This week, SA’s descent into the winter of discontent accelerated as the scourge of illegal mining reached a tipping point in the community of Riverlea.
The competition between rival groups of illegal miners which results in gunfights has condemned residents to a life of fear. The intersection points between illegal mining, poverty, undocumented migrants and poor law enforcement represent a snapshot of the national crisis.
When police minister Bheki Cele visited the area and promised more policing, he was tackling just one element of a complicated alchemy of issues.
The prevalence of illegal mining — where abandoned and mothballed mines are accessed by gangs of desperate adventurers keen to extract the last vestiges of the mineral deposits that once represented the bedrock of the economy — poses a major security risk. A few weeks ago, over 30 illegal miners were reported to have died in an abandoned mine in Welkom where the methane levels were deemed too high to send a search team underground.
Central to the problem is the reality that mines which have reached the end of their commercial viability and been officially shut down still have some remnants of minerals that illegal miners seek to extract. Unfortunately, the illicit nature of their operations means the safety measures associated with underground activities are not observed and the risk of fatalities remains high. The question of how to prevent access to the mines seems to be a question of resources and responsibilities.
Mining houses, who feel they have implemented all that is legally required to shut down shafts, naturally feel no obligation for securing facilities which no longer have any commercial value for them. For the state, the allocation of police resources permanently guarding abandoned mines is impractical due to resource limitations. In the resulting impasse, unregulated activities thrive, lives are lost and communities in the vicinity of the affected mines — like Riverlea — are thrust to the epicentre of a security and safety crisis.
Protecting these communities from the catastrophic effects of these activities is not limited to just arresting those found in the mines. Given the scale of the unemployment crisis, any group of illegal miners that perish or are arrested will simply be replaced by another group. Core to the model is the fact that a market exists somewhere for the type of minerals these miners are able to extract. Much like the poaching crisis that owes its persistence to the unabated demand for rhino horns, breaking the cycle requires that the feeders into the value chain — those who make the balance between risk and reward palatable enough for these miners to take the gamble — be identified in order to arrest the crisis.
These feeders, who run a parallel illicit economy, benefit from the desperation of the unemployed but also create new socioeconomic tensions. Whether the police have the capacity and the intelligence to counter this crisis is a matter of debate. From what we have seen regarding the criminal networks that have affected Eskom and Transnet infrastructure, mere awareness of the hot spots is not enough to prevent criminality.
The announcement this week that the private sector would partner with government to tackle problems in the infrastructure and security areas comes at an appropriate time when the state’s capacity limitations have amplified the nature of the crisis.
What will be important in this collaboration is not to simply limit the focus to protecting the infrastructure of assets like Transnet and Eskom where the state has a direct interest. It is also to extend these resources to communities like Riverlea whose vulnerabilities have been made much worse by the responsibility vacuum where no-one feels fully responsible for addressing the crisis of an economic model that is officially invisible.
But when one sees bodies piling up, that is a reality that haunts the affected communities.
• Sithole is an accountant, academic and activist.
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