The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is generally categorised as a low- to middle-income region and economic zone. Such a region tends to exhibit extensive income stagnation, high inequality, an increasing population growth rate and a large number of people living in poverty. 

These harsh socioeconomic conditions faced by the people of SADC and those from other parts of the continent are incentive enough to illegally enter and end up in the belly of South Africa’s abandoned mine shafts as zama zamas, which loosely translated means “chance takers”. These chance takers, according to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act and Precious Metals Act, illegally acquire, possess or dispose of precious metals.

This lucrative illicit industry is estimated to cost the South African state R21-billion in lost tax revenue annually and R14-billion in gold production, with an estimated 10% of the gold produce destined for foreign markets, according to the EU’s Enact programme, a partnership between the Institute for Security Studies and Interpol, in affiliation with the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

That is just the direct economic cost without the addition of infrastructure damage, such as the recurring sinkholes on Snake Road in Benoni on the East Rand, damage to water infrastructure, as water is critical in the production process, the cost of additional state resources required to curb the crime, and other social and economic costs.

An ordinary mining operation — a mine-to-market value chain — would flow from mining, processing, management of inventory and transportation to the market from where finished products will be manufactured for the end user, the consumer.

The same happens in this parallel economy of zama zamas — however, the public, mining houses and the state, in particular, have placed their sole focus on just the mining activity in the value chain. But this is an industry with suppliers of explosives, security, arms, gas tanks and other inputs in production that are either primary or support the process.

There is big money circulating.

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The hundred-plus arrests in Krugersdorp and Kagiso in the west of Johannesburg only reduce the easily replaceable labour force; those at other levels of the value chain simply look on safely, unbothered, and only frustrated by the disruption in production that will lead to delayed delivery.

This is an inconvenience the “industry” is accustomed to, as witnessed multiple times when operations are disrupted by security forces only for them to spring up again due to inconsistency and other unresolved social, political and economic issues in the republic, region and continent.

The excess supply of labour from foreign markets has been attributed by many commentators to porous borders, weak immigration control, South Africa becoming a weakening state and poor political leadership because those are the popular narratives — significant of course, but not the only ones. Even if all of those were resolved to a satisfactory extent, illegal immigration would still pose a challenge; this has been evidenced in global immigration patterns when immigrants from less developed and unstable areas move to more developed and stable areas.

South Africa is one of the most developed and relatively stable countries on the continent. A democracy, although with challenges, but it still delivers political goods to its citizens and non-citizens, documented or not. This and other attributes will always be a pull factor.

This is also a lesson for South African civil, business and political leaders that South Africa’s development cannot be in isolation from that of the region and continent. A lesson that South Africa must play an active, significant, deliberate and intentional developmental role in structures such as SADC, the African Union, the Pan-African Parliament, African Continental Free Trade Area and others.

In the short term, South Africa can experiment with the regulation of artisanal and small-scale mining, expedite the approval of mining and prospecting licences, double down on security, rehabilitate mines, seal open shafts and ensure proper cross-border movement.

However, a permanent solution is needed to ensure these acts of criminality end and leakages are curbed, and that means ensuring South Africa doesn’t develop in isolation from its neighbours. DM