Illegal miners battling to survive South Africa standoff

By AFP/Clément VARANGES

Hundreds of clandestine miners at a disused South African shaft are struggling to survive in grim conditions because of a police operation to force them out, one of the men who escaped told AFP Sunday.

For nearly two weeks police have been stationed outside the abandoned gold mine at Stilfontein, about 150 kilometres (100 miles) southwest of Johannesburg, intermittently blocking locals from sending down food and water, and arresting undocumented migrants who surface.

"There's nothing left for someone to eat, to drink or anything that can make a human being survive. There is nothing left underground for now," said Ayanda Ndabeni, who was hoisted out the shaft by rope on Friday.

"This operation of the police stopped everything, we suffered underground. Some of us, they died. Some of us are sick, critical."

One decomposed body was brought out last week and there are fears there may be more.

A local who works with the miners has claimed to have been told there were around 4,000 people underground. Police said the figure was probably in the hundreds.

Ndabeni -- who has been a zama zama, as clandestine miners in South Africa are known, for 10 years -- says there were 800 men on the level of the mine where he worked.

Unemployed

He started mining illegally after the regular mine where he worked shut down in 2014.

The mine owners left this shaft open after they abandoned it, he said, a cigarette and a beer in hand.

As he had no work and needed to support his family, he decided to become a zama zama, which in Zulu means "those who try".

Only about four to five people can exit the shaft a day, he said, because there is only one rope down the rough-hewn, gaping hole in the ground in an area of rocky open veld.

The shaft is about 1500 metres (4,900 feet) deep, but tunnels can go deeper, Ndabeni said.

When he came up Friday, after two months entirely spent underground, police took him in for questioning. Because he is a South African national and does not have a criminal record, he was released, he said.

Some of the roughly one dozen other men who surfaced in the past week were detained because they were undocumented migrants from other countries.

For some in the South African government, the illegal miners deserve no help.

"Honestly, we're not sending help to criminals, we're going to smoke them out," minister of the presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, told reporters Wednesday, in remarks that have been heavily criticised.

In the backlash, a court ordered on Saturday that police must end all restrictions around the shaft. The government is also calling for expert advice on how to remove the people underground.

The day of the court order, locals were able to lower 600 packets of instant porridge and 600 litres of water by rope, community leader Johannes Qankase told AFP. This was the first supply since Tuesday, he said.

"They must get food, they must get water, they must get their medical pills," he said.

"We've seen from the people who have been resurfacing, they are very weak, they are very dehydrated," he said.

'I'd go back tomorrow'

Thousands of illegal miners, many of them hailing from countries like Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, are said to operate in abandoned mine shafts in mineral-rich South Africa.

"There are people who don't have any means of income. The only thing that they know is mining," said Qankase.

Many in the surrounding township also benefit from the trade with miners, he said.

"Underground, there is a life for us who don't have jobs and who worked on these mines before," said Ndabeni, whose father was also a miner.

"If they do not stop me, I would go back tomorrow," he said.