Illegal mining is a threat to SA’s competitiveness

Stilfontein is proving to be an inflexion point for South Africa’s approach to illegal mining.

It is also helping to focus attention on issues relating to critical minerals, which South Africa is endowed with.

Critical minerals or critical energy transition minerals include a wide swathe of elements, which are important for various clean energy technologies.

The growing demand for these critical energy transition minerals makes the value chains associated with the minerals susceptible to illegal activities.

Illegal mining in South Africa has been mainly confined to the gold mining sector.

However, illegal mining incidents, such as the events unfolding in Stilfontein, threaten South Africa’s competitiveness in the critical minerals sector.

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South Africa is a global producer of critical minerals, placing a responsibility on us to ensure supply to our trading partners as well as our domestic market for economic growth.

Illegal mining activities in the gold value chain have demonstrated the vulnerability of South Africa’s mineral value chains.

This vulnerability increases with the risk that illegal activities spread to the emerging critical minerals sector.

It is imperative that South Africa urgently addresses illegal mining if the country is to be a globally competitive link in critical mineral value chains.

As top global producer of some of these minerals, it needs to ensure the security of the supply to the global community.

Illegal mining is usually accompanied by conflict, corruption, violence towards women and children and human displacement.

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This has been observed in other African countries, such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo where cobalt mining has decimated communities and facilitated the perpetuation of child labour and the violation of rights.

In Sudan, too, the gold sector has contributed to conflicts and one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our lifetime.

And in South Africa, eight women were gangraped at a mine near Krugersdorp in 2022.

The complexity of the problems posed by illegal mining require multidimensional approaches to address them.

Simply dismissing illegal mining as a law-enforcement issue ignores factors such as the socio-economic conditions that encourage people to work for illegal mining syndicates.

Steps should be taken to combat crime in the minerals sector and legal, policy and regulatory frameworks strengthened.

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The rule of law must be prioritised and supported through a specialised police force to crack down on crime syndicates.

Compliance actors should be integrated into policy-making processes to ensure those suppressing illegal activities distinguish informal practices from criminal enterprises.

A law-enforcement strategy that encourages community involvement will go a long way towards protecting communities and the small-scale miners who aren’t involved in syndicates.

Second, a comprehensive assessment of critical minerals supply chains should be conducted. Emerging mineral value chains are not established, and the lack of information about the value chains creates a bigger risk of illegitimate activity. A lack of knowledge about mineral value chains prevents the development of effective, evidence-based policies.

To counter this, mechanisms to account for minerals from extraction to end-use, should be introduced.

The United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute has developed a framework for a strategic response to crimes linked to critical minerals. The strategies include empowering stakeholders, strengthening legal and regulatory frameworks and enhancing coordination among law-enforcement agencies.

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The illegal mining at Stilfontein has focussed attention on a matter of great importance. At a national level, illegal mining threatens the economy. At local level it poses a threat to communities in mining areas.

Urgent intervention is required to ensure that these activities do not threaten South Africa’s opportunity to secure critical minerals markets.

– Xaba is a researcher at the Mapungubwe Institute