In a heated meeting between zama zamas and Mineral Resources Deputy Minister Godfrey Oliphant recently, the illegal miners, frustrated by constant police raids on their mining sites in Sekhukhune in Limpopo, vowed that they would not cease their operations.
Zama zamas are subsistence, or artisanal, miners who are not employed by mining companies but work independently, using their own resources.
In SA, they are not recognised by legislation and are regarded as illegal miners. Nongovernmental organisations are attempting to get them legally recognised and organised.
"Tell the police to leave. We want to work," Kgaogelo Mapoulo told Oliphant during the meeting in Burgersfort, Limpopo. He makes a living as a middleman brokering deals between the artisanal miners and buyers.
Burgersfort is the heartland of chrome and platinum mining in the Bushveld complex. But it has also become the new battleground between zama zamas, mining companies and law enforcement agencies.
Frustrated by the Department of Mineral Resources’ delay or failure to provide them with mining licences and permits, locals now run a parallel economy to that of registered mining companies. They mine the earth using excavators hired from local businessmen, contract truckers to transport the ore and enlist the services of middlemen to sell the minerals.
This has put them on a collision course with the law. Mine security and police have raided the zama zama mining operations, confiscating machinery and equipment. The Mining and Affected Communities United in Action (Macua) described this in a memorandum delivered to the department last week as "a fight between the needy and the greedy".
Macua has given the department until August 31 to respond to its memorandum, which calls for the legalisation of zama zamas. It argues that the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act is in direct contravention of the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
This country is a signatory to the 1994 treaty.
Macua argues that by failing to legalise zama zamas, the government is effectively violating their right to work, which is recognised in the treaty and the Constitution.
The organisation calls on the department to negotiate with it "to ensure that community and zama zama voices are entrenched into any mining legislative processes and that communities and zama zama miners be treated with due respect and consideration before any decisions affecting their interests are taken".
The organisation is calling for "an immediate moratorium on persecuting hungry and needy zama zama miners". It also wants the department to call an urgent zama zama conference in which representatives of the government, communities, zama zamas, corporates, academics and civil society discuss possible solutions.
While they are generally treated like a pest that lives and operates on the margins of the mainstream economy by the government and big business, the artisanal miners are a major force that will not disappear anytime soon.
In November 2013, the World Bank noted in a report on artisanal and small-scale mining that the sector "represents an important livelihood and income source for the poverty-affected local population" and that it "ensures the existence for millions of families in rural areas of developing countries".
According to the World Bank, formal mining companies benefit 7-million people worldwide, while artisanal and informal mining benefits an estimated 100-million people and their families. It is estimated that at least 10,000 people survive on the proceeds of artisanal mining in the Sekhukhune area.
Zama zamas argue that, as children of the soil, they also have a right to benefit from the mineral wealth beneath their land, in line with the declaration in the ANC’s Freedom Charter, which states that the country’s mineral wealth shall be restored to the people.
— WE ARE MINING ON OUR LAND. WHY SHOULD WE GET ARRESTED? WHY DOES THE STATE TARGET US?
They cannot stomach being left on the sidelines while the mining companies continue to extract and benefit from the mineral wealth.
Until recently, artisanal mining in SA was concentrated mostly in the gold-mining sector, where armed gangs rule with guns. Turf wars, rockfalls and chemical explosions on the East and West Rand of Johannesburg and the Free State have left at least 400 people dead in the past few years.
In Mpumalanga’s abandoned coal mines, men like Shoes Dube risk life and limb daily, extracting the mineral from the earth to support their families. Unlike in the gold sector, where diggers can earn hundreds of thousands of rand a month, informal coal miners eke out just enough to survive.
Dube is the leader of a vast mining operation on the outskirts of Ermelo in Mpumalanga. He serves on a provincial steering committee working to organise zama zamas, like those at Golfview Mine, into registered co-operatives.
The coal they mine is sold to distributors, who arrive in bakkies to resell it in communities around Ermelo.
Dube’s speciality is blasting new areas of operation to allow the diggers to work. He has been doing this for the past five years. He agrees it is dangerous work. But rather than staying at home and starving, he chose this dangerous way of living, he says.
"Poverty is stalking us, my brother. That is our enemy," says Dube.
Zama zamas, especially those operating in underground coal and gold mines, face a daily risk of injury and death. They operate in old mines, where the ground is unstable. They have no proper equipment to counter the huge health and safety risks that have left many injured or dead.
But in a country beset by increasing unemployment, men like Dube find themselves with no choice but to do what they can to survive, even if it is against the law and puts their lives at great risk.
"They are innocent people who just want to feed their families," argues Matthews Hlabane, a co-ordinator of the environmental rights advocacy group the Green Revolutionary Council. He says that while politicians are preaching radical economic transformation on public platforms, zama zamas are living the talk.
"They are doing radical economic transformation in practice. There can be no radical economic transformation without zama zamas," says Hlabane, who is helping to organise the miners in Mpumalanga into formal co-operatives.
Hlabane argues that by formalising the work of zama zamas, they can help the government rehabilitate mine shafts abandoned by mining companies that fail to fulfil their environmental obligations after they cease operations.
He says organising them into recognised structures will help to eliminate the criminal gangs plaguing the zama zama gold mine sector.
However, the department refuses to budge on artisanal miners, adopting a stance that the zama zamas are criminal elements who need to be dealt with accordingly.
Earlier in 2017, Oliphant told a workshop on illegal and artisanal mining in Johannesburg that the department was planning to amend and relax some of its conditions and to issue mining permits to small-scale miners. Oliphant said this would apply to surface miners only and not to those working in underground shafts as this would mean that the department would be sending people to their deaths due to the unsafe conditions underground.
While the debates, arguments, battles and fingerpointing continue in the boardrooms and corridors of power, the frustration on the ground is reaching boiling point.
With no sign of a lasting solution, men like Shadrack Makgopa, a zama zama from Steelpoort in Limpopo, are getting more frustrated and it appears it will not be long before they rise up in defiance.
"We are mining on our land. Why should we get arrested? Why does the government target us?" asks Makgopa.
Mapoulo spells out their position bluntly: "Did God put us next to this chrome belt by mistake? We cannot just be caretakers of the minerals in our own land."
Mukurukuru Media
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