South Africa prides itself on having written human dignity into its Constitution, yet in the dark tunnels of Stilfontein, that promise starved to death.
Ninety-three miners died beneath an abandoned mine while the state sealed the exits, blocked food and water, and watched from above as hunger did its work.
Their deaths were not an accident, nor an act of God. They were the result of a deliberate choice: to defend property over people, profit over principle, and silence over accountability.
What makes this tragedy unbearable is that it unfolded not in secrecy but in plain sight, in the full glare of cameras, under the daily gaze of a media that recorded the spectacle of suffering but turned away from the question of responsibility.
The darkness that killed in Stilfontein was not only underground; it was the deeper darkness of a society that saw suffering and looked away, and worse still, celebrated.
That darkness did not lift when the bodies were brought to the surface, it deepened in the weeks and months that followed. As the country turned away, the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) opened one of the most consequential public hearings in recent memory.
And yet, even as evidence of state complicity emerged in full view, the nation, and its media, fell silent.
During day three of the SAHRC Stilfontein Inquiry, officials from the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources, the South African Police Service (SAPS) and other agencies gave testimony that, if reported accurately, should have made front-page headlines.
They admitted, in effect, to the collapse of constitutional governance in the mining sector: to starving people under siege, to protecting corporate property over human life, and to allowing private mining interests to sit at the heart of national policing operations. And still, the mainstream media was nowhere to be seen.
When the miners of Stilfontein died underground, 93 of them at least, the story briefly made headlines. Cameras came for the spectacle of grief: mothers crying at the mine gate, police lines and body bags.
But when it came time to ask why they died and who was responsible, the cameras vanished. Not a single national broadcaster covered day three of the hearings. No reporters challenged the contradictions in the testimony of the police or the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.
That silence is especially striking given the parallels between Stilfontein and the Madlanga Commission, where evidence has also emerged of private and political interests colluding within state institutions.
Yet the difference in media attention could not be more telling. The Madlanga Commission has enjoyed blanket coverage, live broadcasts, running commentary and endless analysis, precisely because it offers the drama of politics, personalities and power.
Stilfontein, by contrast, has received none. Ninety-three poor, black miners are dead, and there has been no live feed, no panel discussion, no national outrage.
It reveals a media drawn to power, not justice, to the theatre of elites rather than the suffering of the excluded. The same institutions that claim to speak truth to power have become curators of distraction, chronicling the quarrels of the powerful while ignoring the lives of the powerless.
In doing so, South Africa’s Fourth Estate has abdicated its constitutional vocation. A press that ignores the poor cannot claim to defend democracy, for democracy dies not only when governments silence the media, but when the media chooses to silence the poor.
In Stilfontein, that silence was not neutral, it was part of the crime.
A humanitarian crisis turned constitutional
Operation Vala Umgodi, the state’s flagship campaign against so-called “illegal mining”, was presented as a law-and-order initiative. In Stilfontein, it became a siege: a military-style blockade that sealed abandoned shafts and cut off food, water and medicine to those trapped below.
Pathologists later confirmed what communities already knew: the dead had not been shot or beaten, they had starved. Their bodies bore unmistakable signs of death from dehydration and hunger, all within the period that the mine was surrounded by the police.
At the hearing, Acting North West Provincial Commissioner Major-General Patrick Asaneng admitted, coldly, that denying food and water was a deliberate tactic “to force the miners to surrender”. It was a strategy that turned hunger into a weapon of enforcement.
In any functional democracy, such an admission would spark outrage and prosecution. In ours, it was met with bureaucratic indifference, and a media blackout.
The regulator’s betrayal
If the police’s words revealed cruelty, the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources’ testimony revealed betrayal.
Under South African law the department is not merely a licensing office; it is the constitutional custodian of the nation’s mineral wealth, obligated by section 3 of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act to manage resources “for the benefit of all South Africans”. In Stilfontein, that duty was inverted.
The department claimed that the Buffelsfontein mine, inactive and unrehabilitated for nearly a decade, was “not derelict or ownerless”. By classifying an abandoned site as active, it avoided its legal duty to rehabilitate it, consult the community, or accept responsibility for the disaster that followed.
Yet in Parliament, Mineral and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe himself told MPs that his department “had to track down the owners in China”. If the owners had to be hunted down, the mine was, by definition, derelict, and once a mine is derelict, the law requires the state to secure and rehabilitate it.
Instead, the department did the opposite. It bent over backwards to preserve the fiction of private ownership, defending the paper rights of a defunct company at the cost of human lives.
In doing so it violated not only the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act, but the constitutional principle that mineral wealth be managed in the public interest.
From ‘economic saboteurs’ to corporate beneficiaries
Throughout the crisis, Mantashe publicly labelled the miners as “economic saboteurs”, portraying starving men as threats to the national economy.
The rhetoric gave the impression that the state was protecting public assets from criminal interference. In truth, it was protecting the ghost of private ownership, the dormant interests of a company that had long abandoned its workers and legal obligations.
The “economic sabotage” narrative served as a political smokescreen to justify a brutal and unconstitutional operation. Behind that veil, the real beneficiaries were the same private mining houses whose lobby group, the Minerals Council of South Africa, sat inside the Illegal Mining Priority Task Team that coordinated the operation.
The council’s presence in a law-enforcement command structure turned Stilfontein into a show of state power in defence of private capital, performed in the language of security and patriotism.
What was presented as an assertion of sovereignty was in reality an act of corporate protectionism, public power deployed to guard private neglect.
This inversion of duty reveals how deeply capture runs inside the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources. The department tasked with democratising mineral wealth has become the defender of its concentration.
The minister who invoked the language of economic sabotage was not protecting the state; he was weaponising it. The lives lost at Stilfontein are the human cost of that deception.
The anatomy of a captured state
Day three of the hearings exposed not a collection of bureaucratic errors, but the anatomy of capture itself:
- A Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources that serves mining capital instead of constitutional custodianship.
- An SAPS that converts humanitarian crises into theatres of repression.
- A political leadership that escapes blame by criminalising the very communities it has abandoned.
Over all of this hangs a telling silence. The same outlets that ran headlines about “zama zamas” and “illegal mining syndicates” have offered no coverage of the hearings that reveal the state’s own complicity.
The commentators who parrot government claims of “economic sabotage” say nothing about autopsy reports confirming death by starvation under police blockade.
It is as though the nation has decided that the lives and rights of poor black miners are unworthy of attention once the spectacle of death has passed.
The moral test of our democracy
The Stilfontein tragedy is not only about mining; it is about what kind of country we have become. A state that defends private profit while starving the poor has lost its moral compass. A media that reports the deaths of miners but not the state’s culpability has lost its courage.
If South Africa is to reclaim the promise of its Constitution, it must start by facing the truth that Stilfontein has revealed: that the institutions meant to protect the people have turned against them, and that silence, official or journalistic, is not neutrality but complicity.
The dead of Stilfontein are not statistics. They are evidence, evidence of a state that has forgotten its duty, and of a society that risks forgetting its soul. DM