SPECIAL FEATURE: ILLEGAL MINING
South Africa’s mining sector and the
cost of crime
With illegal mining now costing the South African economy around R21 billion a year, according to the Institute of Security Studies (ISS), mine owners are under mounting pressure to tighten up security.
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dd to this increasing violence between competing, heavily armed syndicates and it’s a ticking time bomb for undersecured mines, warns the ISS in an article titled “SA must dig deeper for a solution to illegal mining” . The stakes are high: according to the Minerals Council of South Africa, the mining sector contributed R351 billion to the country’s domestic product in 2018. Further, it’s a major employer in a country where joblessness is desperately high, providing work for more than 453 500 people last year.
Digging down Illegal mining is a lucrative enterprise, say ISS researcher Richard Chelin and
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programme administrator Naomi Tite, with tentacles that often extend to human smuggling and trafficking, illegal weapons and explosives, tax evasion, money laundering, corruption and gangrelated activities. Compounding the problem is South Africa’s legislation (specifically the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act) which aims to regulate artisanal mining, but has little effect on illegal mining. Illegal mining is not clearly defined in legislation, they say, adding that the police’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation has identified gaps in the law relating to the transportation and/or possession of precious metals and diamonds in transit areas. In effect, it means that illegal miners
SECURITY FOCUS AFRICA SEPTEMBER 2019
can only be charged with trespassing, and fined as little as R50. Since illegal mining is so often linked to organised crime, the syndicates need to be targeted by the police – but the challenge, of course, is finding the leaders. The only way this is going to happen is through inter-agency collaboration between law enforcement, the mining industry, and the Department of Mineral Resources and Immigration, maintain Chelin and Tite.
Reasons and challenges The Minerals Council of South Africa says illegal mining is on the rise, gaining momentum on the back of a troubled socio-economic environment characterised by unemployment, poverty and the entry
securityfocusafrica.com
