Sibanye-Stillwater mine death hammers share, causes uproar

Another death at a Sibanye-Stillwater mine has seen the company’s share price plummet 10% on Tuesday and evoked strong reactions from Parliament and trade unions.

Parliament’s mineral resources committee chairman, Sahlulele Luzipo, said it was “high time the company is placed under curatorship”. He went further and suggested that the miner’s operating licence should be withdrawn.

Trade unions demanded amendment of legislation to allow for personal liability by executives for safety failures.

The fatality at the Khomanani mine on Tuesday morning brought the death toll on company premises to 21 since February. This represented almost half of the 45 fatalities in the industry over this period.

But while expressing concern on the fatality rates, the unions pushed back at suspending the operating licence, saying many families relied on the mines for survival.

Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) president Joseph Mathunjwa said he was unclear how curatorship would work. Health and safety chairman for the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) Duncan Luvuno said such a move should be a last resort.

Both NUM and Amcu want the Mine Health and Safety Act amended so mining executives can be prosecuted in their personal capacity and even jailed.

Additionally, Mathunjwa said section 23 of the act, which allows for workers to leave a dangerous workplace, should be amended to be more specific to ensure workers can do so without fear of suspension or other action.

While the details of the fatal accident are still being determined, the company on Monday said the dead worker was caught in the path of a scraper.

Sibanye-Stillwater spokesman James Wellsted explained that a scraper was a large “bucket” used to move broken ore from one position to another. It moves in the confines of a gully, a specially excavated scraper path, Wellsted said.

The Department of Mineral Resources was concerned at the fatalities at the company, spokeswoman Ayanda Shezi said. “Investigators are on site and commenced [their] investigations ” she said. Investigations into the other fatalities at Sibanye-Stillwater mines were ongoing and on completion a report would be submitted to Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe.

Paul Mardon, deputy general secretary for health and safety at Solidarity, said the union was very concerned about health and safety at the mines.

“Something big is definitely wrong,” he said.

A thorough investigation was required. “They have the oldest mines, and the deepest. They are the biggest in the industry, so of course they would have the most fatalities, but to be responsible for nearly half in SA for this year, that is out of proportion to their size,” he said.

“There is no simple answer,” said Luvuno. “This requires thorough introspection from all of us mining bosses and unions to find where the problem is.”

We are only 178 days into the year and already 21 workers have died at Sibanye-Stillwater’s mines. That’s a staggering number. It’s hard to imagine many jurisdictions that would tolerate having in its midst a company in which an employee was killed at his or her place of work virtually every week.

Neither should we. And here we are not talking about an insignificant player, but the biggest company in an industry where SA used to be the leading global player.

Gold mining, which dates back to the 19th century and is probably the most important contributor to the fact that about 10-million people now call the city of Johannesburg home, has long lost its status as the most important player in the South African economy.

For decades SA was synonymous with gold, and the country was the largest producer in the world. We are now barely in the top 10 and employment levels, at around 116,000, are down almost 70% from what they were in the mid-1990s.

The country was barely a feature when AngloGold, once the dominant South African player, discussed its growth plans in May, looking further afield, from Mali to Australia.

That may partly explain Sibanye’s elevation to the nation’s biggest gold producer. Other companies are moving away from deep-level, expensive and dangerous mines, and into mines in other parts of the world that are more mechanised and shallower.

SA’s mining industry, with its intimate association with apartheid and colonial-era exploitation and dispossession, has a long history of callousness and disregard for the well-being of the people who risk their lives going underground.

It is an industry in which the many have long laboured and died in inhumane conditions, while the few became very rich on the back of that suffering.

So to a casual reader, the constant flow of news of deaths might seem natural and only what should be expected.

But that would actually be a misreading of the situation and does an injustice to the progress that’s been made since 1994, when close to 500 people a year died in SA’s mines.

Bloomberg reported late in 2017 that fatalities reached 81 from January to November, noting this was the first increase in more than a decade.

With three working days before the end of the quarter, the total for 2018 stands at 46, meaning that if the fatality rates are maintained, there will be a consecutive year of growth.

That one company accounts for almost half the fatalities in 2018 is rightly ringing alarm bells, with the chairman of Parliament’s mineral resources portfolio committee, Sahlulele Luzipo, calling for Sibanye to be placed under curatorship.

Who can argue against the view that the deaths have now reached “disastrous proportions?”

In a statement posted on its website, Sibanye described the latest incident, which took place at the Khomanani mine, as “perplexing”, saying it happened after the worker entered a scraper path “for reasons still to be determined”.

It is slightly more than perplexing, and shareholders have noticed, pushing the company’s shares down about 11% on Tuesday, the biggest drop in more than four months.

That would indicate that they regard Luzipo’s comments as more than just political noise making, and they do not auger well for a company that is already under pressure from lower gold prices.

Clearly, management’s actions so far, including the appointment of a new safety boss, have been far from adequate.

It will need to do something quickly, otherwise the political pressure for something far more drastic will be impossible to resist, and its stockholders are already getting the message.

WHO CAN ARGUE AGAINST THE VIEW THAT THE DEATHS HAVE REACHED ‘DISASTROUS PROPORTIONS’?