[PODCAST] ‘The kingpins who are involved, the politicians, the corporations, the security companies, the labour brokers... don’t want this to end,' - Bench Marks Foundation's davidvwyk on MoneywebAtMidday with maggsonmedia. Download the podcast below.
JEREMY MAGGS: We’ll start with this and it’s a story of horror, tragedy, and negligence and not unsurprisingly, families impacted by the Boksburg gas leak are now turning to government for help. Seventeen people died at the Angelo informal settlement, more than 12 remain in hospital as I speak. Illegal miners were reportedly responsible for the leak, as they opened a gas canister.
Our community monitors told us that on that weekend there was a trade that went wrong between the police and the zama zamas, and the zama zamas did not agree to the terms of the trade with the police. There was a fight that broke out and then the police called reinforcements, and everybody went underground because they knew that the police would not follow them.
You see, these things are never discussed in the media. No one ever discusses the complexities of the situation. Now, the next thing, which is very, very important for us at Bench Marks Foundation is the issue of the failure of the government to properly regulate mine closure in this country and rehabilitation.
Besides that, there is the Johannesburg Stock Exchange that keeps meticulous records and so on of who owned what in this country in terms of corporate ownership and so on. So the reluctance to act is related to the fact that in the late 1990s, the African National Congress struggled to raise sufficient funding for elections and it had to find a way of doing so. So it deployed its cadres into corporations and we know who the mining billionaires in that organisation now are, and that way they could secure funding for operating the elections. We have American-style elections in this country.
We’ve spoken to zama zamas who say it is the former mining company that abandoned the mine that is now buying the gold from us. Now, if you look at the logic of that, the logic is quite simple. It’s much cheaper to operate a mine where you don’t have any overheads, you don’t pay any electricity or anything, you don’t pay any wages. There are no pensions to be paid, there’s no medical aid to be paid and so on.
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