The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) is deeply saddened by the deaths of at least 14 miners following the collapse of a disused mine at Nkaneng, near Rustenburg in the North West. Others have reportedly been injured, while some remained trapped as rescue operations continued.
SAFTU extends its heartfelt condolences to the families, friends, fellow workers and communities of those who have lost their lives. We hope that everyone still unaccounted for will be located safely.
This tragedy cannot simply be dismissed with the headline that “illegal miners died in an abandoned mine.”
It confirms precisely what SAFTU has repeatedly warned: South Africa has allowed thousands of abandoned, derelict and inadequately secured mines to become death traps, environmental hazards and breeding grounds for organised criminal syndicates.
WE HAVE WARNED ABOUT THIS REPEATEDLY
Following the Stilfontein tragedy, SAFTU pointed to the approximately 6,000 derelict and ownerless mines and abandoned mining sites that constitute the poisonous inheritance of more than a century of mining.
In our subsequent interventions on illegal mining, SAFTU has repeatedly warned that unregulated mining threatens not only those who descend underground but entire working-class communities through unstable ground, sinkholes, pollution, dust, violence, environmental destruction and damage to homes and infrastructure.
We have also insisted that South Africa cannot solve this crisis through policing alone.
The Nkaneng tragedy once again demonstrates the terrible human price of failing to confront the crisis comprehensively.
ABANDONED MINES MUST NOT BECOME ABANDONED RESPONSIBILITIES
For generations, mining corporations have extracted enormous wealth from beneath South African soil.
Workers descended kilometres underground and sacrificed their health and, in countless cases, their lives. Mining communities carried the social and environmental costs. Yet when particular operations were no longer sufficiently profitable, too many shafts and mining areas were abandoned without adequate rehabilitation and long-term protection.
SAFTU rejects a system in which profits are privatised while the environmental, social and human costs are socialised.
Mining corporations cannot be allowed to extract billions during profitable years and then leave workers, communities and the state with unstable shafts, contaminated land and enormous rehabilitation liabilities.
The state must identify the responsible mining companies wherever this remains possible and enforce their rehabilitation obligations. Where companies have disappeared, the state cannot simply abandon affected communities.
ILLEGAL MINING IS AN ORGANISED ECONOMIC SYSTEM
We must also stop pretending that thousands of desperately poor people simply wake up one morning and independently decide to disappear underground. There is an illegal mining economy above the ground.
There are financiers. There are recruiters. There are people supplying equipment and food. There are transport networks. There are buyers of illegally extracted minerals. There are processors and exporters. There are people laundering the proceeds, and there are organised criminal syndicates profiting from the desperation of those who physically enter these dangerous shafts.
The poorest worker underground is frequently the most visible and disposable link in a much larger economic chain. SAFTU therefore demands that law enforcement follow the money.
Arresting impoverished miners while financiers, buyers, smugglers, exporters and syndicate bosses remain untouched will never eliminate illegal mining.
MASS UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY PROVIDE AN ARMY OF DESPERATE LABOUR
SAFTU does not romanticise illegal mining.
It is unlawful. It is extraordinarily dangerous. Criminal syndicates operating in this economy must be confronted decisively. But neither will we close our eyes to the social conditions that continuously supply vulnerable workers to this industry.
South Africa’s catastrophic unemployment crisis has condemned millions of people to a life without any realistic prospect of obtaining decent employment. Across Southern Africa, unemployment, poverty and inequality create an enormous pool of desperate workers who can be recruited into extremely hazardous informal work.
Many mining communities have simultaneously experienced retrenchments, mine closures and the disappearance of formal employment. Hunger cannot be our employment agency. Desperation cannot be South Africa’s mining policy.
This is why a purely militarised or policing response will never resolve the crisis. Close one shaft without addressing unemployment, poverty and the illegal mineral supply chain, and desperate workers will simply be driven towards another.
DO NOT TURN THIS TRAGEDY INTO XENOPHOBIA
SAFTU equally warns against attempts to exploit illegal mining to promote xenophobia and Afrophobia.
Where foreign nationals are undocumented, immigration law must be enforced by the responsible state institutions. Where anyone commits a crime, irrespective of nationality, that person must face the law.
But nationality does not explain why thousands of abandoned mining sites exist.
Nationality does not explain why shafts remain accessible.Nationality does not explain why criminal syndicates flourish.And nationality certainly does not explain who purchases, processes and profits from illegally extracted minerals.Crime has no nationality. Poverty has no nationality. Exploitation has no nationality.
Turning poor South Africans against poor workers from neighbouring African countries merely diverts attention away from those making fortunes from this illegal economy and from the structural failures that created it.
END THE EXTRACTIVIST MODEL PEOPLE MUST OWN AND BENEFIT FROM OUR MINERAL WEALTH
But securing abandoned shafts and arresting criminal syndicates, while necessary, will not resolve the fundamental contradiction at the heart of South African mining.
For more than a century, South Africa has operated an extractivist mining model inherited from colonialism and apartheid: dig our finite mineral resources out of the ground, export them largely in raw or insufficiently beneficiated form, allow corporations and their shareholders to accumulate enormous wealth, and leave workers and mining communities carrying the burden of occupational disease, unemployment, environmental destruction and abandoned mines.
The tragedy at Nkaneng is therefore also an indictment of this economic model.
SAFTU reiterates the historic demand contained in the Freedom Charter:
“The mineral wealth beneath the soil… shall be transferred to the ownership of the people as a whole.”
SAFTU’s founding Congress reaffirmed this demand. We continue to demand the nationalisation of the mines and strategic mineral resources under democratic worker and community control.
We are not calling for nationalisation merely to replace private corporate executives with unaccountable state bureaucrats while workers and communities remain spectators.
We demand democratic public ownership, with workers and mining communities exercising meaningful control and with management subjected to rigorous public accountability.
Nationalisation must form part of a democratically planned programme of beneficiation, industrialisation and reindustrialisation.
South Africa cannot continue digging platinum, chrome, manganese, iron ore and other strategic minerals from beneath our soil, exporting too much of their value in raw or insufficiently processed form, and then importing expensive manufactured products produced using these very resources.
When we export our minerals without sufficient beneficiation, we export jobs.
We demand an end to this extractivist model.
Our mineral wealth must become one of the foundations for rebuilding South African manufacturing. We must beneficiate our resources domestically, develop downstream industries, rebuild our steel, engineering and manufacturing capacity, manufacture components and finished products locally, and create hundreds of thousands of decent jobs throughout the mineral value chain.
This is also part of the structural answer to illegal mining.
Instead of abandoned shafts, devastated communities and unemployed former mineworkers, South Africa should have a publicly owned and democratically planned mining sector integrated into a comprehensive industrial strategy that creates employment, develops mining communities, rehabilitates the environment and ensures that mineral wealth benefits present and future generations.
The choice could not be clearer:
We can continue with extractivism dig, export, retrench, abandon and leave communities with the ruins or we can nationalise our mineral wealth, beneficiate it, industrialise our economy and use it to create decent jobs and transform the lives of our people.
SAFTU DEMANDS URGENT ACTION
SAFTU calls for a coordinated national programme involving government, organised labour and affected mining communities to:
- Immediately audit, secure, seal and rehabilitate dangerous abandoned mines and shafts, prioritising those threatening surrounding communities.
- Identify former mine owners and enforce their rehabilitation obligations, including recovering rehabilitation funds wherever legally possible.
- Investigate the entire illegal-mining value chain financiers, recruiters, buyers, processors, transporters, exporters and organised syndicates instead of concentrating enforcement on impoverished workers underground.
- Protect mining communities from violence, intimidation, environmental destruction, pollution and dangerous ground instability.
- Develop a properly regulated artisanal and small-scale mining framework, allowing legitimate small miners to operate legally under enforceable health, safety, labour and environmental standards.
- Launch a massive publicly funded programme to rehabilitate abandoned and derelict mines, employing unemployed workers and former mineworkers at decent wages while restoring devastated mining communities.
- Hold mining corporations accountable for the entire life cycle of mining, from extraction to closure and rehabilitation.
- Nationalise the mines and strategic mineral resources under democratic worker and community control, consistent with the Freedom Charter’s demand that the mineral wealth beneath our soil belongs to the people.
- End the extractivist economic model and implement a comprehensive beneficiation strategy, ensuring that substantially more of our mineral wealth is processed domestically.
- Use our mineral resources as the foundation of an ambitious programme of industrialisation and reindustrialisation, rebuilding manufacturing and creating decent, sustainable employment.
The Nkaneng disaster must become another turning point, not simply another statistic.
Every death underground should force South Africa to confront a fundamental question:
How can a country endowed with extraordinary mineral wealth continue producing enormous fortunes at one end of the mining value chain while producing abandoned communities, dangerous shafts, unemployment, desperate workers and death at the other?
South Africa’s mineral wealth belongs to its people. It must not remain merely a commodity through which corporations accumulate profits before abandoning workers, communities and exhausted mines.
In accordance with the Freedom Charter, SAFTU demands the nationalisation of the mines under democratic worker and community control; an end to the extractivist economic model; comprehensive beneficiation of our mineral resources; and a state-led programme of industrialisation and reindustrialisation.
Our mineral wealth must create decent jobs, build industries, develop communities and leave behind rehabilitated land not ghost towns, poisoned environments and abandoned shafts that become graves for desperate workers.
For media enquiries contact the National Spokesperson at
Newton Masuku
066 168 2157
newtonm@saftu.org.za
Media Officer
Asive Dyani
071 901 9564
