A Tale of Two Realities
“I was an armed robber” he tells me without a hint of
bravado or exaggeration. “But after I was released from prison I wanted to work
and provide for my family. But there were no jobs for a convict and so I ended
up mining as a Zama-Zama.”
Today, after years of panning the dry and dusty floors of
the diamond rich floors outside
Kimberly, this zama-zama, together with over a thousand other desperate
individuals, have managed to avoid a life of crime, maintained their dignity,
and have peacefully eked out a living from the wealthy abundance of the South
African land. Their humble hope is to keep their family’s fed and clothed, even
if this means working for weeks and months without any income, living in harsh
conditions with only a shack as protection, with no access to water or to ablution
facilities, while having to defend their meagre possessions from being stolen
by the mining company or being harassed by police and Department of Mineral
Resources (DMR) officials.
This is one side of the South African reality that is often
lost in the media`s obsession with their preference for “achievement and
success” and the protection of special interests.
On the other side of the South African reality sits Marcel Golding,
a director of Ekapa Minerals who has formed a joint venture with London listed
Petra Diamonds to buy out the De Beers Kimberly diamond mining operations.
Marcel Golding, the ex-Chief Executive Officer of Etv, also
sits on the boards and has shares in over 40 companies including Tsogo Sun, Rex
Trueform and Ekapa Mining. As the former Deputy Secretary General of the
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), Marcel Golding has used the BEE provisions
to accumulate over R100 million in public assets according to one investment
website.
Ekapa Mining and Petra Diamonds bought the De Beers Kimberly
operations for R102 million in Cash in 2015. The mine is expected to yield 7.2-million
carats from its tailing resources alone. The mines also have 93.2-million
tonnes of ore deposits at a grade of 4.4 carats per hundred tonnes on a total
area spread over 3 981 ha.
According to Mining Weekly, Ekapa Minerals expects to
produce at a rate of 700 000 carats a year in the first three years, generating
revenue of R920-million a year at a diamond price of $95/ct.
The acquired assets are poised to be cash flow positive in
the first year, with initial working capital of R200-million financed 100% by
Ekapa Minerals on a standalone basis.
These two separate realities, one in which desperately poor
unemployed people try to survive in the harsh economically depressed outback of
the South African rural landscape and who have not enjoyed the economic benefits
of our new democracy, and the other reality, of exorbitantly rich, multi
shareholding, powerful individuals, who have abundantly benefited from the dawn
of a new South Africa, seldom come into contact yet are always in tension.
In what can only be described as an example of the worst
excesses of greed, inspired by the current legislative framework and an apparent
governmental preference for economic solutions that benefit only the few, Ekapa
Mining and Petra Diamonds, has lodged an urgent interdict in the Kimberly High
Court to evict hundreds of zama-zama informal miners who have been eking out a
living from unused land in and around the Kimberly mines.
Not only does the Ekapa Mining interdict seek to prevent
hard working, poverty stricken, miners from accessing some of Ekapa`s
properties where they eke out a living from the discarded scraps of their
mining operation, it also seeks to prevent the informal miners from accessing
properties that do not belong to it. Over 90% of the properties that Ekapa
wishes to interdict the informal miners from entering do not belong to Ekapa.
Besides being an attempt to abuse the law, it is an
egregious example of spite and greed. This attempt at legal terrorism would
have succeeded had the miners not been able to access legal representation from
Richard Spoor Attorneys who, without any financial support, have unearthed a
range of questionable, if not outright untrue claims by the Mine.
Thus Ekapa Mining, an immensely wealthy company, that will
derive enormous benefit and wealth from its operations over the lifetime of the
mine, and whose shareholders and Directors are themselves obscenely wealthy in
the face of systemic poverty, have determined that their interests of
accumulating obscene amounts of wealth are threatened by the informal miners
who extract an infinitesimal fraction of the millions of carats that Ekapa will
benefit from, must be protected by hook or by crook. We hope that the Kimberly
High Court will deal decisively with such attempts by the rich and wealthy to
deny the unemployed their right to work and dignity.
Such greed and lack of concern about the well-being and best
interests of the country and its people, despite the daily confirmation and
affirmation of greed by our political
and business leaders, should have no place in any country, and even less so in
a country that bares the shame of being the most unequal society in the world.
But it is indeed this type of greed and skewed legislative
and institutional priority that has led to the inequality that we so often
decry as a general part of cleansing our consciences. Our disturbingly unequal society did not come
about merely by an invisible hand, but is instead engineered and allowed to
develop in the policies and legislation that we pass and acquiesce to.
Despite our mining legislation making an extensive song and
dance about redressing the injustices of the past, here is an example where our
mining legislation and its institutions seek to provide a preference to and
actively collude with large scale mining, whose historically skewed ownership
patterns provides a significant and conclusive preference to patterns of
ownership derived from the past and which benefits a handful of well-placed
politically connected individuals.
This is particularly significant considering the history of
land dispossession and specifically the colonial dispossession of this land. According
to noted historian Emilia Potenza in her book “All that Glitters”, she
describes how initially, diggers of all races were able to stake claims but
that after some time white diggers lobbied to prevent people of colour from owning
claims: “White claim-holders from Europe,
America and Australia ganged up against a small number of Griquas, Tlhaping,
Malay, Indian and Chinese claimholders. African claim-holders were suspected of
IDB (Illicit Diamond buying), because they spoke the same language and had
similar backgrounds to many of the workers. This led to riots in 1875 in which
whites attacked African or Asian claim-holders. The British authorities
responded by cancelling all claims owned by blacks.”
As wealthier investors became involved, claims were
consolidated as smaller diggers sold their claims. By the late 1880s, De Beers,
which was controlled by Cecil Rhodes, came to control most of the industry and
to monopolise most of the world’s diamond market.
With this history in mind, the then Minister of Minerals, Ngoako
Ramatlhodi, in July 2015 at a Small Scale Mining Conference in Kimberly, promised
the informal miners, that the DMR would
assist them to formalise their operations. But despite this promise, the DMR
has consistently failed to deliver on this promise. It would appear that,
instead of assisting the miners, that the DMR in Kimberly has rather acted in
collaboration with Ekapa mines to bring the interdict against the informal
miners. More than one and a half years after the promise was made, DMR has
failed to formalise the informal mining operation and has now washed its hands
of any responsibility for the possibility that thousands of informal miners
might lose their livelihoods, their homes and will most certainly fail to meet
its legislative
obligation to ensure redress of past inequalities.
The DMR has actively acted in a threatening way to the
numerous requests by the informal miners to formalise their operation by
calling in the Hawks who threatened to arrest leaders. The Police have failed
to open cases where miners have alleged that the Mine security stole and
damaged their equipment and have instead threatened to arrest those informal
miners who dared to complain.
The reality of South Africa today, is that, where its
constituent parts meet in a clash of interests, the special interests of the
rich and politically connected always enjoys the institutional and violent
support of the state. While it’s most vulnerable citizens are ignored and
discarded as yet more disposable labour.
But reality is a strange thing. It refuses to be ignored and
will eventually manifest itself, and history shows that its manifestation is
often indiscriminate.
It is thus up to us, the willing and able citizenry to
ensure that injustices such as the one unfolding in Kimberly, are not allowed
to go by unchallenged, less the indiscriminate nature of reality comes back to
bite us.
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