Mine closure blights SA town:
At the end of a narrow road stands the dilapidated husk of a golf clubhouse, now overrun with tall weeds and creepers.
It stands as a reminder of better times for the once booming mining town of Blyvooruitzicht, an hour’s drive southwest of Johannesburg.
Joseph Rammusa, 53, was proud to have been the club’s president — its last, because in 2013, the once-prosperous town suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune.
“I was called to come in the office, I was given a letter that needed to be printed urgently,” said Rammusa, a former clerk at the town’s mine.
“I started looking at the letter, I was taken aback. I realised that the mine was placed under provisional liquidation.”
For more than 60 years, Blyvooruitzicht
sat on one of South Africa’s richest gold deposits.
But a diminishing return on investment prompted the owner to shut the mine, throwing all 1,700 workers out of a job — and leaving the site to looters and decay.
“Things started to fall apart,” said Rammusa.
The newly unemployed staff did not receive any redundancy pay because of a dispute between two mine operators — DRD Gold and Village Main Reef.
The town of 6,000 people was even threatened with the disconnection of its water and electricity supplies, which had
both previously been paid for by the mining company.
Also left behind was an open-air mine dump, which now means that even the slightest breath of wind covers the town with a cloud of toxic dust.
Armed gangs also do battle to control the abandoned mine shafts, which they exploit illegally using casual untrained miners known locally as “zama zamas”.
Four years on from the mine’s closure and the situation in the town has deteriorated dramatically.
“We’re just struggling to get something to eat, to get water from the municipality. Same with electricity (and) we’re battling even to get our children to school,” said Elliot Matshoba, 51, a former safety officer at the mine.
The outlook for the environment is not much better — taps only run intermittently and sewage flows through the streets.
“We’re in a ‘no man’s land’. The government says there’s nothing it can do for us. It’s very painful because no one seems to care,” said residents’ spokesman Pule Molefe, 38. “It’s like we are abandoned here. All we need is for the government to step in and take over and manage and protect what’s there.”
The town’s predicament is not uncommon in South Africa.
The ruinous and abrupt closures of mines, which have provided the majority of the country’s wealth, have increased in recent years as commodity prices have fluctuated unpredictably. (AFP)