Standoff: Zama zamas mining at abandoned sites exacerbate
environmental harm and cause security issues. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
The government is to blame for the crisis in the informal mining sector, which has led to the blocking of open shafts by the police as a tactic to “smoke out” informal miners beneath the surface in Stilfontein in North West.
This is according to Shawn Lethoko, the chairperson of the National Association of Artisanal Miners (Naam).
“The main reason we remain in this crisis is because the government has been dragging its feet to finalise the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining (ASM) policy,” he said.
It was amended by Gwede Mantashe, the minister of mineral and petroleum resources, in 2022.
“Two years on and the policy has been collecting dust on his table because there is no political will to act,” Lethoko said, adding that the minister was not treating the matter with the urgency it deserves and “we call for him to do the right thing and resign”.
A formal artisanal and small-scale mining sector that is regulated is the correct way to deal with the criminal elements that have become “fairly widespread” in the sector as well as “go some way” in curbing the illicit flow of minerals and associated funds out of the country, he said.
Lethoko said the revenue that would be created could contribute “immensely” to the local and national revenue base. Further, better environmental standards and mine health and safety would be possible if the sector was allowed to operate legally.
“We fully understand the history of the mining sector in South Africa, which involved the recruitment of workers, as cheap labour, from the rural areas of South Africa as well as from SADC [Southern African Development Community] countries,” he said.
“Many of these miners were never provided with formal documentation by the apartheid regime and now the same problem confronts their descendants, many of whom are currently undocumented adults who are part of distressed mining communities in South Africa.”
Most cannot secure formal jobs and find themselves “extremely vulnerable” to being exploited by criminal syndicates, who were attempting to run the artisanal mining sector with a “violent, iron fist”.
The syndicates, Lethoko said, were recruiting impoverished and vulnerable young men from SADC countries with a promise of greener pastures, only to treat them as bonded labour through extreme exploitation of their illegal status.
“Many are kept against their will underground and are forced into becoming part of violent conflicts with rival syndicates and normal artisanal miners.
“None of these factors have been taken into account by the government in their deployment of the [police] to close off access to the shafts in Orkney and Stilfontein in order to effectively starve miners into coming to the surface to be arrested.”
Given that many of these miners are working under criminal syndicates against their will, “no one should assume that it is their choice not to come out when they’re also victims of human trafficking and exploitation”.
Lethoko said that, if the government was serious about finding solutions to the artisanal mining crisis, it “would have responded to our call for education and awareness on the ASM policy in the mining communities so that the people who are truly interested in the ASM sector as a way to make a living, would know that there is an alternative … that the DMRE [department of mineral resources] is committed to implement”.
He said Naam had previously told the department to come up with pilot programmes aimed at transitioning from large-scale mining to legal artisanal-scale mining, because it is clear that there are still minerals that are of value to be mined on an artisanal scale but were not of value on a large scale.
“If a just transition through the ASM policy is not implemented soon, then criminal syndicates will completely take over and occupy the sector,” he said, adding that the department’s response had continued to be inadequate.
It has embarked on a tickbox exercise that has not considered the conditions of poverty and illiteracy among artisanal miner men and women and enforces bureaucratic requirements to get mining permits, which are needed to qualify for loans.
“How can any artisanal miner get a mining permit when they are operating outside the legal framework?”
Naam, he said, has constituencies in five provinces where artisanal mining is practised.
“We have made significant strides in providing education and awareness to groups of artisanal miners about the ASM policy and helping them to register cooperatives … to apply for artisanal mining permits as the amended ASM policy recommends. Unfortunately, all of them were rejected due to bureaucratic red tape.”
Naam is offering the government its expertise and its constituencies for consideration as pilot projects in the artisanal and small-scale mining sector, he said.
With assistance from the government and the private sector, they could acquire mining shafts and funds to mine with environmentally friendly recovery methods to improve the lives of artisanal miners in distressed mining communities and boost the economy.
Mariette Liefferink, of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, said the ASM policy aimed to legitimise artisanal and small-scale mining, distinguish between it and illegal mining, strengthen the laws regarding the criminalisation of illegal mining to deter illegal mining activities and to establish a trained detective unit.
“It has been slow to be implemented and to translate into regulations. The law provisions for small-scale mining but small-scale miners must apply for a permit and, in terms of the ASM policy, artisanal miners must be South African citizens — they cannot be illegal immigrants,” she said.
“They can only operate on surface and open-cast mines, they may not operate underground, as is the case at the moment in Stilfontein, and they must also have agreements with the large-scale miners to [lease] equipment … and then the department must educate artisanal miners, especially with regard to the use of mercury and cyanide.”
The policy, Liefferink said, also states that illegal miners must be criminalised and a special detective unit must be established to address illegal mining.
“The policy is there; the problem is South Africa is very good with policies, strategies and regulations but very poor at implementation.”
The department did not respond to the Mail & Guardian’s inquiries this week.
In his weekly newsletter, President Cyril Ramaphosa wrote: “We need to be clear that the activities of these miners are illegal. They pose a risk to our economy, communities and personal safety.”
“The Stilfontein mine is a crime scene where the offence of illegal mining is being committed. It is standard police practice everywhere to secure a crime scene and to block off escape routes that enable criminals to evade arrest. In doing so, the police must take great care to ensure that lives are not put at risk and that the rights of all people are respected.”