An underground war over Mpumalanga’s vast but ageing gold mines turned fatal on Monday after local security personnel received reports of two illegal miners found dead in the Barberton Nature Reserve.
The site, home to the 130 year-old Barberton Mines complex, has become a popular destination for illegal miners to sneak into old, disused workings and tunnels in pursuit of reserves deemed unprofitable by the mines’ former owners.
Pan African Resources, the current owner and operator of the Barberton Mines, emphasised that the two bodies were not underground at any of its operations but were rather located in the mountainous region adjacent to the Barberton operations, according to local reports received by the firm’s mine security officers.
The group said it suspected that the peers of the deceased were trying to force Pan African to send rescue teams to recover the bodies from the perilous, crumbling shaft by pinning the blame on the company.
“They probably fell down an excavation that was there long ago while looking for veins or gold mineralisation. They’re trying to pin it on the mines so that we send out rescue teams, but [the bodies] are not on our land,” Pan African spokesperson Hethen Hira told Business Day.
“It looks like there’s a strategy of going to the media and saying [the deaths occurred] underground at the mine and that the mine is not assisting, but it really has nothing to do with our operation,” he said.
SAPS did not provide further details on the two bodies or their cause of death and did not immediately respond when asked for to comment on the incident.
In a statement, Pan African said it had dispatched proto teams to investigate the situation and conduct a risk assessment on whether or not to recover the bodies. However, given the unstable ground conditions, it said there was no estimated time for the completion of the assessment.
“As stated previously, the mountainous terrain in the Barberton Nature Reserve is a vast area accessed by illegal miners that are trespassing in the nature reserve looking for gold, and who enter old, disused workings and tunnels which are very unstable and prone to collapse,” said the company.
Pan African reiterated its call for harsher punishment of “zama zamas” (or the ones who try their luck), particularly as record gold prices have fuelled a sharp uptick in gold theft this year.
Earlier this month SAPS detained 494 illegal miners as they resurfaced from Pan African’s Sheba mine in Barberton. At the time, the gold producer told Business Day it had arrested about 4,000 illegal miners at its underground operations in the past year.
Things have got so bad at Barberton that Pan African in May blamed 244 retrenchments and a reduction in gold production on increasing gold theft, including by employees colluding with illegal miners and community members, which it said had made operating costs at some of Barberton’s business units unsustainable.
The Minerals Council SA has called for a dedicated policy strategy to help close regulatory gaps around illegal mining, which is currently not directly addressed by SA legislation. Instead, officials rely on charging illegal miners with trespassing, the unauthorised possession of gold-bearing material and other relatively minor offences.
The pressure on regulators to rehabilitate the country’s high number of ownerless and derelict mines is now mounting, particularly following the mass deaths that occurred in an abandoned shaft in Stilfontein at the start of the year.
The state estimates there are about 6,000 abandoned or derelict mines in SA and that nearly $1bn is lost in annual revenue due to illicit mining activities.
In 2021, the auditor-general published a scathing report about the department of mineral and petroleum resources’ slow progress in rehabilitating derelict and ownerless mines — a key part of the effort to combat illegal mining.
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