PEDRO MZILENI | The Boksburg tragedy points to the destructive role of capitalism in mining

At the time of writing,  17 black people were confirmed dead at the Angelo informal settlement in Boksburg – and many more are still recovering at the Tambo Memorial hospital. Preliminary investigations confirmed by the South African Police Service, the Gauteng premier and Ekurhuleni Municipality mayor have attributed the mayhem to the leakage of nitrous oxide gas emanating from illegal mining activities in the informal settlement.

A 2016 report on illegal mining commissioned by the Chamber of Mines revealed that SA loses  more than R20bn  a year from uncollected taxes, sales and royalties from illegal mining activities – and about 90% of the labour utilised in illegal mining consists of undocumented immigrants. In other words, illegal mining in SA is a lucrative industry that is carefully operated by an organised network of international criminals.

The “Legislative Guide on Illegal Mining” issued by the UN in 2020 showed there is a consistent rise in environmental crimes by global corporations. These corporations are illegally trading in wildlife, fishing, mining and waste trafficking to make illicit profits. The report also attributes illegal trade in environmental items to drugs trade, political corruption and collusion with international banking oligopolies to consolidate a fierce underground world of money laundering.

If the official reports of the government concerning the tragedy at Boksburg are to be believed, we have a crisis of security in our country and in the Southern African region. Mining in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region has a frightening history that continues to haunt it today. Hugh Masekela’s all-time classic, Stimela, captures the systematic damage that the convergence of mining, settler colonialism and capitalism has had on the people, communities and economies of the SADC. The death of these 17 black people in Boksburg show that this painful reality inherited from apartheid-colonialism still lives with us today.

The 2008/09 global recession followed by the aggressive rise of the digital industrial revolution have compounded the crisis of mass retrenchments in the mining belt. Some big mining firms have disinvested from SA, leaving behind abandoned mines and dilapidated environments.

The unemployment problem confronting big townships and SADC immigrants must be understood as a result of massive economic loss due to mineral deindustrialisation.

Organised international criminal networks have now taken advantage of these socioeconomic challenges facing former mining townships. The recruitment of illegal immigrants as illegal mining labour is a deliberate act by these illicit industries. They know that undocumented people do not have citizenship and are easily available as desperate cheap labour. In addition, they originate from abandoned areas where there are low prospects for employment.

In order to survive, the undocumented migrants accept any form of income and labour and they have no human rights obligations. They can be paid cheap wages or not get paid at all, they can die or be killed without anyone being held accountable, and they can commit crimes and remain untraceable.

And most brutally, as with the case of Boksburg, the illegal mining industry can experiment with dangerous chemicals near a poor township because there will hardly be any consequences for the mass genocide of black people who live in such dire conditions of poverty. In other words, this tragedy must not be detached from the broader problem of coloniality that still confronts us. The brutal class struggle that began with the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand in the late 1870s still haunts us today.

Ironically, it is the same Chamber of Mines that produced the pass laws in 1895 to control the movement, settlement, and working conditions of black cheap labour. It is this capitalist, racist and colonial design of the white settler economy in SA that birthed the overpopulated townships that house the dispossessed. These are the same pass laws that Robert Sobukwe’s PAC organised against in Sharpeville.

To end the scourge of illegal mining therefore would require us to understand deeply how international capitalism behaves in Southern Africa – its histories, futures, features – and we must begin to organise against it in socialist terms beyond the paradigm of a single nation state.