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IN THE strict sense of the word, the “zama-zama” miners who died and others
who were arrested at Langlaagte last week did not commit a crime, says Terry
Bell in his latest Labour Wrap. Working in a disused and long abandoned shaft,
they harmed nobody but themselves and stole nothing. Yet what they did was
against the law and, therefore, illegal.
This, says Bell, is an example of criminalising initiative and the
entrepreneurial flair that politicians in particular keep saying the unemployed
should exercise. Even the Chamber of Mines commends the zama-zamas as ingenious
and “extremely enterprising”.
Using homemade equipment, they are driven by poverty to risk life and limb,
sometimes spending weeks or even months in fetid conditions underground. There
they are sustained by shipments of food and water sent to them by criminal
syndicates who charge exhorbitant rates for the service. These are the same
people who buy the gold mined by the zama-zamas for a relative pittance, from
which the food and water costs are deducted.
According to Bell, many of these miners will already have contracted the
lung diseases their earlier, legitimate occupations gave them. Such diseases
often only manifest up to ten years after exposure to deadly dust.
As such, the zama-zamas are part of an army of retrenched and retired former
miners from mainly rural areas throughout the region, many of whom will die
painful and premature deaths as a result of an occupational disease. It is for
this reason, says Bell, that government is now contemplating a revision of the
compensation legislation covering miners.
But he maintains that while the intentions may be good, the result, on the
basis of existing reports, could be a disaster. The main intention seems to be
to have existing miners covered by the Compensation for Occupational Injuries
and Diseases Act (Coida) that has better provisions than the current
compensation regulations for miners.
However, says Bell, the Compensation Commission that administers what is generally referred to as “workmen’s compensation” is dysfunctional. And, along with a number of other problems, there has apparently been no adequate costing of the revised scheme.
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