Pressure is mounting on the government to bring illegal miners into the mainstream economy, plugging an illegal outflow of mineral wealth worth R7bn a year and tackling the country’s growing levels of unemployment.
A survey of 1,179 informal miners operating in Kimberley’s diamond fields and the gold deposits at Carletonville and Vlakfontein was commissioned by Open Society Foundation for SA and carried out with the University of Witwatersrand and ActionAid SA.
Neither the researchers nor an official from the department of mineral resources & energy, Sibusiso Kobese, who is involved in a departmental research project into illegal miners, were able to say how many people were involved in the illicit extraction of SA’s minerals wealth.
The number runs into tens of thousands, but nobody was willing to commit to a figure. All conceded that SA’s rising unemployment, slowing economy, increased layoffs in the mining sector and high commodity prices were fuelling the influx of people into illegal mining.
The Minerals Council SA, the formal industry’s lobby group that represents more than 90% of annual mineral extraction, has estimated the illegal miners and vast, well-connected criminal syndicates account for R7bn in illicit flows of minerals, most notably gold, chrome and diamonds.
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe recently said the department was in the early stages of research and policy formulation to set up an artisanal mining sector that would fall within a regulated segment of the economy.
The research document was designed to establish who informal miners were, their nationality, income and what role their activities played in supporting themselves and their families.
It showed that 80% of the 1,179 respondents were earning money for their families and as a whole supported about 4,800 people, Wits researcher Pontsho Ledwaba said on Thursday at the release for the study.
The miners earned four to nine times the salaries of farm workers and domestic workers, with windfalls in the Kimberley area as diamonds worth hundreds of thousands are found by artisanal miners permitted by the department.
While foreign nationals were a minority in Kimberley, they represented about half the illegal miners — known as zama-zamas — in Carletonville, a large gold mining centre, and Vlakfontein, with Lesotho nationals making up more than half the foreign nationals.
Illegal mining in the gold sector is marked by extreme violence, with armed gangs with high-powered firearms protecting turf and their members both above and below ground in violent battles.
The report also focused on some of the suggestions made by permitted artisanal diamond miners and illegal gold miners on how they could become a recognised, protected and active segment in SA’s mining economy.
Their suggestions ranged from specific policies and regulations from the department that would not place the same expenses and obligations on them that the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act expects from the formal sector.
They also wanted access to markets to sell their minerals, cutting out exploitive and controlling middlemen and criminal syndicates, and to be able to tap into health, safety and environmental expertise.
The option of subcontracting their services as registered artisanal miners to the formal mining sector was raised, as well as treating old dumps and rehabilitating the remaining 6,000 abandoned and derelict mines for which the department now has responsibility.
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