Part 4: The political significance of Stilfontein

Xenophobia’s cold-blooded indifference on steroids

In this final part of our four-part series on the Stillfontein massacre we draw attention to the danger of xenophobia for the working class, why it is being consciously inflamed and point to the looting and pillaging of the country by foreign multinational and their local collaborators.  

Apartheid Justice minister Kobie Coetzee declared that Steve Biko’s death at the hands of his security police murderers, left him cold.  Statements by ANC ministers and leaders of its PA partner are comparable.

Minister in the presidency, Khumudzo Ntshavheni set the tone for this callous inhumanity. “We’ll   smoke them out” as she defended government’s decision to starve them to death and bury them alive under the Vala Umgodi (close the holes in isiZulu) policy.

After dead emaciated bodies were brought to the surface through the rescue operation the government undertook only after being ordered by the courts, Police Minister Senzo Mchunu, astonishingly, insisted that the deaths could not be attributed to starvation until there had been autopsies.

Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister and former National Union of Mineworkers secretary general and SA Communist Party national chairperson, Gwede Mantashe doubled down on the government’s denialism. How is the state responsible if you go to a dangerous place and stay there for about three months, starving yourself to death? he asked. Finance Minister, former fellow trade unionist and senior SA Communist Party member, echoed this sentiment.

These remarks spurred the PA leaders to open the sluice gates to flood the public in the sewage of xenophobic hatred. The PA is led by its president, former bank robber Gayton McKenzi. He took his appointment to a cabinet position as a reward for his support for the Israeli far right regime’s genocide in Gaza and popularisation of the PA’s  racism – xenophobia’s blood relative. The PA promotes the racist message that Coloureds (mixed race people) suffer discrimination under a government that gives preference to Blacks at their expense. The ANC’s Stilfontein xenophobia is perfectly in tune with the PA’s call for mass deportations of undocumented migrants summed up in its slogan “abahambe” (let them go in isiZulu) emblazoned on party t-shirts.

Not to be outdone in this orgy of xenophobia by his party leader, PA deputy president, fellow ex bank robber, Kenny Kunene posted a picture on X showing two slaughtered and skinned goats hanging from a roof by their necks. The caption underneath reads: “This is the chilling fate that awaits illegal miners robbing SA of their natural resources and wealth.”

Kunene told television channel, NewzRoom Africa:

I am hoping God kills all of them. I have no sympathy for those who have died stealing the wealth of our country. They have committed a crime by entering this country illegally,” “You saw in the West Rand, Gauteng, where they raped young women who were trying to make money with what God has given them as talent. They are raping in Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg, and the Free State. These are criminals,” he said. He added: “I have absolutely no sympathy. They must die like rats underground there, all of them. They must burn in hell.”

The Stilfontein slaughter has added to the ANC’s mounting working class body count of its direct action and inaction under its rule in democratic SA. It has demonstrated the same contempt for the working class and the poor on a class basis as the apartheid regime did on a racial basis. That this is a Government of National Unity and not the outright majority ANC government of the first 30 years of democracy merely means that its GNU partners are accomplices in its crimes. Operation Vala Umgodi, which the MWP says should really be named “Abafele Emgodini” (let them die in the hole in isiZulu) has been driven by the ANC from the very top – from within the presidency itself.

The government’s conduct at Marikana, Stilfontein and Life Esidimeni are all equally repugnant and deserving of unqualified condemnation.

Echoes of Marikana

The August 2012 Marikana massacre, was preceded by the deliberate placement of mortuary vans near the scene of what was to be the biggest massacre since Sharpeville, the night before. Half of the martyrs of Marikana lost their lives in a hail of bullets at scene one. The remainder were hunted down like game and shot execution style as they raised their hands in surrender or by snipers from police helicopters between the rocks they had fled to what was designated scene two. The Marikana massacre was premeditated.

At Stilfontein however, the state took premeditation to an entirely new level. It engaged in deception, outright lies, denial, obfuscation and belly crawling in front of the mining bosses in the Minerals Council. But this time it was accompanied by the instigation of a tsunami of xenophobia. Implementation of Operation Vala Umgodi began in August 2024. The zama zamas had been trapped there for at least a month before. By October, Stilfontein community members, some of whom had family underground, raised the alarm, warning of the disaster unfolding. In response the government declared the area where communities were carrying out their food supply and rescue efforts as a crime scene and prohibited their intervention.

To distract attention from its culpability for the disaster it had itself created, the government activated its propaganda machine to win public support. Like all propaganda, the state operated on the principle that if they repeated misrepresentation of facts often enough, it could stick and thus protect it from public outrage. Regrettably, the ANC had some success as sickening calls, voice notes and Whatsapp messages poured into radio stations from members of the public supporting the state’s ‘let them die’ policy.

This is what the ANC that prides itself in its history as a liberation movement, has been reduced to. People in the neighbouring countries had pressurised their governments into positioning themselves as “front line states” against apartheid. They offered their solidarity, generosity and their lives as they were bombed by the white minority regime. For repaying them with the venom of xenophobic hatred, the ANC has stripped itself of all vestiges of the “struggle credentials” under the cover of which they have carried out their betrayals at home and in their sub-continental neighbourhood.

With a handful of honourable exceptions, journalists on radio and television placed themselves at the service of the government’s toxic propaganda machine. The dehumanisation and criminalisation of the zama zamas degenerated to the point that phrases like “illegal dead bodies” were used, denying these human beings the dignity they had not been shown in life, even in death. These are echoes of the language used on radio stations in the early days of the Rwanda genocide, when Tutsi people were referred to, amongst others, as “cockroaches.” The consequences reverberate to this day in the crisis in the DRC where 14 SA and a number of soldiers from other countries have lost their lives.

These journalists exhibited not only a lack of common human decency but also a complete incapacity to do even the most basic journalistic work – to investigate. There was consequently no attempt to hold the government, the police or the mining companies to account. Instead, they regurgitated despicable attempts to demonise the community, including insulting SA women as sluts giving their bodies to criminals, and casting suspicion on those raising questions of human rights as condoning criminality and condemned even as “counter-revolutionaries’”.   

Ultimately these deliberate, callous and cruel actions including blocking the community’s rescue efforts, exposes not just the hypocrisy of the government and its cheerleaders in the media over Stilfontein. They have confirmed their role as the unapologetic propagandists of a rotten capitalist system they have embraced. Shorn off all pretences that it is a party presiding over a state protected by a constitution, albeit bourgeois, based at least in words, on the right to life, equality and freedom, the ANC has laid bare the sham democracy that we were and still are called upon to celebrated over thirty years ago. 

Illegal Mining – The real criminals hiding in plain sight

The government has sought to portray illegal mining as something new; the result of an invasion of the country by illegal immigrants through its porous borders. Operation Vala Umgodi was intended to send a signal that the government had drawn a line under all this criminality.  Yet, it knew full well that the zama zamas were made up of the destitute, risking dangerous conditions to put a plate of food on the table for their families exploited by ruthless criminal gangs operating with apparent impunity in the country right under the noses of the police.

The state’s propaganda has cynically lumped together the unemployed in both SA and neighbouring countries and the criminal gangs exploiting them by luring them into slavery through what amounts to human trafficking. This is not new information. The Bench Marks Foundation has long drawn attention to this and called for the formalisation of illegal mining as artisanal mining. Even the mining bosses have raised this with government for more than a decade. CEO Neal Froneman of Sibanye-Stillwater puts it, “the criminality itself is multilayered. It needs to be tackled from the top, at the level of the organised crime kingpins and syndicates and money launderers, not just at the bottom. Even at the bottom, those miners include both victims and perpetrators — of the violence, human trafficking and forced child labour that goes with illegal mining in SA. Business Day 3/11/2024.

Froneman’s statement is a cynical attempt to distance the mining industry from the public embarrassment of the Stilfontein debacle. He is attempting to conceal the mining bosses’ criminal complicity in creating in effect lawless special economic zones for exploitation free from labour, collective bargaining and health and safety laws.

The Bench Mark foundation’s David van Wyk told the MWP that Sibanye used Covid Lock down to illegally retrench a large part of their workforce. Workers were simply not recalled when Level 5 under the State of Disaster ended. I interviewed Sibanye workers in Marikana in the last week of August 2024. They claim there are ghost workers in a shadow operation in the shafts around Marikana. They also say that Sibyanye is worse than Lonmin, that working conditions are unsafe and that you can be dismissed for speaking out. They are even afraid of taking sick leave when they are not well and that you can be dismissed even with a doctor’s note.

Zama Zamas report that the explosives and mercury they use have been left there by the mining companies. An eye drop of mercury costs R1000 – a 5 litre container costs R160 000. Who is financing and supplying the mercury? Mercury is a proscribed substance, incredibly difficult to obtain. They get paid with brand new stacks of Rands still wrapped. Who has access to stacks of brand new Rands? These are questions that SAPS is not interested in answering.

The whole phenomenon reeks of the “degradation of work” by the industry bosses. These informal mine workers are not unionised, do not get pensions, no medical aid. No overhead costs to these operations. It is a means to break the organised working class.”

Comrade David also shared with the MWP an interview he conducted on 15 May 2021. Today we interviewed a Zama Zama migrant worker from KZN. He has two wives and seven children, and a total of 16 family members dependent on his meagre income. He lives in a hostel. He sells his raw gold to Nigerians, Indians, sometimes Chinese and even some whites, Portuguese mainly.

The Zulu Zamas work alongside Ndebeles from Zimbabwe. There is constant tension between them and Mosotho Zamas from Lesotho.

My informant claims that the Basotho or AmaRussias abuse, torture and often exploit the Zimbabweans. He also alleges extreme harassment by the police. The police raid their operations and steal their equipment, gold and money.

They are frequently arrested but never see the inside of a court. Instead they are asked to pay R6000 to be released they are hardly ever charged. He claims that the taxis they use to travel with back to their ancestral lands in KZN are frequently stopped and the passengers suffer body and luggage searches and often their cash is stolen by the police at road blocks.

From my own experience white privilege means that people like me are never subjected to these indignities. He showed us a small nugget of semi processed gold he had with him in his pocket.

Information on illegal mining has been available for a long time, the mining bosses and the gangs’ crimes hiding in plain sight for years. Any journalist worthy of the name would have investigated this.
An excellent example of serious investigation is that reported in the Daily Maverick (16/01/2025). “In 2021 Professor of anthropology at Columbia University New York City, Rosalind Morris released a film called We are Zama Zama. (The film can be streamed for a fee here.) For decades, Morris has studied the phenomenon of informal mining along the Witwatersrand’s denuded gold belt. What differentiates her work from the usual guff is the fact that she collaborates with the miners themselves, crafting papers, books, films and installations that are both honest and revelatory in their depiction of perhaps the world’s most dangerous and thankless vocation.

Morris shot the bulk of the footage for “We are Zama Zama” back in 2016. (She has returned to South Africa often and continues to speak to her sources on an almost daily basis.) Her contention is that the literal and figurative landscape has changed irrevocably over the past eight years. The complexities of informal mining have been erased by a hostile press and public — zama zamas have been reframed as outsiders illegally plundering what remains of South Africa’s wealth, while the authorities look on and do nothing. No one seems to ask why those miners are down there. Why would someone starve to death underground for less than a living wage?

More pointedly, who are the middlemen who run the shafts? Who are the big bosses who benefit from these new forms of slave labour? Are they the very people slandering zama zamas on television?
There are shafts that are no longer viable, that have been mined out, that have collapsed, that are known by police or security and therefore are no longer secure to enter.

In other cases, ethnic conflict, which I consider to be the ghost of apartheid, has continued. These fights have changed the composition and the demographics of the groups who occupy one or another place. An area that I do know very well, Carletonville, was initially occupied by Zimbabwean migrants. They felt a great deal of pressure from other migrants, especially the gangs that are based in Lesotho. But they are now also confronted with influxes of Mozambican zama zamas, who tend to work in much more surface areas.

Their relationships with the formal miners have changed as well, and there’s sometimes overt competition between formal reclamation companies and smaller mines. Sometimes it is direct competition, and sometimes it’s complicitous work, and sometimes it’s abuse between one vis-à-vis the other. And if you sort of think about the causal factors, clearly the rising price of gold is part of that. Back in 2016, gold hovered at around $1,200 an ounce. It is now lingering at around $2,600 That’s a significant, significant difference.

There was a World Council report issued in November last year titled Silence is Golden, which is more than a little ironic. But it came with an interesting subtitle that I think reflects a kind of change in the international civil society’s approach to these issues: “A Report on the Exploitation of Artisanal Gold Miners to Fund War, Terrorism and Organised Crime.” That reflects a new willingness to understand that this very stratified economy is an exploitative one, and those people who are going underground are largely the victims of this exploitative system.

In the Morris article she responded to the question about what she would say to a South African who holds these [xenophobic] views? “But if we’re looking at this from the South African point of view, when you listen to a radio call-in shows or look at the letters to the editor of any publication, the loathing directed towards foreign zama zamas in particular, but zama zamas more generally, is astounding. …it’s shocking to me how profound this rage, hatred, fear and bigotry is. It’s obviously intensified hugely in recent years, and this has something to do with just the density of the populations of people. Globally, we’ve seen the number of informal miners double almost every 10 years for the past four decades.”

ANC’s Xenophobia a conscious policy is a warning to the working class

In the run-up to Marikana, the mineworkers were merely either criminals or, as suggested by then-SA Communist Party deputy secretary general, Jeremy Cronin, unruly tribesmen instigated by a “Pondoland vigilante mafia”.

Ramaphosa, then a Lonmin board member and deputy president of the ANC added his own brand of working class hatred. He proceeded to create the climate for the massacre by demonising the strike as the action of violent thugs, engaged, in his infamous words: in “a criminal act that must be dealt with concomitantly”.

The Stilfontein zama zamas were all these put together and more: criminals, economic saboteurs and illegal immigrants. In reality, Stilfontein merely provided a more insolent outlet for an attitude that has coursed through the ANC’s veins since it imposed the neo-liberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution policy in 1996. The working class and the poor are referred to with such terms of endearment as “izinyoka” (snakes) on public billboards for illegally connecting to the electricity grid because they cannot afford the extortionate tariffs. Public servants are lazy, underworked and overpaid, “entitled” in the Concourt’s 2020 insulting words, as it condoned the government’s wage theft and repudiation of the third leg of the legally binding 2018 -2020 three-year collective agreement.

The resort to xenophobia is not accidental. Even the deaths of twenty-three school children from food poisoning was blamed on foreign owned Spaza shops with at best dubious evidence to back up this claim. This deliberate stoking of hatred for African foreigners cheered on by the mainstream and social media was part of a strategy to rebuild support for the ANC after their historic defeat at the polls in May 2024. The ANC component of the GNU’s xenophobic campaign aims to divert attention away from their rejection by majority of the electorate during the May 2024 general election.

ANC leaders have scapegoated African migrants for their own failures in enforcing laws and regulations that could have saved the lives of the twenty three school children who died from food poisoning and now the slaughter of 78 and possibly many more Zama Zamas.

Absolutely no action was taken over the death of 20 children after consuming contaminated water in Hammanskraal despite overwhelming evidence that it came from the dysfunctional water treatment works. The repairs had been awarded in a corrupt tender to the well-known ANC connected Edwin Sodi.

Tiger Brands is to this day questioning the findings of the most authoritative body in the field in the country for its culpability for the 2017 listeriosis food poisoning deaths. It is still rejecting the findings of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases, the most authoritative body in the country and one of the most respected in the world. The NICD identified one of its Limpopo outlets as ground zero for the poisoning that claimed 217 lives and maimed hundreds more, devastating the lives of families, many of whom lost their only bread winners.  

There are countless examples of the state’s policies and inaction leading to death of working class people not least the needless estimated 300 000 who died during the Aids denialism spearheaded by Mbeki whilst the government squandered billions on needless arm purchases tainted with corruption and crippled investigations into the deals.

Budget cuts have led to the denial of treatment of cancer patients, the decay of water, sewage, electricity, road and rail infrastructure. Housing, education and health budgets have been cut, vacant posts not filled and now teaching posts scrapped. This is the reason SA increasingly resembles a failed state.

The neo-liberal methods in the capitalist madness

The method in this madness result from the neo-liberal capitalist policies imposed on the country since 1996 under which the Freedom Charter and the Reconstruction and Development Programme lie buried.   GEAR was founded on the irreconcilable contradiction between satiating the greed of the infinitesimally small capitalist minority in the form of more profits through tax cuts (down from 52% in 1992 to 27% today). To fill the self-imposed budget deficit, government borrows up to R2bn every single day. The exorbitant interest charged by these mashonisa are even more onerous because the SA economy has been downgraded by all the major rating agencies. To service this debt the government has to set aside 22% of the annual budget to avoid a default on its repayment obligations and present the working class with the bill. 

The foreigners the ANC government prefers

The Minerals Council that puts the commercial value of SA’s illegal gold mining industry at R70bn a year smuggled out of the country last year, while legal exports amounted to R91 billion based on 2022 figures.  The country was denied revenue that could assist in addressing some of the infrastructure backlogs, maintenance and other critical services needed.  

The double standards they have shown in which foreigners they prefer have allowed a free for all in exploiting the country’s resources and infrastructure’. Under Zuma’s presidency the Guptas held such sway that they knew which ministers would be appointed to cabinet before the appointees themselves as Mbalula lamented. Or allowing the oil oligarchy of the UAE’s royal family, which is treating SA’s demand for the extradition of the corrupt Gupta brothers with complete contempt, to commandeer an airport specially renovated and licensed for international flights for their holiday in the Eastern Cape. Nor are they holding to account the 2000 multinationals 90% of whom, the Judge Dennis Davis SARS initiated investigation revealed, are responsible for the theft of R400bn the country loses through illicit capital flows annually. In the minerals sector under invoicing in gold, chrome, platinum and diamonds is rampant.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Since 1995 SA has lost a staggering R3.14 trillion through capital flight since 1995. Foreign capital, SA big business and criminal syndicates are looting and plundering the country. They exploit the relaxation of exchange control regulations, the crippling of the criminal justice system through budget cuts and “state capture” corruption, and collusion between government officials and politicians and police with criminal syndicates. For these crimes the ANC-led GNU blames illegal immigrants, destitute zama zamas including 14-year-old Mozambican children. Over a hundred thousand mainly workers from neighbouring countries have been retrenched by the ANC’s masters in the mining industry over the past decade.  

The ANC government condones the corruption of rulers in neighbouring countries such as those exposed by Al Jazeera’s documentary on corruption in the gold mining industry behind “liberation struggle” solidarity. The ‘foreign’ workers in South Africa come from countries that are at war or because their economies have collapsed due to the failed capitalist policies and rampant corruption and looting on an unprecedented scale by their governments. They maintain their rule through repression, disappearing and incarcerating critical voices in society. Some of these governments remain in power because of stolen elections that the South Africa government has routinely endorsed. This, despite alarm raised by local and international independent observers and months long street protests by the youth and working people against the outcome of the elections in both Zimbabwe and Mozambique. As he did with Zanu’s Mnangagwa, Ramaphosa has unashamedly congratulated the incoming Frelimo president and attended his inauguration.

What has been demonstrated by the ANC’s 30-year rule is that it is incapable of solving the basic problems of service delivery from water and electricity to transport, health and security and other vital services including mass unemployment. None of these problems can be solved by the ANC or any government on the basis of capitalism which is in its deepest crisis world-wide since the 1930s Great Depression.

Mass socialist workers party urgently needed

To end the rampant looting and pillaging of the country by the capitalist class it will be necessary to abolish the anarchy of the capitalist market and replace it with a democratically planned economy. Only under a government of the working class majority can this be put to an end. Such a government would have to end private ownership of the commanding heights of the economy and replace it with collective ownership though nationalisation under workers control and declare a monopoly on foreign trade. The private wealth of the 10% that owns 84% of the country’s income and assets can then become the common wealth of all in an economy planned to satisfy social need and not private profit.     

Only a mass party of the working class on a socialist programme can lead a struggle for the socialist transformation of society. In turn this will enable the lending of support to the working class in SA’s neighbours toward building a Southern African socialist federation to lead the way to the African and world socialist transformation.

What Stilfontein has underlined is the urgent necessity for a mass workers party on a socialist programme.  The Saftu leadership has recoiled from the implementation of the 2018 Working Class Summit Declaration to form such a party. The MWP has taken the initiative to unite the working class outside the official WCS summit process to break the paralysis within it to realise the aims of the 2018 WCS Declaration. Such a party must emphatically reject xenophobia. It is a method used by the capitalist ruling elite worldwide as its system heads towards an even greater crisis than the 2008 global financial crisis from which it has not recovered. The imperialist US’s racist, misogynistic anti-working class president Trump’s anti-immigration programme is serving as a point of reference and inspiration to capitalist governments, the far-right and fascists worldwide. International working class solidarity is the lifeblood of the struggle for socialism which cannot be built in one country. This is especially true in SA, whose economic backbone, the mining industry was built with the sweat and blood of hundreds of thousands from Southern Africa.      

There is an urgent need for unity within and across the three main theatres of struggle currently being fought in silos in working class communities, in the education sector and, in the workplace.

As a first step, we have taken the initiative for the establishment of a United Socialist Civic Federation. A small number of civics have already expressed interest in joining the USCF in Gauteng and the Western Cape.  The proposed platform and programme we have drafted for debate is currently under discussion can be found here.  We will follow this with the development of similar draft platforms and programmes of action for a Marxist Student and Youth Movement and a Socialist Trade Union Confederation. We are also drafting for release for debate a draft platform and programme of action for the establishment of a Socialist Women’s Movement. All these initiatives are aimed at mobilising the forces for the unification of working class struggles also on the political plane and the establishment of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.

We call upon all workers, youth and community members to study our draft and to consider joining this initiative to unite working class struggles with the different arenas of struggle and across them.  It is aimed at uniting all of these under the umbrella of a mass workers party on a socialist programme.     

As we pointed out in our previous article, the community in Stilfontein has demonstrated how easily xenophobia and the criminalisation of these artisanal workers can be replaced by the solidarity that is instinctive to the working class.  These efforts have to be built upon and extended to the wider community of Stilfontein and exported to other mining-affected areas to build a movement that can address the immediate problems, which, in the final analysis, can only be sustained through the socialist transformation of society.