The South African Federation of Trade Unions is extremely concerned that the unfolding situation in the Stilfontein Margaret shaft may end in a tragedy. We call on the government to, without any further delay, facilitate and engage the leadership of the mineworkers and the nearby communities to persuade the mineworkers to come out from underground.
Cutting off food and water supplies—with what can only be described as malicious intent, a vindictive act—without a strategy for directly and indirectly engaging with these mineworkers is not helpful. The community leaders, including those with family members underground, made countless offers to help bring up the mineworkers. However, the community report includes in the media that the police have removed the structure they use to bring up these workers. This means there is no way to get these workers up from the underground. We do not understand why police – who supposedly have the expertise to negotiate with hostage takers – are not taking the community leaders at their word. This facilitation must include conditional provision of water, food, and medicines, as reports show that some artisan mineworkers are now dehydrated and too weak to find their way to the surface. They need food, water, and medicines immediately.
Background leading to this crisis.
The mining industry, together with the agriculture sector, has a long history of being the primary beneficiary of colonialism, apartheid and capitalism. In addition to the Southern African region, immigrant workers were uprooted from Europe, and China in support of mining. Coercive schemes, such as the dog and hut tax, were developed to force peasants off their land to work in the mines and farms in South Africa. Workers across the Southern African region were also recruited under the most horrendous conditions, with at least 60% coming from three areas in particular: Lesotho, the former Transkei within South Africa and Mozambique. Other sites of mass recruitment were Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Malawi.
Trillions of dollars were made – especially from what was once at its peak a century ago, half the world’s historic supply of gold – and, by the 1970s, contributed up to 21% of the GDP. At peak, there were 488,000 mineworkers in 1988 in gold mines alone. The bosses hired mineworkers to make these massive profits because their labour could be kept at very cheap levels. After all, families were not allowed to stay with them for 11 months of the year – passing the social reproduction costs to women back home. Families were destroyed through the migrant labour system and single-sex hostel system. The disease burden in mining was horrific, with tuberculosis, silicosis and HIV-AIDS rampant, and brought home to their families.
The depletion of minerals and the introduction of technology have cut the numbers drastically. There are only 477,000 official mine workers, and in gold mining, only 93,000.
Regrettably, the ANC government never prioritised the beneficiation and building of the secondary industries that would have moved workers to other sectors of the economy. Indeed, neoliberal policies associated with joining the World Trade Organisation on disadvantageous terms in 1994 led to a decline in manufacturing from 24% of GDP to 12% today.
The biggest mining houses, especially the Anglo American/DeBeers conglomerates and Gencor (now part of the world’s largest miner, BHP Billiton), escaped South Africa with their historic profits, evading their responsibilities to workers and environmental restoration.
In the dog-eat-dog world of mining capitalism, there were no ‘Just Transition’ or scaling-down plans to train and retrain workers to survive.
As a result, the once mighty cities dominated by the mining industry are turned into ghost towns where sinkholes and dust flowing from the mine dunes continue to kill thousands in the working-class communities. These workers recruited from the most economically depressed regions of South Africa, such as the eastern part of the East Cape, as well as neighbouring countries, are now starving at home, with many dying from the diseases they contracted whilst working in the mines.
The rise of the phenomenon of artisan mining
In their rush to make huge profits, the mining bosses moved to deeper mines and other parts of the world, where they discovered more minerals, leaving behind areas with substantial deposits that, at the time, were not profitable. The gold price has been especially volatile, with external factors such as financial crises, monetary policy shifts, wars and new competition affecting the price. As waves of currency printing in 2009-13 and 2020-22 hit the world economy, the gold price spiked to record levels of nearly $2800/ounce.
The price of gold (inflation-adjusted), 1915-2024
A combination of mining companies and underworld mineral traders operating in the black market returned to the thousands of retrenched mineworkers to recruit them to work now through subcontractors, paying them only 50% of what they used to earn with no other benefits.
Workers driven by hunger but sitting at home dying one by one, and therefore more vulnerable than before, returned to the industry. So cruel is the system that if fathers have passed away, their sons are recruited. It is estimated that there are between 30,000 and 100,000 artisanal miners nationwide, insultingly called Zama-Zamas. This industry generates between R5 and R21 billion annually. There is a market for this industry. The production is sold to the mines, the black market, and international illicit mineral traders. The government knows this but has done nothing to regulate this new feature of the mining sector. Thousands of mineworkers perish as they work in an unregulated and extremely dangerous/hazardous mining industry, exposing themselves not only to rock falls that maim and kill them but to chemicals in these abandoned mines. Some chip away at pillars where gold seams are apparent but where the resulting collapse of mines and artificial earthquakes result.
The government still needs to enforce its laws:
The Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) demands that mining companies obtain certificates when they close their mines. The act gives this power to the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) when satisfied that the mine closure meets regulatory standards. The regulations include:
The Environment Management Plan compels mining companies to prepare and submit the Environment Rehabilitation Plans before starting operations. These plans include environmental plans at the time of closures.
Mining companies are supposed to put aside financial resources to cover the costs of mine closures. These funds are supposed to be reviewed occasionally to ensure that they are adequate.
The National Environment Management Act (NEMA) outlines broader environmental obligations to protect the country.
The Mines Health and Safety Act requires mine shafts and tunnels to be safely closed or sealed at the end of the mine’s life to prevent unauthorised entry.
Yet the Auditor General revealed in 2022 that about 6,000 abandoned mines were unsafe and unrehabilitated. After mining companies have amassed wealth to their satisfaction, super-exploited the working class, and extracted the minerals, they abandon unrehabilitated mines, leaving a trail of ghost towns, environmental destruction, and poverty.
The Cabinet has now developed amnesia. They have entirely forgotten the mining industry’s history. They have now forgotten that they have failed to enforce their legislation to prevent the unfolding tragedy in Stilfontein. When eight young women were brutally raped a year ago, the government cried crocodile tears as they now take no responsibility for their failure to implement their own laws.
Two weeks ago, SAFTU issued a statement noting that we have asked lawyers to consider if there are no grounds for a class action against the government for its failure to protect the citizens from consuming stale and poisonous food staff sold to the public under unhygienic conditions in contradiction to the provisions of the Food, Cosmetics and Disinfectants Act of 1972, National Health Act of 2003 and Municipal By-Laws.
SAFTU believe that the death of so many children and mineworkers, including the atrocities allegedly committed by some of the undocumented artisanal miners, must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the government.
We shall ask the lawyers to explore the possibility of initiating class action. The government will only take responsibility for its failures once held accountable. Scandalously, today you have a Minister such as Khumbuzo Ntshavheni arrogantly telling the country, to the excitement of the xenophobes, that mineworkers will be ‘smoked out’ and calling workers criminals without any due regard to the background the government of the people should appreciate.
Sies! Inspired by the Minister, some xenophobic members of the public have callously called on the government to put cement slabs on the Margaret shaft and kill all the estimated 4000 artisan mines underground.
We warn that the SAPS cannot simultaneously be investigators, prosecutors and judges. No one has a right to take anyone’s life away. Whilst SAFTU cannot and is not condoning any illegality, including the presence of undocumented workers involved in this illicit industry, we are opposed to any temptation by the police and government to trample on the human rights of anyone just because they are in South Africa illegally. Starving people to death will be correctly regarded as another premeditated murder similar to the first massacre of mine workers in Marikana.
Part of the problem leading to this gross negligence by the government is that too many of its leaders are businessmen and women with direct interests in the mining industry. This is also witnessed in the shameful fact that today, South Africa is the leading source of coal supply to Israel (which imports Mpumalanga mines’ output to provide an electricity grid which relies on coal for 18% of power). In turn, their actions fuel a genocide that our diplomats and lawyers are condemning in The Hague courts, making the government look greedy and hypocritical. Two people with close historical connections to ANC leadership – Patrice Motsepe and Gill Marcus – are connected to genocide profiteering via Glencore, with Trade Minister Parks Tau telling Parliament in September that he does not want to risk annoying the World Trade Organisation by stepping in to halt this travesty. Colombia and Türkiye have halted their coal sales. All the regulations we have referred to are costly and will undermine greedy mining bosses’ drive to maximum profit. If the cabinet members and their families have interests in the profits, it goes without saying that they are conflicted. SAFTU calls on all Ministers or their families not to have any business interests in the industries they regulate. We reiterate our call for nationalisation of the mines, the banks and monopoly capital – the 1955 Freedom Charter mandate – so that the profit motive no longer puts these thousands of workers’ lives at such terrible risk.
