The Constitution of South Africa sets out the rights and responsibilities of all people within its borders. It explicitly safeguards against discrimination, guarantees rights and freedoms and insists on administrative justice. In particular, there is the right to life, to food, and to water. In addition, it insists that a person is innocent until found guilty and that all have a right to a free and fair judicial process.
Yet, in the words of the Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni:
We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped, criminals are to be persecuted. We didn’t send them there and they didn’t go down there for the good benefit and good intentions of the republic.
This statement is a unilateral suspension of these Constitutional rights and obligations. Clearly, the Minister needs some schooling in the Constitution of the land.
It is now six months since the saga of what has become the largest massacre in post-apartheid South Africa tragically unfolded. A lot has been said and done. In the process, close to 100 ‘illegal miners’ or ‘Zama Zamas’ perished under the government-driven operation ‘Vala umgodi’ (close the hole). This operation deprived the miners who were trapped in the abandoned shaft of food, chronic medicines, and the basic necessities to survive.
Our observations of what happened
From the Bench Marks Foundation, we visited Stilfontein, engaged with the community, and met with the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace. From this, we make the following observations:
- The police did not provide assistance to the rescue effort between August 2024 and 13 January 2025. Rather, they immediately detained anyone that came to the surface and did not also allow any public access to the detainees.
- It was only after the court instruction on 13 January 2025 that the police allowed Mine Rescue Services to go down with selected community members to lead the rescue.
- About 75 corpses were extracted between 13 and 16 January, and a further nine between August 2024 and 13 January 2025, as a result of the Khuma community’s rescue efforts. The number of dead miners continues to rise, with nearly a hundred deaths having been reported so far. While authorities say that there are no more bodies, members of the community insist that some bodies are still in the inaccessible parts of the mine.
- Priests from the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace were not allowed to pray over the dead bodies. Noting that both Lesotho and Mozambique are predominantly Catholic countries, spiritual access to both the living and the dead extracted from the mine should have been a positive humanitarian gesture. It is also alleged that the priests and the public, including family members, were not allowed to visit their detained relatives either in prison or in hospital.
- No guns came to the surface, despite what the politicians and media have said.
- Those detained were immediately sent to prison cells or to the local hospital, depending on their condition. Most of them were so emaciated that their bodies could not retain food or water. It is impossible to determine if any of those who were hospitalised or detained in prison cells died after detention.
- It is reported that those who ended up in overcrowded prison cells faced further starvation as they were too weak to fight for food with common criminals, who were also in the cells when the police delivered food.
- It is alleged that many of the men had South African wives or girlfriends and bore children with their spouses. They faced summary deportation without family members being informed. This has left dependents in Khuma Township absolutely destitute.
- It is said that the South Africans who surfaced were set free and not charged.
- It is impossible to determine how many of the men were former ‘formal’ mine workers who did not receive their pensions or unemployment benefits when they were retrenched.
- The community alleges that when these shafts closed down some ten years ago, the mine owners didn’t follow the proper retrenchment procedures, nor did they inform the workers of the closure of the shafts. Therefore, those who lost their jobs suddenly became illegal immigrants as their work permits terminated. They and their families were left destitute.
- Community members claim that men in bakkies would drive around asking people if they need jobs. Given the high level of poverty, unemployment and inequality in the country, many people affirmed that they needed jobs. These people were then loaded onto transport and driven to abandoned mines. Often by force, they found themselves underground for as long as six months at a time.
Amnesia of politicians
Politicians like Mantashe lived in apartheid South Africa and are familiar with the notorious Section 6 of the Terrorism Act, which led to the death of Steve Biko in 1977. Mantashe and his cronies are now calling the shots and have promoted ‘afrophobic’ and ‘anti-blackness’ notions that the black migrants, who entered the country illegally, are sub-humans and criminals who deserve to die. This is despite the fact that during colonialism, racial capitalism, and apartheid, the mines were absolutely dependent on ‘cheap labour’. They were press-ganged into the mines through taxation, land deprivation and engineered underdevelopment in their countries of origin.
If you go to a dangerous place, such as a neglected mine, and stay there for about three months, starving yourself to death, how does that become the responsibility of the state? – Gwede Mantashe, Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.
Yet, Mantashe and his former National Union of Mineworkers comrade, President Ramaphosa, have never addressed the impact of the migrant labour system on poor black communities in labour-sending and near-mining communities.
We have said before that the issue of ‘zama zamas’ should not just be treated as a matter of ‘illegal’ people flocking into our country to steal minerals. There is a historical context that must be dealt with — generation after generation of men from labour-sending areas in the Eastern Cape, Lesotho, Mozambique, etc. As mining declined, tens of thousands, if not millions, were retrenched and forced to go back to their villages without pensions and the means to support their families. In 2022, Webber Wentzel reported that there is approximately R47 billion of unclaimed retirement benefits in the mining sector.
Unclaimed benefits, extreme poverty in the labour-sending areas, trafficking of young men, skyrocketing retrenchments, and failure of Mantashe’s department to ensure that mines are properly shut down and rehabilitated. These are among the most pressing issues that the media has failed to focus on since the beginning of the saga.
I have absolutely no sympathy. They must die like rats underground there, all of them. They must burn in hell. – Kenny Kunene, Patriotic Alliance deputy president and former convicted criminal.
The media and politicians continue to run with the narrative that ‘zama zamas’ are illegal migrants who are here to steal South Africa’s natural resources. There is this false sense of negative importance that some South Africans attribute to their fellow African brothers and sisters. And it has been stoked by politicians and some factions of the media. To be human, you have to be ‘legal’ and a South African.
All of a sudden, Mantashe suffers from amnesia about how the mining sector continues to be structured by the governance and economic model of Cecil Rhodes. It only involves black people when they are ‘cheap labour’. As it stands, less than 10 percent of mining companies in South Africa are owned by black people. The 27% BEE requirement of the Mining Charter is like the old Land Act of 1913 — apportioning a minority share to the majority in the population is a demographic, racist insult.
The likes of Mantashe and those who sing his tune are defenders of the long-standing brutality of the black body in a racialised capitalist system.
The meeting in Stilfontein also noted that the authorities are reluctant to investigate the network of criminal syndicates. These allegedly involve politicians, police officers, security companies, and scrap metal dealers. They also allegedly involve formal mining companies in a complex value chain that has resulted in the super-exploitation of artisanal miners.
Those who find themselves exploited in this intricate web have no labour rights and cannot be unionised. They have no prospect of being part of pension schemes or medical aid and are subjected to inhumane working conditions and unsafe and unhealthy lengthy periods underground. These conditions of super-exploitation are defined by low income, long hours and low overhead costs for the syndicate crime bosses on the surface.
What is illegality?
They must be sure to be even-handed when they talk about illegality:
- Abandoning a mine is illegal.
- Shutting a shaft without informing the employees of imminent unemployment/ retrenchment procedures is illegal.
- Not paying workers unemployment benefits and pensions is theft: stealing from the poorest of the poor.
- Not giving workers exit medical checkups on termination of employment in a mine is illegal. It is also a denial of the worker’s constitutional right to health. And it makes it impossible for the worker to access the Tshiamo Trust fund money for workers who suffer from silicosis.
- Failure to test any worker who died underground for Silicosis is illegal. Have the lungs of the corpses of the estimated 84 mineworkers who surfaced been sent to the National Institute for Occupational Health for testing for silicosis.
A way forward
The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace and the Bench Marks Foundation met with members of the Khuma community, including some who assisted in the rescue of the mine workers. They agreed that Commissions of Inquiry often do not lead to justice and closure and suggested that a special tribunal be set up to investigate the injustice that occurred at Stilfontein. It was proposed that the idea of a special tribunal be tabled at the Alternative Mining Indaba and that it be taken forward from there. The Stilfontein crisis featured on the agenda of the Alternative Mining Indaba and is being debated at the National Association of Artisanal Miners for possible finalisation.
Nteboheng Phakisi-Portas, David van Wyk, Esther Makhetha and Eric Mokuoa. The authors work for the Bench Marks Foundation, except for Esther Makhetha, who is with the Tshwane University of Technology.
