General secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions, Zwelinzima Vavi, has saluted Police Minister Senzo Mchunu for his measured intervention in the standoff between illegal miners – said to be in their thousands - and law enforcement agents in Stilfontein, North West.
Mchunu led a high-level government delegation to the area where the illegal miners, colloquially referred to as zama zamas, have been stranded underground, in disused mines for months after police and soldiers arrived in the area as part of Operation Vala Umgodi.
Breaking the impasse, government has now showed a conciliatory approach with dozens of volunteers entering the abandoned gold mines in Stilfontein in a bid to rescue the illegal miners.
Mchunu has also enlisted services of experts in mine rescue, and indicated that he wants all the stranded miners brought to surface within a week.
“It must happen within a week, we get done, we get everybody out within one week,” said Mchunu after meetings with community members and provincial police bosses.
Mchunu said government was not planning a genocide, as some sections of society said after the tough stance expressed by Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni who insisted that government would not assist the stranded miners as they were “criminals” and the government would “smoke them out”.
“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. We are not sending help to criminals. Criminals are not to be helped. Criminals are to be persecuted,” Ntshavheni said in Cape Town on Wednesday.
“We didn’t send them there, and they didn’t go down there for the good benefit or for the good intentions for the Republic. So, we can’t help them,” she said.
Commenting on the developments, Vavi said Mchunu has displayed political experience while being firm on the illegal miners.
“I am extremely happy. The attitude and the fears Saftu had that there was another Marikana loading are now allayed by the interventions by a very measured, level-headed and experienced minister (Mchunu) who himself is a product of the trade union movement. What happened through Minister Mchunu was victory through rationality,” Vavi said in an interview with broadcaster Newzroom Afrika on Saturday morning.
“A government must always choose negotiation over enforcement through guns, teargas canisters and all of that. Surely a government must always choose peace instead of war when that war can be avoided.
“We were extremely worried by the minister (Ntshavheni) who we think demonstrated her lack of experience, passion, she was cold and extremely arrogant, telling people that these are criminals. It made us to remember immediately the email written by the current president (Cyril Ramaphosa) when he was in the board of Lonmin when he called workers dastardly criminal and called for concomitant action to be taken,” said Vavi.
The trade unionist said Ntshavheni made him remember “all those chilly words” made before the 2012 Marikana massacre.
“Minister Mchunu demonstrated his ability to think, just to have passion even in the context of a crisis, knowing that these are people, they are acting illegally and we are not asking that government must go soft-soft. A lot of people are misunderstanding this.
“We are not asking government to condone illegality … all we were asking for, and this is what Minister Mchunu has done, surely when facing a situation of an imminent human catastrophe of 4,000 people starving to death underground because the structure that they were using (to come to the surface) has been removed, people have run away when they saw police, you need to say please come back guys, let’s talk,” said Vavi.
He said the illegal miners have been drawn to the disused mines from as far as Eastern Cape, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe to eke out a living.
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