A landslide at Zamboye's artisanal gold site exposes the lethal cost of CAR's unregulated mining economy, where diggers work without safety infrastructure in exchange for the country's most bankable export.
On 18 August, footage emerged showing a landslide engulfing artisanal miners at the Zamboye gold site in the Central African Republic, with workers buried beneath cascading earth and sand. The scale of casualties remains unconfirmed, but video evidence leaves little ambiguity about the violence of the collapse at a site typical of CAR's informal extraction sector.
CAR's artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) sector operates almost entirely outside formal safety or environmental regulation, providing livelihoods for tens of thousands while feeding gold flows that transit through Sudan, UAE and regional smuggling networks. Each disaster of this kind underscores how the resource curse operates at its most granular level: the state captures neither revenue nor responsibility, while miners absorb all physical risk.
Watch whether CAR's transitional government — already stretched by Wagner-linked security arrangements and donor tensions — faces any accountability pressure domestically or from the ICGLR's regional mining governance frameworks. Repeated incidents without regulatory response will further entrench the parallel economy that keeps Bangui's formal gold statistics fictionally low.
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