Illegal miners plague Sibanye
A deep undercurrent of corruption coupled with a lack of policing and prosecutorial skills have allowed illegal gold mining syndicates to run rampant in SA’s gold mines, says Sibanye Gold security head Nash Lutchman.
Illegal mining costs the country about R20bn a year in lost sales, taxes and royalties. Sibanye recently had 461 illegal miners arrested at its four Cooke mines near Johannesburg.
“The syndicates are having a field day. They are laughing all the way to the bank. We don’t have sufficiently trained police to deal with this type of miningrelated crime. Our National Prosecution Authority lacks the particular skills to prosecute this,” Lutchman said.
“The general corruption at the lower levels in the South African Police Service and private security contributes a lot to nothing being done to stop this,” he said, adding that employees and mine security personnel were worsening the problem by smuggling food underground and aiding illegal miners.
Smuggled food packages were sold for hundreds of rand, prompting Sibanye to ban food going underground to feed miners who live in the dark for weeks at a time.
The miners could earn up to R22,000 per underground session, earning R450 per gram of gold in 20g amalgam packages.
Illegal mining brought a host of social ills including assault, murder, bribery, corruption, firearm-related crimes, rape, theft and drug abuse.
Sibanye found 90% of those arrested for illegal mining at its operations were foreign, with many having mining experience as retrenched or out-of-work miners making up the underground teams.
Gold and diamond mines were the most targeted by the illegal miners.
Sibanye says it is losing about up to 4% of its annual gold output of 1.5-million ounces to illegal gold mining despite increasingly stringent security measures to stop illegal miners entering its mines and to stem the flow of food and equipment to them.
Lutchman said Sibanye was experiencing a similar problem of people illegally entering its newly acquired platinum mines near Rustenburg — in this case to steal copper cables and other recyclable material.
It was predominantly operational and closed gold mines that were targeted by illegal mining syndicates, he said.
Earlier in June, one illegal miner was caught at Cooke with gold valued at R200,000 in his stomach, showing how lucrative the business can be.
Lutchman said despite illegal miners being arrested, they were soon either out on bail or fined and released under relatively mild charges of trespassing or theft. One of the best ways to close abandoned or shuttered mines was to collapse tunnels and shafts, making access impossible, he said.