BERNARD SWANEPOEL says it's fine, we can talk, but what time do I rise in the morning? I reply that I'm up usually between 05:00 and 05:30. Can we have a coffee conversation at 06:00? he asks. And that's how we came to talk about greed, death, violence, suffering, and all-consuming poverty before breakfast.
I tell him I was an SABC radio reporter who frequently had to drive to the East Rand in the late 1990s when police had to extract illegal miners from underground. The scenario often was the same. There was an accident underground, a tunnel that had collapsed, and someone would call the police.
The police would arrest those walking out, but illegality was never the crux of the matter – that was the rescue effort. These were never vertical shafts but gradual entrance tunnels like in old movies, somewhere among the marshes in the blackened field. Usually, four or five bodies were carried out. There were heartrending scenes of people suffering on the furthest edges of society.
I ask Swanepoel if zama-zamas haven't always been with us.
“I think you make a very good point on two levels. One is that it's not new at all. I was surprised how big it has become, that now they are gangs with hierarchies and at the top sit people who act with violence, that's terrible. The reason is mainly the gold price and copper price because that's why people are underground, you know, they're going to steal the copper in the cables, or they recover gold that was left behind.
“The other thing is, 20 years ago, the narrative changed from just zama-zamas to illegal miners. I was personally still active in the industry and I personally thought, okay, I don't really understand the criminality, it's like someone picking corn from a field that has long been threshed, you know. I always respected the danger and risk – it was never something you wanted, that people should go into a mine that was unsafe – but the official declaration of it as illegal was definitely a relatively new development – in the last 20 years.
“I have changed my opinion over time. I initially thought the criminalisation of these people was unnecessary, but of course, I was not active enough to realise that they don't just keep to the walk-in tunnel mines of the East Rand – they physically descend into working vertical mines to steal copper and gold ore. This also happens with chrome and other things. I realised there was a different scale and definition of the problem compared to the scenario we discussed in the East Rand in the 1990s.
“It has become a problem with significant cost implications for the legitimate industry. It touches on our [South Africa's] real underlying problems. I mean, in a country with 40% unemployment, people will find ways to make money, whether they climb through the window to steal from you, or pick up cans and bottles to sell on the street, or go underground into a mine.
“Then there's the police's ability to prevent the problem. It's zero. If they can't prevent something, then inevitably a mess will occur. Of course, they'll show up at the mess, but they arrive with shotguns and cannons at a stone-throwing incident. It's not difficult to look back now and say the police were wrong. You can't let 80 people die, mainly due to hunger, and then say that was the right approach. We can never approach it like that again. It's not acceptable.
“It seems they have an inability to know what's going on, to arrest the right people, and then they come to the scene of the mess and take out their social frustration on people who are quite vulnerable.
“In these discussions, one must bear in mind a fact we don't like, and that is that most of the dead people are illegal immigrants. I don't think a Zimbabwean's life is worth less than a South African's, but I mean, the Zimbabwean can't say, ‘But the South African economy isn't working, and that's why I did this.' It's a terrible tragedy for me – we all want to blame someone, but so many of these fingers are pointing at our entire South African society."
Since when have we had a true problem?
I ask him when he thinks the illegal mining problem really became a big one.
“After 45 years in and around the industry, I'm like a Victor Matfield of Springbok rugby... no hell, who do I think I am! I mean, I played but I'm not playing anymore, I don't want to say I'm as good as him, sorry!
“There was definitely always something from where I sit, and it's cyclical, like commodity prices. The copper problem – copper has become an exceptionally valuable commodity and copper is clean. So if you steal a kilogram of copper, you have a kilogram of copper you can sell, and you get almost the full price. So copper theft, which goes hand in hand with illegal mining, is a phase I've been aware of for the last 15 years.
“Today, at every mine, there's a lot of effort to prevent workers or community people from coming in gangs to steal. They steal large cables, cut them off, slice them up and carry them out. That's one aspect. That's why it's no longer as simple as ‘shame man... it's just people coming to exploit the old mine.'
“Anyone who has copper can take it to scrap dealers, and even if everyone can see you're coming with an Eskom cable cut into meter-long pieces, they'll give you the money, regardless of the fact that it's illegal – that's just how our society works, despite our fantastic legislation.
“The second big aspect is, of course, the gold price in the last six, seven years ... I mean, it's a vulgar gold price, right, we're talking over a million rand a kilogram. You don't need to bring out much gold to earn a good month's income. The higher the price, the more it can support this whole pyramid scheme of gangs and crime."
“And of course, South Africa now produces only 10%, maybe 20%, of the gold it used to produce. We were a big gold industry and now we're small, so there are many old mines.
“The dilemma is that most of the activities happen in underground mines. As you said, even in the shallow entrance mines there were accidents.
“I honestly don't understand how you can have such a crisis at Stilfontein on a shaft that's over a kilometre deep. It's illogical. In the past, you would have a big problem with zama-zamas if you had a shallow mine. The deeper the mine, the more people were dependent on access through legal and existing systems. You would need to bribe someone to go down the shaft in the elevator and take food, and it doesn't sound to me like that's true here at Stilfontein.
“The community blames the police, but there are definitely suspicious elements in the community, including the people who went underground to help check if everyone was out. They were also probably people who were part of the food suppliers. This was not just a bunch of Mozambicans who came and did something illegal despite the South Africans, it was an integrated exercise. The problem comes from the community because the community makes money. They sell bread for 20 times the price, a litre of Coke goes for R200."
Who should close and secure old shafts?
Just who is responsible for rehabilitation and security when a company closes a shaft – the company, the state, even the police? I ask the mining elder.
“As always in our country, we have very good legislation. Most of our laws were written post-democracy and they are modern, with enough applications for our circumstances.
“There is a big focus in our mine closure legislation around environmental issues and sustainability. What does that area where you mined look like 100 years later?
“For deep underground mining, the focus is not primarily on criminality and preventing it, but on your tailings dams, your surface areas. These must be maintained even 100 years later. The question is always whether there is enough funding in the trust fund for the long term. It's very good legislation, it's very clear.
“A mine has owners, and the owners are responsible for the mine, whether it's in care and maintenance, which implies it can be reopened, or whether it's in final closure. This is true until the state gives you a closure certificate, then the mine returns to the state.
“The state's lack of capacity has long frustrated the industry, because you can never get a closure certificate. As clear as the legislation is, there's something preventing the state from saying, okay, we now take the mineral rights – these belonged to the people, we allowed you to make money here, we received tax, it's now closed, it now returns to us, the people."
“At one point, 15 years ago, I could publicly say there are no closure certificates. It was a fact. I don't know if a few have been issued since then. So of 6 000 mines that are no longer being mined, 5 900 could have been legally closed if the state had the capacity to do so. Ownership is very clear, there are legal owners and they remain the owners until there's a closure certificate, fully paid up with all the money the law requires. There's also the problem of all the money in the trust funds that must be managed by someone, and not stolen."
Was the Stilfontein shaft closed?
I ask Bernard in what condition the law requires a shaft like the Stilfontein shaft to be before it could possibly get a closure certificate.
“The ‘closing' has changed over time. There was a time when you could span a fence around your farm and say it's closed, but due to the reality of criminality, this has changed.
“Deep shafts are closed in a few ways. Temporarily, there's a fence with security and alarms, especially for a shaft you might want to reopen later, or if it's a shaft you need access to for purposes of the rest of your mine, because the shafts are like a network of tunnels that are interconnected, so that you can pump water from one to another, so that you can let air flow from one to another.
“If you want to close a shaft permanently, mines do this in one of two ways: Either they pour ore or rock into the shaft and physically fill it, and/or they pour a metre-thick reinforced concrete slab over the shaft – a so-called cap.
“Unfortunately, there are cases where people still drill and blast and go through the concrete to gain access to the underground. There's only so much you can do.
“An underground shaft that is not connected to other shafts is actually easy to close. Our entire West Rand, even the mines owned by Anglo, originally Anglo Gold, were sometimes connected underground to mines owned by Goldfields, or other companies. So you must close in a way that you can seal off, and sometimes you must close the tunnels that connect you to your neighbors.
“If you have water, like on the East Rand, at Springs and Grootvlei and on the West Rand at Randfontein, where water levels are high and acidic water comes out of the mine, it becomes a big environmental impact that you must manage. But these mines of the Buffelsfontein, Stilfontein area, their water never rises close to the surface, so you can completely close that mine. I'm not sure why they haven't been completely closed.
“The rising gold price sometimes makes mines that are on care and maintenance want to reopen. It's not just illegal miners who are interested in the high gold price, sometimes it's legal mining activities too. There's actually no concept of permanent closure. The higher the fence you span, the bigger the pliers people bring, the higher the wall you build, the more explosives they use."
Legal zama-zamas
I still wonder if informal mining cannot be decriminalised and regulated somehow. Could the old shafts go on tender for companies that want to remine them, and then be allocated on a pure affirmative action basis?
“Ali, that would be ridiculous. Then we'll be regulated in killing people in disasters like these, honestly. No, there's nothing wrong with the legislation. I mean, there's a process for people who want to mine legally. This concept of informal mining, it lends itself to open-pit mining. You and your friend come, you bring a wheelbarrow ... you know, it's just not applicable to dangerous deep-level underground mines, honestly, it would be ridiculous. And I speak from the perspective of the Stilfontein disaster. It shows us how dangerous old, abandoned gold mines are.
“To make a mine safe, it's not like we as an industry do it so well, I mean, we still kill 49 people a year in our mines. The effort, the cost, the discipline, there are inspectors who come to look, it's an entire process that costs an incredible amount of money, and now you want to allow thousands of people. To make a mine safe you need ventilation, you need to send fresh air down, everything you need underground comes from engineering infrastructure. No, honestly, if you think old Joburg Hillbrow was a disaster just because there's no policing, take away the water, take away the sewerage, take everything away ... if we stop calling criminals criminals, nothing changes in the right direction.
“Part of the problem with the criminality of illegal mining is that when the guy is pulled out of the mine by the police, they can almost do nothing with him. That's why it's so embarrassing that the alleged ringleader who was finally pulled out of the mine, after letting everyone around him die of hunger, walked out of the police station. Maybe he bribed a policeman.
“All the police can charge the small guys with is trespassing. It's basically an illegal activity with no deterrent punishment. You get caught, it costs money, the police, mine security, everyone works together, and the 15 guys who are caught get bail immediately.
“We're just putting on a plaster!"
I tease Bernard that his work at Harmony was also a kind of zama-zama job (he laughs) because they had to exploit an old mine to make it viable. How much gold could possibly be recovered in a shaft like the one at Stilfontein?
“Harmony was a listed company and part of the story was how we did things differently, and therefore could make mines viable that other guys couldn't. There's enough truth in saying that the ‘Harmony way' was different from what other people did, but it was within the laws of the country, and it was a company with a market capitalisation of a few billion rand, you know, it wasn't 17 guys who went underground with flashlights and candles and...
“Every mine, even a mine that closes, has an official inventory of how much gold the geologists estimate is still there. At Stilfontein, it could be that the people are literally just sweeping up and collecting the dust and broken ore that was left behind. It could be that they went with people who worked there, because when a mine closes, there's always a bit of ore left over. That's why I say the community's involvement is an interesting aspect of the criminality. However, I don't really know what happened here at Stilfontein.
“Some mines also have carbon reef [Ventersdorp Carbon Reef], which for example is 30g per ton, in a kind of black powdery thing, which you can ultimately scrape out with a wire from the rock, so I don't know what they recovered at Stilfontein. If you're talking about a thousand people, or whatever, then it sounds like it was a bigger exercise than just sweeping up old ore. I don't know.
“But any mine that closes, a coal mine, a gold mine, a platinum mine, there's still so-called ore, then you say okay, if these guys can go do this... well, they're doing it illegally. If you want to legally reopen a mine, it's going to cost you a few hundred million rand, you have to get the fans going, you have to fix the pumps, you have to redo everything, you know... unfortunately, the capital required to do something legally is just a bit different from the capital required to do something illegally.
“I don't think one should over-romanticise what we could do at Harmony, within the laws of the country. People who did something just different from 100 years of institutional use is not really the same as this dilemma. There's a narrative that says, if we give it to smaller guys, then they can do it differently, but I don't think that applies."
Could the police have handled it better?
I wonder about solutions. If the solution is not to starve people, as the police did, what is it then?
“Fortunately, you just have to write about it and I can just talk about it. I don't really know. It's not bloody easy. By definition, anyone with any approach will say prevention is much better. We must ask the police what they did to prevent this.
“To prevent, you must have a physical presence from time to time, or you must have information. This guy who's now on the front page of the newspapers who is allegedly the ringleader, did the police know about him? Did they know him? Crime intelligence and prevention are so much better than the mess we saw.
“I myself was of the opinion that these were armed gangs underground. Our police have no ability to go into such a situation. You go a kilometre down underground, and now you must shoot in that dark labyrinth. I think it was these so-called community leaders who were clearly part of the network, who are friendly received by these guys, who had to go to convince people to come out. I think some of these people we currently celebrate as heroes might still turn out to be part of the network. We'll see.
“Could the police have gained access to a rescue attempt three weeks earlier? The dilemma was, the food you send down keeps the system going. I think the moment you couldn't prevent this process, you should have been able to go arrest the guy sitting in the fancy building in Lesotho making the money, and I say Lesotho now, but maybe it's Swaziland, maybe it's Sandton.
“Actually, I honestly don't know."
♦ VWB ♦
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