Sibanye blitz nets up to 1,400 illegal miners

Precious-metals producer Sibanye-Stillwater arrested nearly 1,400 illegal miners at all its South African gold shafts in 2017 in a blitz the company says has mostly ended the practice at its mines.

Illegal gold mining has plagued SA for decades and it costs the government and the industry more than R20bn a year in lost sales, taxes and royalties, according to a Chamber of Mines report in 2017.

Sibanye CEO Neal Froneman vowed in 2017 to take the war to illegal miners and clear them from its shafts by January 2018.

According to data provided to Reuters by Sibanye, it made 797 arrests in 2017 linked to illegal mining at its Cooke operations and 1,383 overall. The blitz peaked in June, with more than 500 arrests, above the 443 arrests in 2016 as a whole.

While Sibanye fell short of its goal of stamping out illegal mining altogether, Sibanye’s head of security, Nash Lutchman, said based on available intelligence, “there are only about 40 to 50 illegal miners operating now, scattered across our Kloof and Driefontein operations”. Most illegal miners are undocumented immigrants from neighbouring countries. They have long provided migrant labour for mines but are now being laid off.

The syndicates that support them and traffic the illegal metals are well funded, well established and highly dangerous, security experts say.

Sibanye’s drive was helped by the mothballing of its unprofitable Cooke operation, which was the epicentre of illegal mining activity in its shafts.

Sibanye spent R300m in 2017 and will spend another R300m in 2018 on access and biometric controls at the entry points to its gold mines.

“It still costs us so I don’t know if we will ever declare a victory but we are at the end of stage one,” Froneman said.

“My biggest concern about illegal mining is the corruption of our supervisors and our employees. That just sets a path for creating a rotten organisation. Everybody gets bribed and the integrity of the business just gets undermined,” he said.

Froneman conceded that there was no guarantee illegal miners would not try to return, so the company needed to maintain its costly vigilance.