TWO KM BENEATH WELKOM, South Africa, (Reuters) – One of South Africa’s biggest gold firms has taken the drastic step of banning all food underground to cut supply lines to gangs of illegal miners used to staying deep in the mines for months on end, threatening lives and official production.
With gold mining around Welkom, 200 km (130 miles) south of Johannesburg, dating back to the 1930s, the bedrock is criss-crossed by a myriad network of tunnels that provide perfect cover and multiple entry points for illegal miners.
Bosses of Harmony Gold’s 2.4 km deep Phakisa mine – one of the world’s deepest – have tried blocking up old shafts and installing stadium-style turnstiles at the top of the main shaft to stop imposters slipping through.
In January this year, they tightened the screw by imposing a total ban on food to prevent official miners bringing in supplies to sell or give to their unofficial counterparts.
“There are two things you need to survive underground: food and water. You can always get water down a mine but the food ban has made a real difference,” Harmony chief executive Graham Briggs told Reuters this week during a mine visit.
Unions agreed to the ban – as long as it was accompanied by a free meal at the end of a shift – even though it means teams of men will consume nothing but water during an eight-hour shift pounding at the gold-bearing rock in sweltering heat.
Although nobody knows the full extent of a problem that is literally hidden deep in the bowels of the earth, the countermeasures introduced by firms such as Harmony suggest the threat from illegal mining in South Africa is significant.
Once underground, the men will stay there for weeks, if not months, subsisting on food brought in from above ground.
