In this third article we continue what has become a four-part series on the Stilfontein crisis. In the first part which you can access here and the second part here we focused on the government’s response and the media’s coverage of the crisis and offered an analysis of the place of illegal mining in capitalist mining. In part 3 we discuss who are the real criminals behind this industry and deepen our analyses put forward on what has now become the Stilfontein slaughter.
On the 15t January, 2025 the SA Police Service (SAPS) announced the end of the court ordered rescue of workers engaged in “illegal” mining at the Stilfontein Mine just outside Klerksdorp about 150km west of Johannesburg. By then the death toll had reached 78. The original estimate had been 109 dead. The bodies of those unaccounted for will probably never be found. They died a gruesome death. Many lost their lives from drowning in the pool of acid drain water more than 2km underground into which they had fallen after unsuccessfully attempting to exit the abandoned mine. They would have tried to climb out of Shaft 11’s slippery rails and rusted broken stairs or attempted the 7-day long crawl through dark and flooded tunnels to Shaft 10. They died from the government’s policy of laying siege to the mine, closing the exit and deliberate starvation – the denial of food, water and medication.
It is thanks to the heroic efforts of the Stilfontein community, social movements like Macua (Mining Affected Communities), Lawyers for Huma Rights etc, that the unfolding horror was exposed. Reports of starving zama zama survivors eating the flesh of the deceased and images capturing the bodies of the dead underground, wrapped in plastic by the surviving workers to ward off the smell of the decomposing bodies, went viral worldwide. It is this exposure of the government’s disgraceful and criminal conduct that compelled the courts ultimately to order the rescue mission.
The ANC-led government must take full responsibility for the Stilfontein slaughter. But the state had tasted working class blood before. The 34 martyrs of Marikana, had been hunted down in the surrounding hills into which they had fled, quarried like animals, shot execution style, many with their hands up in surrender. The bullets that claimed the lives of the Marikana workers meant instantaneous death. The victims of Stlifontein died after the unimaginable horror of the slow and painful suffering from starvation.
The Marikana massacre was followed a few short years after by the Life Esidimeni case where 144 mental health patients were deliberately neglected and starved to death in a cost saving exercise by the Gauteng Heath Department.
The barbarity of the Israeli regime’s policy of laying siege to and deliberate starvation of the Palestinians in Gaza formed a critical element in SA’s legal team’s devastating genocide case against Netanyahu’s far right regime and the subsequent International Criminal Court’s issuing of warrants of arrest. The Stilfontein siege mimicked the Netanyahu regime’s barbarism. The ANC leadership’s incomprehension of the hypocrisy between their posture on Palestine and their Stilfontein strategy is simply breathtaking! But this is no surprise. The ANC government has taken no action against private companies profiteering from coal exports to Israel as the genocide was being perpetrated.
Not content with mimicking the methods of the genocidaire heading the far right Israeli regime, ANC ministers and their Israeli genocide supporting Patriotic Alliance Government of National Unity (GNU) partners could not resist the temptation to take their inspiration from Trump’s xenophobia towards immigrants, undocumented and documented alike. In support of his plans, already in motion, to deport millions of immigrants, Trump has described immigrants as former inmates of prisons and mental asylums adding that Haitians eat dogs and cats.
In similar fashion the zama zamas, the overwhelming majority of them poor and destitute, have been tarred with the same brush as the criminal gangs orchestrating illegal mining that enslaved them. These gangs procure their slaves through deception, kidnapping, violence and human trafficking. They have been doing so for decades. If the ANC government was unaware of these activities, which they say is costing the economy R60bn a year, they would be guilty of criminal negligence.
Illegal mining only possible through collusion of the police, mining companies, and politicians
But something much more sinister is at play. The profits of what is in fact a global illegal mining industry, derive ultimately from gold, chrome and other minerals entering an international value chain involving mining companies, facilitated by politicians and a corrupted intelligence and police apparatus. It is simply an insult to the intelligence to suggest that this is done by destitute zama zamas including 14-year-old children from Mozambique paraded on television in handcuffs in the style of the Israeli Occupation Forces in Gaza dehumanising Palestinians they are holding hostage.
In her statement on the escape of the “kingpin” from jail of a Lesotho national, the SAPS spokeswoman for the Stilfontein operation took temporary leave from her unrestrained xenophobic claims that the police were simply attempting to restore law and order and rooting out criminality. She admitted that the escape could not have been possible without collusion. The heads she said must roll, would have to include police and prison officers, and very likely politicians. Such action as has been taken has predictably been against officials at the lower end of the food chain. There is little chance of action against the big fish in the criminal justice system or politicians. This after all is a GNU with corruption – tainted politicians sitting on the parliamentary benches and in a cabinet headed by a president who engaged in the criminal offence of failing to declare millions in foreign currency stuffed in a sofa on his Phala Phala farm.
The Illegal mining gangs have been operating with impunity for years. So brazen have they become that they have fought out their battles for control of abandoned mines in townships like Soweto, Riverlea and West Rand townships where women were raped. These activities have spread to the North West. The Sunday Tribune (26/01/2025) reports that Kgosi Mmanotshe Ramokoka, of the Baphalane Traditional Council has appealed for police intervention after clashes between employees of rival security companies resulted in the injuries of three men in the Bojanala Platinum District Municipality, near Sun City. Residents of the Witrandjie community have resorted to taking up arms themselves against the gangs mining for chrome.
Gang leaders have boasted about their funding of political parties like the All Basotho Convention (ABC), a former governing party now in opposition in Lesotho. As we pointed out in our previous articles, these gang leaders have even compared their relationship with the ABC to that between the allies in the ANC-led Tripartite Alliance.
Stilfontein follows in bloody footsteps of Life Esidimeni and Marikana
The Stilfontein slaughter takes its place alongside the 2012 Marikana massacre of 34 mineworkers, the 147 Life Esidimeni deaths of mental health patients in 2015, as well as the victims of the Isindiso fire in the Johannesburg CBD in which 77 were gruesomely incinerated in an abandoned building in 2023. The state was held culpable for the deaths of the Life Esidimeni and Isindiso Fire victims respectively by Judges Dikgang Moseneke and Sisi Khampepe who headed the inquiries into both tragedies. In his damning findings on Life Esidimeni, Judge Moseneke described what patients had gone through at the hands of the state as a “terrible tale of death and torture.”
However, the handling of the Isindiso fire was notable for being in fact the first public dress rehearsal for the use of xenophobia – a practice that has been elevated from intemperate outbursts by senior ANC leaders into what has increasingly become virtual official policy.
Since its humiliating defeat in the May 2024 elections, the ANC has employed this grotesque version of the apartheid regime’s policy of divide-and-rule against African foreign nationals. It is at once a desperate attempt to deflect attention from its culpability for the sense amongst ordinary people of a failing state, as well as an attempt to turn the poor against the poor.
Crime has reached horrifying levels as mass shootings have become a new feature of township life. Crime has also become more brazenly organised carried out in open and contemptuous defiance of the criminal justice system. Despite the findings of the Billion rand judicial commission of inquiry into “state capture” ie government corruption, parliamentarians and cabinet ministers found to have a case to answer, continue in their posts. After the briefest of pauses for the election campaign, it has been business as usual as new corruption revelations have engulfed cabinet and the presidency itself. The Minister of Justice was simply redeployed. The presidential spokesperson, revealed to have earned her position after burnishing her corruption credentials in local government, is still firmly ensconced in her position in the highest political office in the land.
For the working class, life is a daily struggle under water and electricity cut-offs through throttling or “load reductions”; increasing unemployment; a creaking health and education system; a growing housing backlog, deepening poverty and a rising cost of living. To defuse this anger, the ruling political and economic elite needed not just a distraction from their culpability for the socio-economic crisis in society. They needed to divide the working class through xenophobia.
Stilfontein strategy – a cover-up for crimes of big business and organised crime
These events bear testimony to the cold blooded indifference, even hostility of the ANC government towards the working class to whom it had promised a better life for all more than thirty years ago. The common theme running across all four events is the ANC’s role as the servants and political protectors of the capitalist class and the ruthless pursuit of its ambition to create, in Mandela’s words in 1956 “a prosperous non-European bourgeoisie”, a rich black capitalist class in today’s language.
The ANC-led GNU’s entire Stilfontein policy amounts to a cover up for the crimes of the mining companies against whom not only absolutely no action has been taken for simply abandoning 6 000 mines, the syndicates exploiting and enslaving the destitute, and elements in the criminal justice system colluding with them – the real criminals.
The mining companies, like the gangs, have enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their flagrant contravention of the law. The law obliges the mining companies to obtain a certificate for decommissioning mines and to follow proper safety closure procedures. Not even as controversy raged around the entrapment of the workers did this spineless ANC demand accountability from the mining companies.
On the contrary, claiming no budget for the rescue, Mineral and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe behaved like the quislings of the capitalist class which has dictated his government’s economic policies throughout the post-apartheid period. He went on his knees begging the Minerals Council, representatives of mining companies, for donations. This was after the Buffelsfontein Gold Company, the owners of the Stilfontein mine, arrogantly dismissed claims that they carried any responsibility for the crisis or had any obligation to rescue the miners.
The ANC leadership has demonstrated a lack of common human decency as well as a jelly-like political spinelessness. The mining company bosses, as they have done for more than a century of pillaging and profiteering, have acted with complete indifference and impunity. The reckless abandonment of the mines has caused serious social and environmental damage. Mass retrenchments have piled on the misery on communities in the surrounding towns. Discarded like disposable goods, retrenched workers received meagre retrenchment packages. Nor has there been even the slightest consideration for compensation for the communities in the surrounding towns suffering from the ruination of the economies for which mining provided a lifeline.
Stilfontein must rank as the most shameful chapter in the ANC’s thirty-year post-apartheid history. It is arguably the most damning confirmation of the ANC’s complete and utter political, ideological and moral degeneration. The ANC is backed this time by, amongst others, its partners in the GNU, like the Patriotic Alliance, with whose unapologetic xenophobia it has become totally infected. It is at the same time a confirmation of the concomitant degeneration and political collapse of its Tripartite Alliance partners – the SA Communist Party the leadership of the Congress of SA Trade Unions which has maintained a deafening cowardly silence throughout.
It underlines the necessity for the abolition of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society in SA and the region. In the concluding, part 4, of the series, to follow, we argue for how the working class can unite and address the urgent task of the creation of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.
