How Stilfontein spiralled out of control

The tragedy at the North West mine speaks to a litany of ills: unemployment, collapsing municipalities, a lack of border control and the police’s inability to deal with crime. And then the state’s iron-fist response made it even worse.
6 mins read

Ronel Tolmay, a judge in the high court in Pretoria, was one of the few to immediately appreciate the gravity of the human tragedy that had been playing out at the abandoned Stilfontein gold mine, about 160km from Joburg, in recent months. 

Presiding over a case brought to her last week by Zinzi Tom, the sister of one of hundreds of illegal miners trapped underground, Tolmay was unequivocal. 

“We do not want a situation where this will be marked as the darkest point in our history,” said Tolmay. “From a constitutional basis, it is immoral not to get water and food. It can’t be that more people die.”

Tom’s case – that the government must be ordered to begin rescuing the miners – had been reinforced by two letters sent up by the miners on a rope, which sketched a hellish picture.

“People around us are dying by the hour and currently, 109 people have died,” they said. The miners’ requests – washing powder and charcoal to neutralise the smell of the decomposing bodies, and Jeyes Fluid, to wash away the maggots on the bodies – were viscerally arresting.

But to anyone who had been listening in recent weeks, this shouldn’t have been a surprise. 

Since the police first embarked on operation Vala Umgodi at the Buffelsfontein Gold Mine (BGM) in August to “smoke out” many thousands of illegal miners, known as zama zamas, the warnings had become increasingly more desperate.

Clement Moeletsi, one illegal miner who first descended 2km underground into that shaft in July, described weeks ago how desperate it got when the supply of water, food and medicine from the community was suddenly halted by the police. 

“People began eating cockroaches … some miners, driven to the brink of starvation, had been forced to resort to the unthinkable: eating the flesh of those who had died,” he said after he’d been evacuated in early December.

With neither the government, nor the owner of BGM willing to pay the R12m cost to rescue the miners, it was left to the Minerals Council – the industry body representing the country’s largest mining houses – to sign the cheques to ensure the rescue happened.

Finally, on Monday this week, the rescue began – and Tolmay’s warning could not have seemed more prescient. 

Over the next few days, 78 dead bodies were lifted up, alongside 246 survivors, sparking a wave of fury that the situation had been allowed to escalate to this extent. In all, since the standoff began, 1,540 people were arrested, many of them illegal immigrants.

As Bloomberg described it, the smell of rotting corpses clung to those who were rescued, while emaciated teenagers emerged from the shaft, bones protruding from their small frames. 

Iron fist backfires

“It’s a gemors,” says Bernard Swanepoel, a mining industry veteran who now heads the Joburg Mining Indaba.

“This is the pimple that explodes in our faces that tells us the whole body is infected. It speaks to all the problems in South Africa: immense unemployment, collapsing municipalities, a complete lack of border control, rampant criminality and the police’s inability to deal with crime.”

In a more mature democracy, says Swanepoel, the scale of the Stilfontein tragedy, and the fissures it has revealed in policy and state power, could topple the government. 

“In the global context, it’s an embarrassment. The only positive thing was that the Minerals Council stepped up to provide the R12m for the rescue. That’s a rounding error in the police budget, but no-one was willing to commit to spending it,” he says.

Swanepoel is well-versed with that mine, which once formed part of the company he headed, Village Main Reef, before it was sold to BGM and shut down in 2015. But while critics have slammed the corporate sector for not doing enough to properly shut down mines, he argues that this isn’t always fair. 

“This mine was properly closed in line with the requirements and a slab of concrete was used to seal it off. And if someone goes and opens it after that, it’s fair to say we’re dealing with real criminals – not innocent bystanders,” he says.

Which isn’t to say the deaths are at all justified. While it is true that the zama zamas acted illegally – and this is a nationwide scourge that has to be halted – it’s also true that the authorities inflamed a delicate situation that called for policing savvy. 

The state’s iron-fist response turned a mine invasion into a humanitarian crisis that hit the front pages across the world, and now risks becoming a tragedy akin to Life Esidimeni, where 144 psychiatric patients were removed from private care and subsequently died of neglect.

Moeletsi, in his affidavit, spelt out how this already dire situation was made worse by the police response. “Operation Vala Umgodi, implemented without warning by the police, abruptly cut off any chance of aid or rescue,” he said. “These were preventable deaths, caused not by natural circumstances, but by human decisions.”

The communities that had provided those underground with food, medicine and water were overnight stopped from doing so by the police, and there was no warning given to the miners. And in the end, after many weeks had passed, Moeletsi said many were too weak to be retrieved.

While the police had claimed the miners were simply refusing to emerge for fear of being arrested, instead stockpiling masses of food, Moeletsi said this was a lie. 

“Everyone underground was ready to come out. There were no stockpiles of food, and the notion that we could voluntarily come out is entirely false. The truth is that we were trapped in a situation of dire necessity, and no-one could leave until the rope came down.”

Scent of xenophobia

Jessica Lawrence from Lawyers for Human Rights, which acted for Tom, says the aftershocks of these unnecessary deaths will continue to rumble through South African society for some time.

“This was entirely avoidable. The community around that shaft had asked multiple state organs to intervene for months. We lodged our court application, for instance, in November. How many deaths could have been prevented if this had been dealt with earlier,” she says.

While the police’s actions underscored how ill-suited they are to dealing with civilian and humanitarian crises, the taste of xenophobia hung heavy over their actions. In many interviews, the zama zamas were described as “foreigners” who had invaded the country’s mines, importing crime and automatic weapons into otherwise law-abiding communities.

It is revealing that of the 1,540 illegal miners who surfaced from that mine, the vast majority were immediately charged with immigration act violations, alongside trespassing and illegal mining – even though many were South Africans. 

Nor was there much nuance from political leaders either. 

Gwede Mantashe, the minister of mineral and petroleum resources, is adamant that every miner who surfaces is a criminal and must be arrested. “We’ll never stop acting against illegal miners,” he said. “Next we’ll be asked to rescue those who commit cash heists. They voluntarily entered a dangerous space.”

The problem is, there are many such dangerous places in South Africa – 6,000 mines have been abandoned, including many in the once-prosperous gold fields – and with jobs in many of these areas few and far between, it’s created an atmosphere of desperation.

But it would be simplistic to see the zama zama crisis as a linear result of unemployment, given that many – though evidently not all – of those arrested at Stilfontein were from neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe and Mozambique. 

“How can it be that someone comes to South Africa specifically to commit a crime,” asks Swanepoel. “If this was just due to harsh economic circumstances, you wouldn’t see this. But we also have a country where crime does pay. They know they’ll get off lightly.”

This, in fact, is how it played out. 

Lawrence, who was in court when many of the arrested miners appeared, says they all received suspended sentences, with some being deported.

“All the sentences handed down were extremely lenient. Which illustrates how ridiculous it was for the police to argue that people were staying underground to avoid prosecution. No-one would choose death over a suspended sentence.”

Avoiding responsibility

When it comes to the 6,000 abandoned mines, this isn’t out of the ordinary in a mining country; Swanepoel points out that Australia has three times that, at 18,000 abandoned mines. 

“Every mine has an end to its life. But what is unique in South Africa is that we have deep-level mines which are relatively easy to close off. You pour a metre-thick concrete slab, reinforce it, and ask government for a closure certificate,” he says.

The problem has been the government’s reluctance to provide closure certificates, as that would theoretically bring an end to the mine’s responsibility to the nearby communities, and make those people government’s problem.

At Stilfontein, this grey area manifested in the embarrassing squabble over who should foot the R12m bill to rescue the trapped illegal miners. The mine was closed in 2015, but the legal owner, BGM, wasn’t given a closure certificate. 

The causes, obviously, are many, but there are few silver-bullet solutions. Or remedies that go beyond the obvious: better policing, more fluent policy, and implementation of existing law. 

Swanepoel, for his part, says the only solution in the short term is to prevent people from going into underground mines. This entails a task force visiting each abandoned mine, and making sure the access points are properly closed. 

But even this wouldn’t come without complications. Says Swanepoel: “After Stilfontein, would you be the man to cast a slab of concrete to close a mine when there might be 100 people underneath? I know I’m not that brave.”

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Rob Rose

With more than two decades in business journalism and as an author of Steinheist and The Grand Scam, Rob knows his way around a balance sheet. While editor of the Financial Mail for eight years, the title bucked the trend of falling circulation, producing award-winning news.

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