Copper: Humanity’s first and most important future metal
Millions of feet of copper wiring will be required for strengthening the world’s power grids, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes more are needed to build wind and solar farms.
Human Rights Watch on Sunday told prospective investors in China Non-Ferrous Metals Mining Corporation’s upcoming IPO that they should be aware of the company’s “disturbing labor rights practices in Zambia,” and poor safety record.
State-owned CNMC plans to go public in Hong Kong with its operations in the southern African country which includes underground mines, a smelter and processing plants that employ 6,000 workers.
CNMC will embark on a road show within weeks and the IPO could raise as much as $500 million.
The miner is also on an aggressive expansion drive and “by the end of 2013, CNMC’s total investment in Zambia will surpass $2.5 billion, providing more than 20,000 jobs,” the country’s Post Online reported last week:
Should CNMC successfully list the Zambian mining asset on Hong Kong, it would become the first foreign mining firm to list a local asset outside after Konkola Copper Mines chickened out of its much-publicised plans in 2010 to launch an initial public offer on London Stock Exchange for Konkola Resources to raise at least US$1.1 billion.
Human Rights Watch documented the labour abuses in a November 2011 report, “‘You’ll Be Fired if You Refuse‘: Labor Abuses in Zambia’s Chinese State-owned Copper Mines”.
Comments
Deykenya
It is not Human rights only on zambia national but imported Chinese slave labour, it has to befall on the African Governing Conscience too that independence was the fight of inhuman treatment and uneven distribution this is not an African only issue it has been the bone of contention even today where we feel transparent and democratic with human rights it is the infections which we say to cure but with a blind eye. to change this we have to groom the mindset and not create derivatives to benefit the glamour of todays deminished responsibility towards our moral duty to the universal spirit that we all adore from each race color creed or religion to care for our human sole equal to the material earth only then can we realistically bring the courage of happiness and smiles on the childern who own this earth and being destroyed by our adult follies in greed of the material wealth where the first iota of respect should be given.
Samarendra Dey
Concept Creators Limited UK.