SA gold miner Pan African Resources says it has arrested about 4,000 illegal miners at its underground operations in Mpumalanga over the past year.
The group has been in the headlines this week after police detained 494 illegal miners as they resurfaced from its Sheba mine in Barberton, Mpumalanga.
Onlookers feared a repeat of the mass deaths at an abandoned gold mine in Stilfontein earlier this year as Pan African called on the police to help detain the miners.
“We’ve had an ongoing problem with illegal miners in Barberton because of the terrain and the nature of the ore body. It’s a mountainous area with visible gold and over 140 years of legal mining, so access for illegal miners was easy to look for,” said Pan African head of communications Hethen Hira.
Hira told Business Day that Pan African had arrested between 150 and 200 people every week over the past year.
“The local police just couldn’t cope,” he said, so the company asked the SA Police Service (SAPS) to extend its controversial Vala Umgodi (close the hole) operation to Barberton — an exercise that resulted in about 500 people being found underground last week.
“We knew where the camps were and that it was a problem, but we wanted to get some assistance from police and have a more permanent impact,” said Hira.
“We got rid of most of the camps. We found cooking equipment, fridges, etc. Now there are isolated pockets of guys, and we feel we’ve got a handle on it, but this is an ongoing process with the national police service for the next month or so. For now, there’s an air wing involved and there are patrols on the mountain,” he said.
Presenting its interim results in May, Pan African said that increasing gold theft, including by employees colluding with illegal miners and community members, had made operating costs at some of Barberton’s business units unsustainable, resulting in the retrenchment of 244 mineworkers and a reduction in gold production.
With a direct workforce of 3,759 , the mines are the largest employer in that region.
Hira told Business Day earlier this year that the growth of illegal mining had forced the group to boost its security spending to about $40/oz of gold from about $25 in previous financial years.
Gold theft has escalated across the local mining industry over the past 18 months due to record gold prices.
According to Sibanye-Stillwater’s latest annual report, the group witnessed its highest number of illegal mining incidents in more than a decade last year, with 540 incidents and 1,487 arrests recorded at its SA gold operations.
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