Police wait outside an illegal entrance to a mine shaft near Stilfontein in North West this week. A thousand illicit miners have been arrested as part of the SAPS’s Operation Vala uMgodi in the last week. Police have been cutting of the food and water supply forcing the men to come out then arresting them. Picture: Timothy Bernard/Independent Newspapers
By Gillian Schutte
IT IS inconceivable that a nation that once stood as a global champion for human rights could so blatantly mirror the tactics it has condemned abroad.
At the Margaret Mine shaft in Stilfontein, North West, South Africa’s police and military have sealed off the entrances to trap thousands of artisanal miners underground. Dubbed Operation Vala Umgodi, this strategy deprives miners of food, water, and even the chance to surface without risking arrest.
The parallels with Israel’s blockade of Gaza are unmistakable: restriction of movement, denial of basic necessities, and the punishment of entire groups under the guise of enforcement. The result is a human rights catastrophe unfolding within South Africa’s borders.
Margaret Mine, located near the Vaal River, is a site of both industrial and social neglect. Acquired by Harmony Gold Mining Company from AngloGold Ashanti in 2017, the shaft remains operational as a water pumping facility, preventing its underground workings from flooding. Yet illegal miners reportedly occupy the shaft, raising serious questions about its management.
If Margaret Mine is an active site, how were these miners able to access it? If it is disused, why has it not been properly closed and rehabilitated, as required by law? Ventilation shafts, often exploited as entry points, remain unsecured, exposing the mine to unauthorised access.
As the Bench Marks Foundation notes, these failures reflect systemic negligence, where both mining corporations and the Department of Minerals and Petroleum prioritise profits over safety and accountability.
The narratives surrounding these miners are built on deliberate misrepresentation and myth. These men did not willingly choose to become “illegal miners“ but were lured into the Margaret Mine shaft by recruitment agencies, often unaware of the illicit nature of their work.
They are not faceless criminals but neighbours, fathers, and brothers—members of the same struggling townships that border the mines—forced into these abandoned shafts by crushing poverty and the absence of opportunity. As naturalist Joe Grant observes, "If you allow desperation to go unanswered, what you get is exploitation."
The systemic failures that drive miners underground are deeply rooted in the collapse of South Africa’s large-scale industrial mining sectors. As retrenchments in the platinum and gold industries rise, workers find themselves abandoned by a system that fails to provide them with the skills or support necessary to transition to other livelihoods.
Bench Marks Foundation has repeatedly highlighted the inadequacies of social and labour plans submitted by mining companies, which claim to equip retrenched miners with portable skills.
In reality, most workers are left with no viable alternatives, often coerced by syndicates that exploit historical labour ties between rural communities and the mines. Criminal organisations recruit new generations of miners from villages, perpetuating cycles of exploitation and desperation.
Retrenched miners face insurmountable challenges even in accessing the meagre benefits they are entitled to. Pension and benefit payments, often outsourced to third parties, require navigating complex bureaucratic processes. Illiteracy, lack of access to technology, and the financial burdens of communication and travel exacerbate their plight.
As Bench Marks Foundation points out, these systemic barriers leave miners destitute, with illegal mining becoming a dangerous yet unavoidable means of survival. Margaret Mine is emblematic of this cycle, where poverty, systemic neglect, and corporate irresponsibility converge to trap workers in dire circumstances.
Rather than addressing these systemic failures, the state aligns itself with the interests of foreign mining corporations that have profited massively from South Africa’s natural resources while leaving local communities impoverished.
Companies such as Harmony Gold, Anglo American, and Sibanye, with significant foreign investments, benefit from a crackdown designed to protect corporate assets at the expense of human lives. Mining analyst David van Wyk notes that foreign corporations are “testing the boundaries of how ruthlessly the government will serve their interests”.
Operation Vala Umgodi, launched under the pretext of combating illegal mining, exposes a government that is all too willing to cater to multinational interests while disregarding the dignity and welfare of its own citizens.
By trapping miners underground and cutting off their supplies, the state has effectively endorsed a policy of starvation to safeguard the profits of those already shielded by wealth and power.
The operation exposes not just violations of the right to life but a broader undermining of South Africa’s constitutional framework. These miners’ right to dignity is flagrantly denied as they are treated not as human beings but as obstacles to be removed.
Their freedom and security of the person, which includes freedom from inhuman and degrading treatment, is trampled by a state willing to use starvation as a weapon.
The miners are denied freedom of movement, effectively imprisoned underground with no recourse. Their right to food and water, explicitly protected under the Constitution, is weaponised against them.
In addition, the failure to address the exploitative recruitment practices that ensnare these miners reveals a systemic disregard for the right to fair labour practices. These men were not afforded any protections against the exploiters who lured them into this dangerous work.
In denying these miners any form of judicial process or access to courts, the state further contravenes their right to have disputes resolved by a fair and impartial tribunal.
This operation also highlights the glaring inequality in the application of constitutional rights. The miners are branded as criminals and abandoned, while powerful mining corporations benefit from a government willing to enforce their interests. This selective protection of rights undermines the Constitution’s guarantee of equality before the law, revealing its structural bias toward preserving wealth and privilege.
Desperately poor local communities in Stilfontein, recognising the injustice of the government’s actions, have stepped in to do what they can. Families and neighbours—facing their own hardships—have started cooking food and organising support for the trapped miners.
These ordinary citizens understand that these men are not criminals but integral parts of their community. The government’s willingness to starve these miners contrasts sharply with the empathy shown by their neighbours, exposing the moral vacuum at the heart of the state’s policies.
While the Constitution proclaims the right to dignity, it is the people of Stilfontein who uphold that principle in practice, offering compassion and solidarity where the government offers only repression.
Operation Vala Umgodi is not an isolated event but part of a disturbingly recognisable pattern in post-apartheid South Africa. It evokes painful memories of the Marikana massacre, where police killed 34 striking miners to protect corporate interests.
The same willingness to sacrifice human life for economic stability is evident here. The Constitution’s promise to protect the right to life is contradicted by state actions that use hunger as a weapon, leaving vulnerable men to perish in the darkness of the Margaret Mine shaft.
The government’s deployment of police and military forces against impoverished citizens reveals the extent to which it has drifted from its constitutional mandate, prioritising the maintenance of order and the appeasement of powerful interests over the basic rights of its people.
This operation also lays bare the hypocrisy of South Africa’s foreign policy. The government has rightly condemned Israel for its treatment of Palestinians, highlighting the deprivation of basic necessities and collective punishment inflicted on Gaza.
Yet now, thousands of miners face similarly devastating conditions—sealed underground without access to food or water, their survival dependent on the compassion of their neighbours, while the government enforces their isolation. This double standard erodes South Africa’s credibility on the world stage, exposing the gap between its international rhetoric and its domestic realities.
The crisis at Margaret Mine forces us to confront the harsh truth about South Africa’s celebrated Constitution. While it enshrines fundamental rights and freedoms, its foundations are steeped in compromises that prioritise property and economic stability over justice and equality.
The miners’ plight highlights the limitations of this framework, which fails to dismantle the exploitative structures that keep the poor marginalised and vulnerable. The Constitution, designed to protect wealth and power, offers no recourse to these workers, who are labelled criminals and abandoned to their fate. It is not a progressive document but a tool of preservation, ensuring continuity for the powerful while leaving the vulnerable to suffer.
At Margaret Mine shaft, nearly 4 000 miners remain trapped underground, stripped of food, water, and the most basic semblance of humanity. This is no natural disaster but a calculated act of state violence—a cold, deliberate move to starve and flush out men deemed disposable in the ruthless calculus of profit.
Operation Vala Umgodi is not an isolated event; it is the latest indictment of a system that has repeatedly sacrificed the poor to shield the interests of the powerful. South Africa’s Constitution, often hailed as a symbol of justice, stands exposed as a hollow promise—a tool crafted to entrench property and capital while abandoning those it claims to protect.
This is not democracy, nor is it progress; it is exploitation presented in the language of rights, a brutal signifier of a nation’s failure to deliver dignity and justice to its most vulnerable.
* Gillian Schutte is a filmmaker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.