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An attempt to crack down on illegal mining in South Africa has ended in disaster.
The total of three hundred and twenty four the extraction has been done and out of the three hundred and twenty four, seventy eight.
Remm remains or corpses.
Authorities sealed off shafts at the buffos Fontein gold mine in October, hoping to cut off the miners access to essentials, but it left as many as one thousand people trapped underground without any access to help. Civil rights groups claim more than one hundred people have now died.
I've witnessed data, I've witnessed a lot of things, have seen hair with my It's like I was in a scary movie, but it was reality to me because I was there. I was witnessing everything, and then I took risky. I told myself, I'm not gonna die under clown.
In today's episode of The Next Africa podcast, we'll ask what's driving people into illegal mining, why the authorities were so keen to try and shut it down, and how this ended in tragedy, with the government forced to back down and rescue the miners.
Then some members of the government are parents to boy children and how would they feel if their children were underground dying of hunger.
I'm Jennifer's Abasadja and this is the Next Africa Podcast, bringing you one story each week from the continent driving the future of global growth with the context only Bloomberg can provide. Joining me this week is Bloomberg stembile Sele, who's been on the ground at the Bulfha Spontein mine.
Cimbilee.
Thanks so much for joining us, especially considering a lot of the work and the reporting that's gone into this. So let's just start with a bit of context. How big of an issue is illegal mining for South Africa.
So the closest estimates that we have is the potential loss or what the Minerals Minister, Guero Mandasha refers to as a leekal to the economy.
In fact, he.
Goes as far as to call it as an attack on the economy. But he's saying that in the last year, sixty billion iran that's three billion dollars has been lost as a result of illegal mining. And then where the stems from really is a number of abandoned or disused mines in South Africa is about six thousand in totals, where you have people going into them and mining independently or artisanal mining as it's called in some places, but
in South Africa it's illegal. So it's illegal mining trying to get whatever it is that they can still extract from the earth to sell for money.
And it happens on a number of levels.
Because I think the first maybe point of context is around former miners who themselves were a part of these minds when they were active and licensed and so on, and so they have a good sense of how things are underneath. They know where the sections of the shafts are where they're likely to get.
The most minerals from.
And so I think that's the first category of miners that we're seeing test. Basically, people that use to work in minds, they lost their jobs when the minds closed, and now they're failing to make.
An income in any other way.
Then you have people that have never mind before, but they're hearing, hey, there's a bit of a gold rush happening underneath the earth. Go and try your luck, and when you are hungry. The unemployment rate is one of the highest recorded in the world. It does become a
very real option. And then I think the third category is given this vacuum that is there, given the lack of formalization around artisanal mining, if we could call it that, you have these massive cross border criminal syndicates that have gotten involved, and their operations are extensive, they're highly armed,
they're very dangerous. You'll find in these communities where there are these abandoned minds and there is this activity, particularly words, driven by these syndicates, crime tends to skyrocket in the early as well. We've heard horror stories of mass rapes of women, extreme violence that happens in people's home as
a results of these syndicates. The other side of it, and we'll get into this a little bit later on when we speak about the people that have surfaced from this mine, is that there is an element that appears to be human trafficking where you see people from neighboring countries mallowing Mosim beacon particular, that find themselves maybe being called by a relative to say, hey, so and so is in South Africa. Go and stay with them for a while. They've got a really good opportunity for you.
They make their way across the border. Most of the time illegally. When they arrive, they told that they need to go underground and mine for the cold and other precious.
Messiles, and they were essentially held hostage.
They're against their will, they're not allowed to leave, and their lives are run explosisively by these syndicates. And so I think that's broadly the picture of how it's unfolding. The other missing elements I think around this is where is the market, because obviously South Africa exports all of its precious metals, and so it's not clear where these
minerals are actually going. But it goes without saying that they are leaving the ports and the borders of South FA and I think that's something that the police really need to be looking into, because in as far as you can't shut down that market, you're going to struggle to clamp down on this practice for as long as you believe that it shouldn't be formulized and should be done away with.
It's such a complicated and nuanced picture that you just painted there.
You were talking about the police.
So let's bring in sort of what we've been seeing over the past few months here in South Africa, and that's really this crackdown. We saw the authorities targeting this Buffa Spontein gold mine. Why this one and what were they doing to try and shut it down?
So I think for context, this is not the only operation, and the security forces embarked on what they call on operation of Islam Quoti, which is the literal Zoo translation for close the whole. And so they've looked at a number of disused or abandoned minds where there is this illegal minding activity taking place, and they've sort of taken this approach. I think this has just been on a more larger scale and it's been one of the most active that.
They have taken this project on.
Right, So this particular instance begins in October of twenty twenty four.
You have police arriving in their numbers and.
They attempt to close the shaft basically, and what that looks like in reality is to say, any provisions food, water, medication that goes down the shaft, we're stopping that from happening. We're stopping people from entering the mine already. And so when you're an illegal miner, the way that it works is that you rely on people on the outside to bring these provisions to you also to let you inside
and outside of the shaft. So if there's no one on the other side that's assisting you, you are stuck there. I think something else to bear in mind is that they are underground for months at a time. So in the case of bufore Fontane, there are people that say that they've been there since February, so that's almost a year.
And so the police's intention with the strategy really was to say you are now forced to come out because you have no way of surviving underground, and that's to look like prohibiting community members or people that they work alongside these illegal miners from bringing them these provisions. And what we've seen is the number of court cases led by NGOs that are assisting community members and family members of people underground to try and compel the government to
allow for these provisions to be let down. So the intention, as I mentioned, is to force people.
To come out.
And when we look at the setup as it were of this particular mind, there's three shafts and the men that we're dealing with two of those shafts. It is possible for you to come out by yourself without assistance. It's not easy, but there's infrastructure, there's a stair wall, there's a staircase, there's something that you can hold on to, you to drag yourself up the mind that has become the death trap where this tragedy is now unfolding.
It's shaft number eleven.
The difficulty with this one is that it's three klumeters deep underground. There is no climbing infrastructure, so the only
way in and out is to be dragged out. And so initially, when the police had stopped people from going in and out, the community and family members had taken it upon themselves to create like a makeshift pulley system that was made of rope, and so some of the people, very few that who've seen emerge from this particular shaft of the three have been retrieved or extracted in that manner.
At some point the police came in and they stopped even that community driven initiative from taking place, and I think so that's how we've seen the sort of escalation over the past few weeks where there's no food getting two people, particularly in the shaft, and so a number of them, we believe that number maybeage one hundred by the end of this week.
Many of them have starved to death.
Some of them all have fall into their death trying to make it up that police system when it was a possibility. We understand that things got so severe. There are claims by some of the miners that have been able to come up that things got so bad people were eating cockroaches down there. Some are claiming that there were instances of cannibalism.
Of course, we can't confirm me.
Any of that, but that is the reports and that's how people are describing the conditions at Shoft number eleven.
Stick with us. We come back.
We'll talk about the rescue operation that's finally taking place and whether or not there's actually going to be more crackdowns like this and some of the other mines across the country.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back today on the podcast, we're talking about illegal mining and how a crackdown on one mine in South Africa reportedly led to the deaths of as many as one hundred miners. Stembulay is still with us and has been on the scene there, so Stimbulay, the government refused at first to help get miners out, as you were describing for us earlier, who were the people then that helped them. Is it some of these NGOs that you were mentioning.
So I think this is also what has led to the mass of animosity and hostility that is taking place between community members, family members, and the governments. In the very early days of this operation, where it really wasn't clear what the setup was and that there was a shoft where people, even if they wanted to come out physically could not, the government took a really tough position.
We heard the Minister and the Presidency don't have any saying that government was not going to get involved in assisting people that were essentially criminals. Of course they've not been bought at that point before a court of law, but they were for all intents and purposes, involved in criminal activity by participating in this illegal gold mining. And so I think that's where the breakdown and the relationship happened.
And when the government was folding their arms and saying, you do what you want, but we will arrest you as soon as you come up here, we then saw community members coming in and the first thing that they did, obviously was to fundraise money to try and get food. When the court orders did come that temporarily did allow for some provision to send down. We saw them putting
together this Pulley system. On the sidelines of that, we also saw court action that was driven by NGOs or sponsored by them on behalf of family and community members. And this is where they were also doing their part before the court to try and compel governments to do something about this. This then comes to a head last week Friday when an applicant Zinzi Tom is a woman
whose brother is underground at shaft number eleven. She then went to court and I think this would have been the fifth court case involving the government in this particular matter where she was pleading with the court basically to force government to assist her. And in that session before court, government then said, you know what, we don't need to carry on with this case. We are happy to reach
a settlement. We are going to assist. And what that assistance has looked like is bringing the Minerals Council organization on board to provide the twelve million Rand that is needed to fund this rescue operation.
They bring the heavy machinery that.
Has basically a cage that goes down like an elevator and is able to then extract to bring people back from this two point eight kilometer put and so this rescue operation it.
Began on Monday.
For their part, the government is arguing that at some point they did make the realization and it's not that they were against assisting people, but that they were just waiting for the best way to go about it, and when that opportunity presented itself, they found the funding, they found a plan that would work. They they did embark
upon it. They weren't dragging their feeds. But I think the complicated part is it also depends on who you're speaking to, because again the Minerals minister Guende Mandesha, he is adamant that this is an illegal activity. There's no human rights element, there's no humanitarian assistance that is required. You can't do these things for people that are obviously anciently criminals. And so that's the lay of the land
politically speaking. But there really has been then some animosity given the stance from government between them and the NGOs and community and family members of those who are trapped, particularly at Shoft eleven of this mine.
Before we let you go, stim be like, can you just describe for us the situation there on the ground. You spent time there, obviously speaking with authorities but also with the community. What can you tell us about some of the takeaways that you got from being there.
I think just incredibly somber. Watching things unfold is kind of in the middle of nowhere, It deserted, it is extremely hot, and you just see the hub of activity, so many police vehicles, and I think just the most chilling thing is really seeing the amounts of Forensic Pathology Services vehicles that were standing by to gather up the bodies.
And so even though we're at somewhat of a distance from the actual shaft opening, you could see when the bodies were being extracted and they were loaded into these vehicles. And I must just tell you that the smell of the decomposed bodies was extreme. It stuck to the people
that had emerged or were rescued from the shaft. Of the people that we saw are being rescued yesterday and the day before, they were extremely young, some young boys who were about fourteen fifteen years old, who were nothing but skin and bones, given that they'd been underground for so long without any provision, and so the scenes really unfolding there an absolutely horrific situation.
To be watching, and I'm assuming that you're.
A family member or a community member, you have someone that's underground that you care about.
It is also a really scary moment.
For you because you're hoping for the best and that they're be one of the lucky ones that.
Actually emerge still alive.
But there's also those that have given up and have got in the sense that they're just waiting for a body and they just want the closure to be able to bury the person that they love. And so yeah, I think there's a very somber mood there at the before sputeen mine.
And you can read all of our coverage across Bloomberg platforms. Now here's some of the other stories we've been following across the region. This week, the US State Department demanded that Rwanda stop using GPS jamming equipment in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where millions of people displaced by conflict
are desperate for aid. The jamming and the so called spoofing is preventing United Nations peacekeeping and humanitarian aircraft from flying in the region, the Department said in a statement on Wednesday. And Gaban's military leader has picked a new Economy Minister to resolve the Central African oil producers' debt woes. Mark Domba, an entrepreneur who's studied public administration at Harvard University, takes the helm of the key ministry after a cabinet
reshuffle announced Wednesday on the Presidency's Facebook page. The shakeup comes days after the World Banks suspended disbursements to Gabon over arrears of twenty seven million dollars. The OPEC member also has dollar bonds maturing in June of twenty twenty five. And you can follow these stories across Bloomberg, including the Next African Newsletter. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. This program was produced by Adrian Bradley.
Don't forget to follow and review this show wherever you usually get your podcasts. I'm Jennifer Zabasandra. Thanks as always for listening.