In November, a crisis at the Stilfontein mine in the North West province of South Africa, 145 km from Johannesburg, began making international headlines. Up to 4,000 ‘zama zama’ mineworkers had been purposefully trapped underground by the police. The zama zamas are informal small-scale, or ‘artisanal’, miners who enter abandoned mines to extract residual minerals left-over when large-scale commercial operations cease, often working under the cosh of criminal gangs. At the time of writing up to 400 remained underground.
Responsibility for the Stilfontein crisis must be laid firmly at the African National Congress(ANC)-led government’s door. It is a direct result of the police’s Operation Vala Umgodi (“close the hole” in Zulu) – the sealing of entrances to the abandoned mine and cutting off food supplies. By the time the matter came to public attention, as a result of the Stilfontein community’s heroic intervention, the zama zamas had been trapped for three months without any food and water supplies, their health deteriorating rapidly.
The government must take full responsibility for the deaths of the eight workers whose bodies have been brought to the surface so far. The MWP condemns the Minister in the Presidency’s statement encouraging police to “smoke out the criminals”. The Stilfontein crisis should have been dealt with as an emergency with an emphasis on rescuing workers and offering any victims of the gangsters protection. The nationality or legal status of those trapped should have been irrelevant.
Instead, the police, backed by the hysteria of capitalist politicians, handled the crisis as a case of criminality orchestrated by illegal immigrants and cordoned off the area as a crime scene. The South African media at first served as an echo for the government, sensationalising its reactionary, xenophobic policy in the name of upholding law and order. It should share responsibility for the delays that have resulted in unnecessary deaths.
However, the state was not prepared to be diverted from its mission to demonise those trapped even when it was compelled to accept that some of those trapped were South Africans. Further adding outrageous insult to injury, the government denounced women from Stilfontein for allegedly ‘aiding and abetting’ criminality by forming relationships with foreigners. The government could have avoided these deaths had it worked with the community to rescue workers who remained trapped underground for fear of arrest or because the criminal syndicates may be holding them against their will. To the everlasting credit of the Stilfontein community, they stood firm in the face of an avalanche of government propaganda cynically misrepresenting the complex realities of what had unfolded.
Community-led solidarity action
The MWP salutes the Stilfontein community and the organisations that supported them for taking legal action to force the state to appoint a professional rescue team. It was reminiscent of the recent action taken in Spain by communities struck by floods, who stepped forward with their own relief efforts and clean-up operations after their government failed to act. The community rescue efforts and solidarity challenged the state’s anti-working class and xenophobic attempts to criminalise the trapped miners.
Until the site was cordoned off and placed under heavy police guard, the community could access it. Painstakingly slowly and with great effort, it rescued some workers and delivered life-saving supplies, working in shifts using improvised ropes and other materials to bring over a dozen workers to the surface. One community member reported to an international news agency about how the police just stood idly by, waiting for them to rescue the workers, only stepping in to place them under arrest once they were brought to the surface.
The state’s face-saving exercise
The unfolding tragedy is a direct consequence of the high levels of unemployment and poverty and the state’s failure to enforce the laws and regulations put in place to deal with the rehabilitation of disused and abandoned mines.
Well before Stilfontein the activities of heavily armed criminal gangs exploiting vulnerable retrenched mineworkers caused mayhem in and around Gauteng townships bordering abandoned mines. They engaged in open warfare to control abandoned mines. Communities already plagued by drug wars and violent crime feared being caught in the crossfire, as well as the threat posed by underground mining activities to the stability of residential housing foundations and exposure to possible explosions of gas and fuel pipelines.
It is no accident that there is a failure to distinguish between the ordinary zamas zamas discarded by the mining industry and the criminal gangs who exploit them. The ANC government’s entire operation was cynically calculated to deflect attention from the decades-long cowardly failure to hold the mining industry to account for the crisis of abandoned mines, retrenchments, and the deprivation and desperation that surrounding communities have suffered.
Stilfontein has laid bare the utter inhumanity and class hostility towards the working class – the poor, the exploited and the oppressed – by the African National Congress governments since 1994, and, since May, as head of the Government of National Unity. This is the lot of the working class majority under the capitalist system.
What lies at the root of the zama zama phenomenon?
The immediate cause of the explosion of zama zama activity is the mass retrenchments over the last decade. Mining companies have clawed back the concessions the heroic mineworkers’ strike wave of 2012 forced from them. Lonmin, for example, the epicentre of the strikes, and scene of the Marikana massacre, culled the workforce by over 110,000. These retrenchments focussed particularly on migrant workers from neighbouring countries.
The criminal gangs who have taken over exploiting zama zamas are as rapacious as the mining bosses who discarded them, but now join the chorus condemning illegal mining. The abandonment of over 6,000 mines in South Africa is every inch as criminal as the activities of the zama zama gang leaders. It is estimated that approximately 10% of SA’s annual gold production comes from artisanal mining. This is not possible without the collusion of the “official” industry, which, at the top end of the value chain, facilitates the sale of commodities brought to the surface by the zama zamas. The work of the zama zamas is an extreme form of the precarious nature of work that dominates capitalism after forty years of neoliberalism, not only in South Africa but internationally.
How can the crisis be overcome?
Individuals become zama zamas because of the desperate lack of jobs and communities near abandoned mines can look towards artisanal mining as providing some sort of future because of the crushing lack of any other opportunities and the grinding poverty they are trapped in. No amount of police repression will stop artisanal mining in these conditions. Recognising this reality, the MWP supports demands that artisanal mining be regulated to provide communities with sustainable, decent, and dignified work. This needs to be linked to the nationalisation of the wider mining industry under democratic control and management of the working class – a long standing demand of organised mineworkers.
The community in Stilfontein has demonstrated how easily xenophobia and the criminalisation of these artisanal workers can be replaced by the solidarity that is instinctive to the working class. These efforts have to be built upon and extended to the wider community of Stilfontein and exported to other mining-affected areas to build a movement that can address the immediate problems, which, in the final analysis, can only be sustained through the socialist transformation of society.
The MWP encourages the community members who have offered support and solidarity to the mineworkers to lead a campaign based on the following demands:
- Community to take the lead in rescue operations with the support of the professional rescue team and funding set aside for the rehabilitation of the mines.
- Communities to support a call for amnesty for the remaining mineworkers and those arrested.
- The state to arrest and prosecute the leaders of the criminal syndicates who own and control the illegal operations.
- Immediate implementation of the proposed amendments to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) to regulate the Artisanal and Small-Scale Mining sector.
- Rehabilitation of mining areas must include addressing the most pressing needs of those communities by creating decent jobs and providing quality health, education, and services.
- Support from the labour federations to participate in the structures that must be established to lead a programme of nationalisation of mines.
- Nationalise the mines under workers’ democratic control and management, starting with rehabilitating the mining areas and creating jobs.
- Unite the working class struggle in communities, the workplace and the education sector under a mass workers’ party on a socialist programme.
