing. No notification cancelling the leases had been published by Saturday evening, and no list of the cancelled leases, the companies affected or compensation appeared. Because the order covers every lease and every mining activity, it reaches the legal holders of those leases as well as the illegal operators. No notification constituting the task force or the judicial commission had appeared either. Until those documents appear, the cancellation rests on the governor’s announcement alone.
The province has been under governor’s rule for about a month, after Parliament backed the emergency and governor’s rule in the province, and Kundi said maintaining law and order was the government’s first priority.
The other side of the same week
The crackdown lands in the same week Islamabad was courting mineral investors. 13 mineral deals were signed at the Pakistan Minerals Investment Forum, though only $100 million of it was real money. Kundi made the case for the lawful version of the trade at the same press conference, saying the province had significant mineral reserves and would seek a minerals agreement better than Reko Diq. The contrast is the point: the province is shutting its gold mines in the same week the country is selling its minerals to foreign investors, because the governor says the existing trade funded the militants who killed his policemen. Whether the shutdown produces a lawful trade, or only a pause, depends on the policy due in three weeks and on the commission’s findings.
What happens next
Contractors have until about 21 November to clear their machinery. Then the task force and the judicial commission must be constituted in writing, the new policy must appear within three weeks, and leaseholders must be told whether their leases are cancelled, suspended or renegotiated, and whether any compensation is due. The first test is the machinery deadline. The second is whether a notification follows the announcement. More national news from Pakistan.
