KCM Attains Africa’s First Five-Star Safety Rating
The award comes after the first combined OHSAS 18001-Five-Star audit ever undertaken by the BSC in Africa, done at KCM’s Nchanga Integrated Business Unit in Chingola last month by the council’s veteran auditor, Avril Bairstow. A Company spokesperson said the achievement was a credit not just to KCM and its employees but to the entire mining industry in Zambia. “The rating is based on the best practices at international level and our score of 81.3 percent at the first attempt is a big credit to the efforts put up by staff, especially those at Nchanga and other key players who have made this possible,” he said. The audit was conducted by reviewing KCM’s health and safety documentation and systems against both the International Five Star Occupational Health and Safety Audit and BS OHSAS18001:2007. This was followed by an inspection of the sites and associated buildings. The audit seeks to ensure that all aspects of health and safety have been covered by the organisation’s management systems and assesses the efficiency of the system. Ms Bairstow said Nchanga had done well to achieve the grading which should be viewed as a realistic measure of where KCM was at present so that a programme of improvement could be implemented in the near future. The company spokesperson said as the first mining house in Africa to attain a five-star rating, KCM was now firmly on the road to joining the best in the world in terms of safety standards. “This is a major milestone in our march to attaining the highest standards in safety and occupational health,” he said. Ms Bairstow commended the KCM management for attempting the Five-Star rating, saying it was a bold move as no mining house in Africa had ever done it. Five-Star rating is just one step away from the ultimate accolade in safety and occupational health; the Sword of Honour. She said the KCM management had demonstrated a genuine commitment to achieving best practices and continuous improvement in safety and occupational health by aiming for the Five-Star rating. “Five-Star is a very difficult audit and involves serious scrutiny…very different from other compliance audits like OHSAS 18001 and so, it is very courageous of KCM to go for it. I don’t think there is any company in Africa that has attained it yet,” she said. She said a lot of companies in India, including TATA and ITC had achieved five-star rating and Vedanta will have drawn a lot of inspiration from that to encourage the KCM Management to have a go at it. She noted however, that KCM was the first African company to undergo a double OHSAS 18001/Five-star rating. Safety is one of the four pillars of the ‘Tubombe Tusunge’ cost-saving initiative launched by KCM in May and Ms Bairstow said attaining best-practice standards in safety would be a great achievement for the company’s employees, shareholders and board of directors. “It is a prestigious award, the Five-Star rating. It is good for the workers and good for the share-holders and the board of directors. The safer you are, the happier the board and the shareholders and the more willing they are to invest even more,” she said. Ms Bairstow said KCM already had some of the best qualified safety people in Zambia and could take a lot of pride in the fact that it had invested a lot of money in their training.