MORE than 10000 Lesotho miners employed in South African gold mines have lost their jobs since the beginning of this year. “Many of these retrenched mineworkers return to Lesotho where they face bleak employment prospects,” Puseletso Salae of the Mineworkers Development Agency in Lesotho’s capital, Maseru, said. He added that many of the mineworkers are tempted by mining houses to accept retrenchment by offering them relatively large severance packages. South Africa’s mining industry has been hard hit by declining gold prices in world markets and the fact that gold deposits are now located deeper underground, leading to higher mining costs -and increased danger to miners.