After a deadly accident in an off-limits mine in South Africa earlier
this month, one leading Catholic bishop is calling for accountability.
Tens of thousands of so-called “artisanal” miners work illegally in
disused gold and platinum mines formerly operated by mining outfits, or
else dig their own mines in search of deposits, often working without
proper safety equipment.
Many of the miners who work these dangerous sites are undocumented immigrants.
Sometimes, miners spend weeks underground.
Fourteen such workers died on August 10, after a disused mine gave
way in the Nkaneng informal settlement near Rustenburg and Marikana,
South Africa.
The liaison bishop for the Justice and Peace Commission of the
Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC), Thulani V.
Mbuyisa of Kokstad, says writing the victims off as “illegal miners” is a
moral failure that allows the true culprits to escape scrutiny.
“Regardless of their nationality, immigration status or involvement in illegal mining,” Mbuyisa tells Crux Now, “these were human beings whose lives had value.”
“We must enforce the law, certainly, but a society cannot be
satisfied simply to label the dead as ‘illegal miners’ and then move
on,” he says.
“We must ask what conditions repeatedly drive desperate people into
places where death is an entirely foreseeable possibility,” the bishop
also says.
With an estimated value between $2.5 trillion and $3.5 trillion,
South Africa’s extraordinary mineral wealth has long been the backbone
of its economy, yet the communities sitting atop the minerals remain
trapped in extreme poverty and crippling unemployment.
Mbuyisa believes the Nkaneng collapse is symptomatic of a deeply fractured social contract.
The following are excerpts from Crux Now’s conversation
with Bishop Thulani V. Mbuyisa of Kokstad, South Africa, liaison bishop
for the SABC’s Justice and Peace Commission, edited for length and
clarity…
Bishop Thulani V. Mbuyisa: My first thought was
about the human beings who had died and the families who would receive
the terrible news that their loved ones were not coming home.
Fourteen people have died and eight survived this tragedy. Human life
is sacred. One person who dies from illegal mining is one person too
many. Regardless of their nationality, immigration status or involvement
in illegal mining, these were human beings whose lives had value.
I also found myself asking: how many more people must die in
abandoned or disused mining areas before we recognize that something
deeper is wrong?
We must enforce the law, certainly, but a society cannot be satisfied
simply to label the dead as “illegal miners” and then move on. We must
ask what conditions repeatedly drive desperate people into places where
death is an entirely foreseeable possibility.
You called on South Africa to confront “deeper questions about its mining economy.” What are those deeper questions?
The deeper question is this: Who ultimately benefits from South
Africa’s extraordinary mineral wealth, and who carries its human and
environmental costs?
For more than a century, mining has generated enormous wealth, but
many mining communities continue to live with unemployment, poverty,
damaged environments and dangerous abandoned mining infrastructure.
Nkaneng therefore forces us to look beyond the immediate question of
illegal mining. We must ask why disused mining sites remain accessible.
Who is responsible for rehabilitation and security?
Why do people living alongside enormous mineral wealth remain desperately poor?
Who finances and profits from illegal mineral extraction, and is our
mining economy genuinely serving the common good, or merely the
interests of the shareholders and the international criminal networks?
The Department of Mineral And Petroleum Resources (DMPR) has itself
said that this tragedy occurred within the boundaries of an area for
which a valid mining permit exists, although the permit concerns a
surface opencast operation and does not include an underground shaft.
That makes a thorough investigation into responsibility, compliance, security and rehabilitation particularly vital.
Why are vulnerable people still being driven into dangerous, abandoned spaces?
We have to begin with high levels of unemployment in the country, which itself generates a deep sense of desperation.
Nobody should romanticize illegal mining. It is dangerous, unlawful
and, in many places, connected to organized criminal networks. But we
must also ask why somebody is prepared to enter an unstable shaft or dig
through dangerous mine workings knowing that he may not return.
For some people, the decisions on whether or not to participate in
illegal mining is made under circumstances of severe economic hardships.
When legitimate economic opportunities disappear, desperate people
become easy targets for criminal syndicates that recruit labor while
those higher up the value chain make the real profits.
That is why arresting the person underground, while leaving untouched
those who finance, organize, process, transport and purchase illegally
extracted minerals, will never solve the problem.
South Africa’s wealth was built on the backs of miners, yet
historically the mining sector treated Black workers as disposable. Has
anything changed?
The apartheid-era mining industry developed a migrant labor system in which Black mineworkers carried an extraordinary burden.
The migrant labor system was essentially a system of disposable labor.
Generations of men were separated from their families through migrant
labor, housed in compounds, exposed to dangerous working conditions and
diseases, and inadequately compensated for the human cost of producing
the country’s mineral wealth.
It is true that much has changed legally since apartheid.
Workers today possess constitutional and labor rights that their
predecessors were denied. However, the deeper question is whether the
old idea of disposable labor has entirely disappeared.
When former mineworkers struggle for compensation for occupational
disease, when mining communities remain poor after decades of
extraction, or when desperate unemployed people become expendable labor
at the bottom of illegal-mining networks, we should be cautious about
claiming that the underlying mentality has disappeared.
The forms may have changed.
The question of whose life is valued within the mineral economy remains.
Why do communities such as Nkaneng remain poor despite
sitting alongside extraordinary platinum wealth? Is the social contract
broken?
In every mining town in South Africa, one finds a moral
contradiction: the existence of immense wealth in the midst of immense
poverty.
This contradiction should trouble our consciences. You can stand in a
community surrounded by some of the richest mineral deposits on earth
and still find households without decent employment, young people
without prospects and communities struggling for basic services.
There is something ethically wrong when enormous wealth can be
extracted from beneath a community while poverty remains entrenched
above the ground.
If communities experience mining principally through blasting,
pollution, unemployment, and abandoned infrastructure, while the
economic benefits seem to travel elsewhere, then there is clearly a
breakdown in the social contract between those at the point of mineral
extraction and those at the point of wealth accumulation.
Generally, in the mining sector in Africa, we seem to have a social
contract driven by greed: corporate greed, the greed of criminal
syndicates, and the greed of the corrupt political elite.
What is the physical reality of abandoned mine sites for surrounding communities?
An abandoned mine does not simply disappear when commercial extraction ends. It remains physically present.
There may be shafts, unstable workings, contaminated water, mine
dumps, polluted soil, and other environmental and safety hazards. Where
rehabilitation and security are inadequate, these sites can become
magnets for informal and illegal mining.
They can, therefore, become dangerous spaces situated directly beside
communities in which people are already struggling with unemployment.
That is why mine closure cannot mean simply removing profitable
minerals and walking away. Closure and rehabilitation are part of the
moral and legal responsibilities associated with mining.
How do integral ecology and the tragedy at Nkaneng fit together?
Integral ecology teaches us that the cry of the earth and the cry of
the poor cannot be separated. When mining damages land, contaminates
water, or leaves dangerous infrastructure behind, the consequences are
not merely environmental.
Human beings live in that environment.
The poor are usually the least able to escape those consequences.
Nkaneng illustrates this connection very painfully.
We have damaged or disused mining spaces on one side and vulnerable
human beings entering those spaces in search of something from which
they can survive, on the other.
Environmental abandonment and human abandonment begin to mirror one another.
We should not forget that a mining economy that treats land as
disposable will eventually find it easier to treat people as disposable
as well.
Who bears moral and legal responsibility for the Nkaneng tragedy?
We should be careful not to pronounce legal responsibility before the investigation is complete.
The DMPR has confirmed that the incident occurred within the
boundaries of an area where a valid mining permit exists, while
clarifying that the permit concerns a surface opencast operation and
does not include an underground shaft.
The Department is reviewing compliance with applicable laws and
permits, and police investigations are continuing. Therefore, the legal
responsibility must be established by evidence.
That being said, we should not shy away from making a pronouncement about moral responsibility.
There are different layers of moral responsibility.
We must examine the moral responsibility of those who owned,
operated, closed or were required to rehabilitate and secure the site;
the responsibilities of regulators; and the criminal networks that
organise and profit from illegal mining.
We must also examine ourselves as a society when unemployment and
inequality become so extreme that entering a potentially lethal mine
becomes somebody’s livelihood.
Is illegal mining primarily a law-enforcement issue?
Law enforcement is necessary.
Illegal mining cannot simply be tolerated. Criminal syndicates must
be investigated, and the trade in illegally extracted minerals must be
disrupted.
But if our entire policy response consists of police operations and
sealing shafts, we will be dealing with symptoms while allowing the
conditions that produce them to remain.
South Africa needs a much broader response: proper auditing and
rehabilitation of abandoned mines; accountability for mine-closure
obligations; stronger regulation of the entire illegal-mining value
chain; economic opportunities in mining communities; and serious
consideration of properly regulated artisanal and small-scale mining.
We must ask not only, “How do we stop people going underground?” We
must also ask, “Why are they going underground in the first place, and
who is making money from sending them there?”
Where does the Justice and Peace Commission fit into the mining debate? Are you simply issuing statements?
As the Justice and Peace Commission, we have, over decades, been
issuing statements on mining injustice. But statements are only one part
of our work.
The Justice and Peace Commission works directly with communities
affected by mining and with former mineworkers seeking justice. We do
what we call “pastoral accompaniment.”
Particularly, we have accompanied sick mineworkers in their struggle
for compensation and reparation, supported community organization and
advocacy, and worked with affected communities to challenge the wider
structures that allow mining wealth to coexist with poverty,
occupational disease and environmental damage.
Our approach is pastoral in nature, which means walking with affected communities, rather than simply speak about them.
In some way, what we are engaged in is synodality in action:
listening to and journeying with the communities suffering human rights
harms as a result of mining.
This means listening to former mineworkers and their families,
supporting their efforts to access justice, engaging mining companies
and government, using litigation and advocacy where necessary, and
helping communities organize around their rights.
For us, this is fundamentally part of the Church’s mission. It is an integral part of evangelization.
Justice and Peace cannot stand at a distance from people who are suffering and merely issue moral observations.
The Church has to be present where people carry the wounds of the mining economy.
Our concern at Nkaneng therefore belongs to a much wider commitment: A
mineral economy in which workers and communities are treated as human
beings with dignity, not simply as instruments of extraction.
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