Can we harness the power of zama zamas?

There are mines. There are people who are willing to mine those mines. There are no people willing to protect those mines. Would it not make sense to benefit off of the people willing to mine the mines and use the money to protect the mines?

In an underground world where bread costs as much as a tank of petrol and no risk is too large for the financial benefit, you cannot convince anybody that there isn’t enough demand and money to at least consider bringing zama zamas into the legal fold. Take some of the profit, make the mines safer, encourage a responsible policy and manner of doing what’s already being done and you may well be able to counter the problems.

It’s not a secret that for decades, illegal mining hasn’t been dealt with effectively by the law. It’s also no secret that there’s little appetite to deal with the zama zamas. It’s why Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni had a chuckle at the suggestion that the state should assist with evacuating the trapped illegal miners in Stilfontein.

To her credit, there are better things that the state could be spending its resources on though she’d probably run into a roadblock when confronted with the “most progressive” constitution in the world; that inconvenient piece of paper forcing her to consider the dignity, right to life and several other bits of nonsense that 30-year-old legislation affords to people regardless of their criminality.

ALSO READ: 1 100 soldiers deployed to help fight illegal mining

It was good when it was helping her buddies but now that she’s actually got to address a real issue, simply condemning criminals is far easier.

What it isn’t is profitable. It doesn’t take a stroke of genius to understand that there’s a lot of money laying down there and if we’re not going to go for it, somebody else is, especially when people are desperate and life is cheap.

What’s the alternative? Fill in the mines? Post security everywhere and hope anybody with the skills to tunnel are hired in the Middle East instead? Beg the zama zamas to stop extracting from the mines? There doesn’t really seem to be an effective solution that is both realistic and not disproportionately expensive.

While it would be easy to sit on the fence and do nothing, that’s not going to solve the increasingly apparent problem of illegals getting stuck in mines. And as much as it would be simple to brush it aside by condemning it as illegal activity, it doesn’t solve the issue of lives being in trouble. That’s not the society we’ve built. If it were, you could easily blame kids for drowning because they got into the pool knowing they couldn’t swim. You could blame people for getting mugged because they were in a bad part of town with their convertible’s roof down.

If you outsource the responsibility of being responsible, you’ll always have these kinds of problems and by just ignoring the zama zama problem, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Zama zamas have been getting stuck and abused for generations and yet they still go down there. Why? Because the proposition, with all its risks and flaws, is still so good.

ALSO READ: ‘Illegal mining changed my brother, he was a gangster,’ says sister of one of the miners

Making money has never been an unattractive proposition to a person with limited options. Making lots of money, even less so.

So, all things considered, if people are willing to take risks to go down there, why not step in as the state, make the process safer, take a cut and let the people make their money. The margins will be less but at least the state could afford to work the sites properly, inspect and maintain security. They can limit the existing abuse or at the very least, profit off of it while making the place safer than it already is.

On second thoughts, if the state can’t keep up with inspecting tuckshops… maybe relying on them to make mines safer isn’t the best idea.