Peter Dickson
Miners retrenched as a result of the falling gold price are returning to the Transkei to a drought that will eat away the last job opportunities they are likely to find.
With unemployment in the Eastern Cape, South Africa’s second-poorest province, at a critical 49% and recruitment for the mining industry coming to an end, Premier Makhenkesi Stofile made a desperate appeal to the British government and the International Monetary Fund this week to reconsider the sale of gold reserves.
The mining industry has indicated that 11 700 jobs are at risk at five mines and Spoornet is planning 27 000 retrenchments over the next three years.
After an emergency executive council meeting in Bisho, Stofile said that the sale of gold reserves would “exacerbate the already bad situation”.
The former Transkei is also now firmly in the grip of drought. Eastern Province Agricultural Union president Pieter Erasmus says the situation, brought on by a searing heatwave and little rain over the past two months, is “critical”. Farm workers could soon be paid off by desperate farmers also trying to sell their livestock to make ends meet, Erasmus says, and the added burden on welfare-dependent communities, together with hundreds of retrenched miners, will be crippling.
Apart from only two areas in the north-east and the East London coastal belt, grazing is way below normal and farmers are feeding their animals by hand at great expense. Most farm dams are empty or very near empty and precious underground water reserves are diminishing rapidly.
Even Port Elizabeth, the region’s biggest city, has made an urgent appeal to residents to cut down on water usage as the levels of the industrial metropole’s supply dams continue to drop steadily.
Says Erasmus: “Farmers are trying to sell many of their animals to make things easier for themselves. There are no longer subsidies for drought. To survive, they have to cut costs. This means that they will have to let some of their employees go as a last option should matters become worse, while they will not be able to employ more labour.
“Should we get good rains in September and October, things will improve. However, I shudder to think what could happen if the rains do not come soon.”
Welfare agencies say the retrenched miners, their self-esteem and once- revered community status gone with their jobs, will be torn between depression and suicide on their return to this bleak scenario and will battle to adjust. Mostly illiterate and trained only as workers, they will be unemployable in areas where production has traditionally been left to women.
State welfare grants are already stretched to the limit and the miners’ added burden, which the Transkei Land Services Organisation says is “killing the social fabric of the Transkei”, is expected to prevent children from going to school and to lead to alcoholism and increased malnutrition. Increased crime will also follow the increase in poverty, welfare agencies warn.
Says Eastern Cape NGO Coalition chair Tozi Gwanya: “People are already not getting as much money, so the direct impact is that money is no longer there and the pensions of older people, because of the past dependence on migrant labour, become even more stretched.”
Gwanya says agencies are discussing training and skills programmes for the retrenched miners in hides and skins processing, leather craft and small commercial farming. Desperate farmers, however, were still waiting this week for the rains to come.