South Africa’s illegal mining crisis requires military intervention and high-level police work, Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman told DM168 in an interview.
‘The military would be appropriate. I think we should declare a state of emergency around illegal mining,” Sibanye-Stillwater CEO Neal Froneman said as he elaborated on comments he made during the group’s interim results presentation on Thursday, 25 August.
“Arresting — at the bottom end of an organisation — people [who] are poor and poverty-stricken is not going to solve the problem. If you want to stop illegal mining you have to stop these syndicates that control this, that’s where the value is created. You have to deal with it nationally and internationally. To do it nationally you need very well-trained people on the ground, not normal policemen,” he said.
Illegal mining has for decades been a thorn in the side of South Africa’s licit mining sector and Froneman said one of the reasons that Sibanye closed down its Cooke operations west of Johannesburg was “because we could not manage the issue”. But the gambit appears to have had an unintended consequence. Froneman said as a result of the incident, Sibanye is no longer able to pump water out of its Cooke 2 shaft, which is now slowly filling up. That will eventually make it off limits to illegal miners unless they can make a transition to underground scuba diving in a sci-fi movie kind of way.
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