Police work is not for the faint-hearted. To do it well, one has to be at ease with what mere mortals dread. Officers may be shot at on a random day at the police station because some bandit thought it a great idea, as happened in Alexandra township on Friday.
On another day, officers of the law could be called upon to implement Operation Vala Umgodi, in terms of which police, sometimes outgunned, must exchange fire with zama-zamas who have opened tunnels mostly around Gauteng to illegally access mineral deposits in disused mines.
At Stilfontein this week, more than 50 illegal miners emerged from a disused mine shaft, dehydrated and weak, pleading that help be sent to many others who remain underground for fear of arrest.
The police said they would not allow “our men and women in blue and our soldiers to go down there to combat this particular activity. It is dangerous.”
The Stilfontein saga has brought to the surface many challenges our nation faces. The first is the scope of policing jurisdiction. If, as police seemed to accept, the tunnels in question are dangerous, which laws apply there and who enforces them? The idea of a no man’s land where the laws of the jungle apply should not be countenanced.
The country’s security chiefs must come up with a security plan to ensure that the so-called zama-zamas don’t become emboldened by the knowledge that they could kill, pillage and plunder and that there is nothing our police, defence force and intelligence community can do.
The point is not for them to be reckless and send officers to their deaths. The idea of simply manning the entrances and proclaiming areas to be too dangerous for our guardians of the law beggars belief.
But the very existence of illegal activity around our mines talks to policy gaps. Operation Vala Umgodi is a response to a manifestation of a problem, not the problem itself.
The main issue is that zama-zamas were allowed to operate on an unregulated, unmonitored ecosystem for so long that this has proven lucrative to many. This is why Gauteng is full of holes leading to mines from east to west.
The department of mineral resources & energy invited the public to comment on artisanal and small-scale mining policy in 2021, but this has been in abeyance since. The resultant policy lacuna meant that those with heavy firepower but who also have no regard for life came up with their own rules. The public intermittently gets caught up in these deadly exchanges, sadly.
It is also these policy gaps that saw minister in the presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni speak with a forked tongue about whether or not the government will help illegal miners stuck underground without water and food, following police implementation of operation Vala Umgodi at Stilfontein.
Ntshavheni said: “We’re not sending help to criminals. We’re going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped. We didn’t send them there and they didn’t go down there for the benefit of the republic, so we can’t help them.”
Many reacted with rage, saying this is inflammatory and runs counter to the principles of ubuntu that the government often preaches. Some reminded us of Ntshaveni’s principal, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s use of the phrase “concomitant action” in the run-up to the Marikana massacre, where the police killed scores of striking mineworkers.
It’s also possible that Ntshavheni’s ambiguous words were meant to differ from George W Bush’s in 2001 when he said of those behind the September 11 attacks: “We are going to smoke them out”.
Even if Ntshavheni is correct that the government is not in the business of rescuing suspected criminals, such communication must be handled with nous and deft.
The solution might lie in the government’s introduction of overdue legislation to regulate artisanal mining, to deal with the lawlessness around abandoned mines, where people are honestly trying to eke out a living, but criminal syndicates operate as well.
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