The South African gold mines taken over by criminal gangs

Down a shaft that plunged more than a mile below the earth in South Africa’s old mining heartland, a man’s life hung in the balance.

After weeks working — then later, trapped and starved by violent gang leaders — in the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine in Stilfontein, he clung weakly to a makeshift pulley winching him to safety this month. Above ground, a dozen men strained under the blistering morning sun, lifting the miner out inch by tenuous inch.

The man from Mozambique, who was unable to give his name as he collapsed on the ground, was the latest survivor of a stand-off that has gripped South Africa for weeks, pitching the police against brutal criminal syndicates who run networks of desperate, impoverished miners known as zama zamas.

The stand-off has revealed the scale of criminal infiltration of the mining industry, a cornerstone of Africa’s most industrialised economy.

South Africa was once the world’s top gold producer, but ageing infrastructure and muddled policymaking have forced many commercial operators to shut. That has left up to 6,000 disused mines which, with gold prices reaching record highs this year, have become sites of turf wars between notoriously violent gangs competing to smuggle the precious metal.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s business-friendly coalition government has launched a crackdown as part of a plan to revive declining investment in mining, which accounts for 6.2 per cent of the country’s GDP. But despite implementing market reforms in electricity and largely turning around years of crippling power blackouts, hopes of cleaning up the mining industry have come up against the harsh realities of an economy where up to one in three people are unemployed.

The underground war for the future of the country’s mining industry “is going to get worse before it gets better”, said one security consultant who works for several multinational mining houses. “It’s become a type of insurgency, and the government hasn’t dealt with it for 20 years.”

Thousands of zama zamas, isiZulu for “take a chance”, have flocked from Lesotho, Zambia and Mozambique, neighbouring countries which during apartheid provided a vast and brutalised migrant labour force for extracting precious metals. Gang leaders recruit or coerce these men into working in disused quarries, forcing them to spend weeks or months at a time inside before they are allowed to resurface.

Around 25 tonnes of gold from South Africa is believed to be smuggled to countries like the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland annually, according to a World Gold Council report.

Officials say Operation Vala Umgodi, or “Close the Pits”, will help eradicate a black market that drains the economy of as much as $1bn annually, by some estimates. But in the sleepy town of Stilfontein, 160km west of Johannesburg, the impasse spotlights the difficulties ahead.

Since last month, police officers have formed blockades around Buffelsfontein, a former gold and uranium-producing mine where zama zamas have long operated. The heavily-armed officers gathered around every known exit shaft, then cut ropes used to ferry down food and water.

The aim was to force gang leaders to allow miners to resurface by “smoking them out”, as one minister controversially called it. So far, more than 850 bedraggled, dazed miners have resurfaced from Buffelsfontein, among more than 12,000 wildcat miners rescued in total. Those who did not need to be hospitalised were promptly arrested by waiting authorities. Hundreds are due to face charges in courts.

Private companies have also pledged to crack down, as the shafts from abandoned mines sometimes link to other ones still being used by commercial operators.

“The operating environment in the Southern African region remains challenging from a security and crime perspective,” Sibanye-Stillwater, one of South Africa’s biggest miners, said in an update on combating illegal mining earlier this year.

But the authorities’ “surrender or starve” siege tactic has angered rights groups, who have reignited a debate about unemployment and xenophobia in South Africa, and sought to force authorities to allow emergency supplies to be sent to the miners. At least four civil society groups are also camped alongside the police trucks outside the shafts.

Protests outside a mineshaft where it is estimated that hundreds of illegal miners are hiding after police cut off food and water © Ihsaan Haffejee/Reuters

Louis Nel, who has worked as a security consultant in the industry, said gang leaders below ground were armed with AK47s and improvised explosive devices, making any attempt for officials — or miners themselves — to enter or leave without permission impossible. He said the gangs were deliberately allowing only a trickle of miners to escape in order to manipulate public sentiment.

“They spend months at a time down there, so they know the place like the back of their hands,” he said. “This thing of only releasing one miner at a time, [the gang leaders] are doing it to gain public sympathy.”

David Van Wyk, lead researcher at Bench Marks Foundation, a Johannesburg-based civil rights groups that has worked with zama zamas, said senior-ranking officials in South Africa and neighbouring countries had also been implicated in the syndicates.

Zama zamas are also sometimes approached to collude with legal operators and refiners in order to move the precious metal in a manner that enables tax evasion, he said.

“What you’re doing in Stilfontein is you’re fighting the footsoldiers. What you need to do is follow the money trail,” van Wyk added.

In the town centre, with neat fenced lawns and red-brick bungalows, some residents were baffled by the police operations.

“We used to see the gang leaders driving around in their flashy cars,” said one store owner. “They’ve been there for years, so why all the fuss now? Maybe somebody high up isn’t getting their kickbacks.”