Kafue River disaster exposes Zambia’s Bamako Convention reporting failure

By Thandiwe Moyo

Once teeming with fish and sustaining vast farmlands, Zambia’s Kafue River  has become a source of fear and deprivation following the February 2025 tailings dam collapse at Sino-Metals Leach Zambia mine on the Copperbelt.

The breach released acidic mining waste containing dissolved solids and heavy metals, including lead, into the Mwambashi stream, a direct tributary of the Kafue, contaminating one of the country’s most critical water systems.

Initial findings from the Engineering Institution of Zambia (EIZ) confirmed that the spill discharged concertrated acid and dissolved solids, leading to immediate mass fish die-offs of over100 kilometers downstream, crop wilting along riverbanks, and the temporary shutdown of water supplies to Kitwe, a city of 700,000.

Kafue River is Zambia’s longest wholly internal waterway that is a lifeline for roughly 60 percent of the country’s population. For farming and fishing communities along its banks the dam failure translated into a sudden loss of food, income and access to safe drinking water.

“This river cannot be used for anything,” said Chilufya Mwape, a farmer whose maize field was destroyed by contaminated water.

Mwape added that a number of families who relied on farming and fishing in the area could no longer do that anymore due to the heavy metals and cyanide currently present in the river.

Although the incident has largely been treated as an infrastructure failure, it exposes a deeper and systemic problem; the accumulation, storage and oversight of hazardous mining waste in Zambia’s Copperbelt.

The tailings released at Sino-Metals acidic residues laden with lead and other heavy metals fall squarely within the definition of hazardous waste under the Bamako Convention.

Zambia is a party to the Bamako Convention, the pan-African treaty adopted in 1991 to prohibit hazardous waste dumping and to ensure environmentally sound management of toxic wastes.

The Convention goes beyond the Basel Convention by embedding the precautionary principle and imposing stricter controls on hazardous waste generation, movement, storage and disposal.

At Sino-Metals, large volumes of hazardous waste were retained behind an earthen dam without sufficient safeguards. Yet the most consequential failure may not have been the collapse itself, but the absence of robust systems to track, report and independently verify the quantities, toxicity and risk profile of hazardous waste accumulating at the site.

Following the spill, Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA), the country’s  designated competent authority under the convention issued an Environmental Restoration Order (ERO) and announced that legal action will be taken once all necessary assessments were completed.

The Ministry of  Green Economy and Environment (MGEE), instructed the company to repair the damaged dam, rehabilitate contaminated land and provide alternative drinking water to affected communities.

Sino-Metals issued an apology, paid a fine of K1.5 million (about $63,000), and provided interim payouts ranging from $17 to $2,000 per affected household. These measures however, fall short of addressing the long-term environmental, health and livelihood losses now facing communities along the Kufue river.

More troubling is the prolonged absence of the final pollution impact report.  As of January 2026, nearly a year after the spill, ZEMA has yet to publish its findings. Some families are still waiting for the interim payments while others report being told that the water is safe to drink in the absence of publicly released data.

This delay has implications beyond Zambia’s borders. Under Bamako Conventions countries are obliged to report hazardous waste incidents, waste streams and compliance measures to the Convention Secretariat. This information underpins the work of the Regional Centres for Hazardous Waste Management (RCHMs), which are intended to support monitoring, early warning, technical assistance and coordinated enforcement across Africa.

In the Kafue case, missing and delayed data on hazardous waste volumes, composition and movement severely constrain regional oversight. Without transparent reporting, RCHMs are unable to assess cross-border risks, identify systemic non-compliance or issue early warnings that could prevent similar failures elsewhere. The result is a weakened regional compliance architecture, despite the Convention’s explicit intent to strengthen collective environmental protection.

Civil society organisations, including the Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ), Southern Africa Litigation Centre and ActionAid, have warned that reliance on company-generated assessments, coupled with limited public disclosure, undermines both community trust and Zambia’s obligations under the Convention.

The Bamako Convention demands heightened vigilance against such intra-continental hazards. The Kafue spill exposes a persistent “Bamako gap”. The difference  between Zambia’s binding regional commitments to precaution and environmentally sound management, and the weak implementation, delayed reporting and limited transparency evident on the ground.

Zambia’s Environmental Management Act of 2011 affirms every citizen’s right to a clean, safe and healthy environment. That right, however, is rendered meaningless without timely disclosure of pollution data, independent verification of hazardous waste controls and credible enforcement.

As CEJ Executive Director Maggie Mapalo has warned, that failure to act decisively risks long-term public health harm, deepening poverty and irreversible ecological damage. Biodiversity has been eroded and food security undermined, while affected communities remain in limbo.

The Kafue catastrophe is  not only a national environmental crisis but a test of the Bamako Convention’s effectiveness. Full publication of ZEMA’s findings, independent audits of hazardous waste management, and strengthened reporting to the Convention Secretariat and RCHMs are essential if the Convention is to function as a meaningful accountability and early-warning framework.

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