Experts have said illegal miners are being made scapegoats for sinkholes in Johannesburg, ahead of local elections on 4 November, The Guardian reported.
Rosalind Morris, an anthropology professor at Columbia University, has worked closely with illegal miners. She said the porous dolomitic rock south and west of the city becomes unstable when water is removed.
“The biggest culprit of sinkholes in South Africa is formal industrial mining, which dewaters at a scale of hundreds of millions of gallons of water removed from underground every day,” she said.
Morris said intense digging by zama zamas in some areas does cause collapse. But she said the idea that they caused the problem for the first time was “completely fallacious”.
In May, Johannesburg transport council member Kenny Kunene took journalists on a tour of sinkholes. He claimed zama zamas were at fault, including for the collapse of a section of Wemmer Pan Road.
That road once linked the central business district to the south-eastern suburbs. One section has now disappeared, leaving raw earth marked by holes where illegal miners have been digging.
Zama zamas are also often blamed for violence, including a mass shooting in Wedela township in September. David van Wyk, lead researcher at Bench Marks Foundation, said the blame lies with feuding gangs that control access to the shafts.
“The guys working in the mine are actually super-exploited cheap labour,” he said. “The guys with the guns are the guys who take the gold.”
In Roodepoort, Cora Bailey said dozens of illegal miners arrived in late September to dig across the road from her animal charity, Claw. She said they took water from its two 25,000-litre tanks for panning and processing.
Bailey said police told her the mining was too big for them to deal with. About a week later, officers cut the grass that partly hid the miners, but a smaller group returned within days.
Police said on 19 October that they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas across the country in the previous week. Researchers put the number of illegal miners in the tens of thousands.
In 2025, 93 bodies were pulled from a mine shaft in Stilfontein, after police blocked food and water from going underground.
Mining companies must seal old shafts when they stop operating. Mining minister Gwede Mantashe told Parliament that in 2025 there were 6,100 derelict and ownerless mines and 1,170 unsafe mine openings.
Experts agree most illegal miners come from neighbouring countries, mainly Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, The Guardian reported. There is no full data on them.
In Khutsong, about 80km west of Johannesburg, campaigner Vusi Cele said illegal miners keep the township going. His group wants artisanal miners to get mining licences.
Cele, 33, sells mobile phone covers and screen protectors. He said he would also mine if he could get a licence. “On the surface there’s peanuts,” he said. “Underground there’s money.”
Source: this article is based on reporting by The Guardian. Image: The Guardian. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice News desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Kgomotso Maake covers news and politics for Tzaneen Voice. Kgomotso reports on government, Parliament, municipalities, courts, crime and service delivery across South Africa, with a close eye on how national decisions reach towns like Tzaneen and the wider Limpopo province. Stories are written in plain English and focus on the facts: who made the decision, what it means, and what happens next.