FILE PICTURE: Illegal miners seen after emerging from a hole in the ground. Picture: Alaister Russell
Illegal mining has been under the spotlight recently as about 35 suspected illegal miners have been killed in Grootvlei, near Springs on the East Rand, since the beginning of the year, according to police. Last Monday, the bodies of five suspected illegal miners were found with bullet wounds after what was believed to have been a turf war between two groups of illegal miners in the area.
In September, police reported that 15 illegal miners in the Grootvlei area had been killed in alleged gang fights in a short period of time.
In August, an illegal miner was fatally shot and another wounded in a shoot-out between police and miners. The police had responded to a suspected shoot-out between two zama zama groups at an old mine shaft near Daveyton.
The Chamber of Mines said there was an increasing level of violence by illegal miners. It also said according to the Institute for Security Studies, in 2006 the value of gold theft in South Africa during 1999 and 2004 was about R2 billion and PGM theft around R255 million.
“The growth in illegal mining, which is now happening on a large scale nationally, could be attributed to the combination of a difficult socioeconomic climate and limited resources at the disposal of law enforcement agencies, such as police, immigration, border controls and prosecuting authorities,” it said in its 2015 fact sheet on illegal mining.
Wits professor Robert Thornton, who has been researching the illegal mining mechanisms, said illegal miners surface with high quality gold ore with up to a kilo of gold per ton as opposed to the quality that mines usually expect which is six to 12 grams per ton.
Thornton said the miners normally stay underground for a couple of days to weeks at a time before surfacing to process the ore.
“We’ve heard stories of one man staying down for eight months,” he said. “What happens with the rock, it’s processed by a team on the ground that involves men, women, children, most of the work in producing gold is done above ground.”