Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe says his department will soon start compiling fatality and injury statistics of illegal miners to give society a hard look at the human cost of the activity.
Illegal mining is rising in SA, with the miners known as zama zamas presenting a big risk to themselves and to the health and safety of the employees of legal mining operations, often threatening them and their families to assist in the crime.
Many illegal miners have died in accidents, often fatally injured in falls of ground or killed in factional rivalry.
They often illegally acquire explosives, diesel, copper cables and other equipment from mines, and make illegal electricity connections from the mine’s electrical infrastructure, the Minerals Council SA says. The illegal miners also tend to use environmentally unfriendly refining methods and materials, which also put their health at grave risk.
The department wants to bring artisanal miners into the formal sector, perhaps by piggybacking their work on land held by larger mining companies, so that their mineral production contributes to the country’s economy rather than funding criminal syndicates, the minister said.
We don’t want to legitimise illegal mining by saying it is artisanal miners
— Gwede Mantashe, minerals & energy minister
The department will mull creating an artisanal mining sector, as large mines near the end of their lives and thousands of jobs are being lost in the formal sector, he said, noting it is early in the process and the exact nature of an artisanal mining industry would take time to formulate.
“We’ve tried it in Kimberley and it’s worked to a limited extent,” Mantashe said.
“It’s a process under construction. It must be developed because it will be food on the table of many starving mine workers who have skills.
“Regulation is being developed. We are looking at it carefully. We don’t want to rush. We don’t want to legitimise illegal mining by saying it is artisanal miners.”
The minister’s sentiments follow the release of mining fatalities data last Friday showing that SA mine deaths fell to a record low of 51 in 2019.
The industry had 81 fatalities in 2018.
“This is the lowest level ever in the industry,” Mantashe said at a briefing on Friday.
International rates
Asked whether the falling number of people employed in the mining industry — because of rising input costs, most noticeably from state-owned power monopoly Eskom, and ageing mines — has led to the reduced fatalities, chief inspector of mines David Msiza pointed to the constant fatality rate per million hours worked. It showed a declining trend that has plateaued since 2015 with 0.08 fatalities per million hours worked, a 75% improvement on 2003 when the rate was 0.32 and 270 people were killed.
SA’s rates are double that of the US and four times higher than Australia, both countries that have mechanised and relatively shallow mines compared with the labour-intensive, deep-level gold and platinum mines in SA.
Coal mines, which are either open pits or shallow, compare more favourably. In SA the fatality rate is 0.05, comfortably below the 0.07 in the US. In Australia, the coal mining fatality rate is 0.02.
Safety summits
The one area of concern in the latest data is the 67% increase in fatalities in the platinum sector, in which the number of deaths increased to 20 in 2019 from 12 the previous year.
Platinum company bosses have committed to speaking to their peers in other minerals operations and hold safety summits to reverse the trend, Msiza said.
Mantashe said the department noted a correlation between high commodity prices and fatalities as mines pushed hard on production to capture profits, and sometimes this led to the rapid reopening of mining areas or pillar extraction.
This would form an area of study and scrutiny among participants drawn from the department, organised labour and mining companies in mine health and safety talks, he said, attributing the improved fatality and injury performance to the close co-operation of all three parties in making SA’s mines safer.
The gold industry, once the largest single source of mine-related deaths in SA, showed a drop to 19 fatalities in 2019 from 40 the previous year.
In 1993, there were 615 deaths in SA’s mines and the gold industry accounted for 426 of those, showing the vast improvement the industry has made, Msiza said.
Using the fatalities per million hours worked, gold mines remained the highest at 0.09 but well below the previous year’s 0.19 when more than 20 people died at Sibanye-Stillwater gold mines. Platinum mining in 2019 registered 0.06, up from the 0.04 of the previous year.
There were no disasters, which the department defines as accidents in which five or more employees are killed, in 2019, Msiza said.
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