Most educated people disregard South African hardline black nationalists, but as a group, they often notice things we refuse to.

As the issues with illegal artisanal mining has reached an increasingly intense public focus, hardline black nationalists (or “AfroNats” as we call them) have pointed out that what the zama-zamas are demonstrating, is that pretty much anyone can do mining. Yet the barriers to market entry remain extremely high.

It used to be that the old argument against nationalisation was "you need special expertise to do mining", but clearly, the experts will have to offer a better take than that to be convincing.

Returns even from expired and shuttered mines, have turned out to be fairly decent - some miners even manage to earn a middle-class income, tax-free, from picking out veins of precious ore.

What strikes a lot of the black radicals, who have long had a romance about the mineral sector as a focal point for “white monopoly capital”, is that the minerals turn out not to be all that hard to exploit, meaning that the issue is primarily one of gatekeeping.

Punishments for illegal mining carry harsher penalties than most violent crimes - under the Diamonds Act of 1986, unlicensed possession of unpolished or uncut diamonds receives a fine of R250,000 or 10 years in prison, or both. Unlicensed mining can get you less time on its own (as little as six months), but charges can be compounded - a crew caught in 2017 were sentenced variously to 20-25 years apiece.

Of course, it is the wild west, and violence and coercion are par for the course. So is the environmental impact of cyanide leaching, among other practices. The water table can become severely polluted by tailings and effluents dumped into rivers, poorly maintained sewers; shoddy or abandoned tailings dams, acid rock drainage, river siltation, and so on.

And yes, adequate environmental protections would increase overheads, but the formal mining industry hasn’t exactly adhered to environmental concerns all that well themselves.

Clearly, the permanent oligarchy and foreign interests which have steered most of South African political activity for the past century are not making the best case for their preservation in the eyes of nativists.

Nor are they particularly impressed by who is doing the digging - Illegal miners are mainly from Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

And from the miners’ perspective, matters are not particularly equitable either. They endure forced labor, brutal treatment, and life-threatening environments under gang control.

As the widely licensed recent article by Kimon de Greef points out, powerful syndicates run the illegal gold trade, profiting from both gold extraction and selling overpriced supplies to miners. Miners often incur deep debts, paying high fees to enter or exit shafts, leaving them trapped in cycles of exploitation.

Many miners are deceived into the work with false promises. Others are kidnapped or threatened, sometimes beaten into compliance. Some miners, including children, face severe injuries or starvation underground.

A joint police and military crackdown has arrested over 1,300 zama-zamas, but gangs maintain control. Illegal mining contributes about 10% of South Africa’s gold production, worth over R15 billion annually. This lucrative trade is controlled by criminal networks with connections extending into legitimate markets.

But it need not be this way.

ENACT, an Africa-based think tank focusing on organised crime, issued a report recommending that South Africa permit but regulate artisanal mining.

Being that they are sponsored by the EU, Interpol and by NGOs associated with the American State Department, they recommended the OECD should be responsible for oversight and due diligence measures, using their policy framework for “conflict and high-risk areas”.

The group is also funded largely by the De Beers group, and so naturally they recommended the centralisation of mineral trading in this sector, creating a subsidised, state-sanctioned monopoly through public-private partnership.

But they also had a clearly commonsense approach to the industry in its broadest sense - the Minerals and Petroleum Development Act needs to be amended to provide allowances for artisanal miners, though they oddly suggest SAPS should handle licensing.

The trouble with minerals licenses in South Africa, is that they take an average of ten years to turn around, from the initial prospecting application to sticking the drills in the ground, and that’s just for the big players.

This forms a bottleneck to market entry, which is celebrated by PWC, which has waxed lyrical about the heroic efforts of the South African mining cartel to save the world in their latest reports:

The world's top mining companies have an important story to tell. They are helping feed the world while lighting the way to a low-carbon future and providing materials for infrastructure development and consumer demand They are a force for good, critical to life in the 21st century as we know it. Yet this tale remains largely obscured, hidden from the view of the public and even investors. The industry is often accused of lacking transparency, and it could certainly be more open about its impacts.

They report a 40% rise in the amount of mining deals going to the top companies, as the industry tightens its cartelisation in order to safeguard its dominance during the implementation of an extremely costly process of complying with global environmentalist policies

This sector is also responsible for much of the character of the past century’s governance style - they lobbied the Smuts government to introduce a hefty poll tax on the homelands to force cheap black labour into the mines, displacing white labour, which was beginning to unionise.

The backlash in the 1922 Rand Revolt, which demanded this cheap labour be kept out, was defeated by gunfire, and when the populists got Hertzog into government, he attempted to nationalise the mines and open the market for artisanal miners. This was struck down by the cartel known as the Chamber of Mines, who threatened to dynamite their shafts and collapse the economy.

The poll taxes eventually constituted a greater share of the tax revenue than the incomes of white South Africa did, and the forcing of the peasants into the mines decimated traditional African subsistence farming, inducing a minor famine in the homelands in the 1930s, while choking cities with migrant labour camps, and produced the compromise policy with white populists of creating what was known as "petty" apartheid - the system of localised segregation policies which were given as a substitute for the separate development preferred by the residents of white settlements.

In the current dispensation, the oligarchs have found an easier way to operate - co-option. The stringent nature of the Labour Relations Act encourages sweetheart deals with ruling-party-aligned trade unions at rates which shut out market entry to all but the largest players in any sector, by allowing labour bargaining agreements to be extended to non-parties. Meanwhile BEE cuts in ruling party elites and their families into the game.

At present, this extractive industry is shutting out the broad swathe of the population from enjoying the natural benefits of our mineral bounty, and while I regard nationalisation to be a ludicrous and foolish enterprise, it is clear to me that we could solve pretty much every aspect of the zama-zama problem simply by making it easier to do artisanal mining, and small-scale mineral trading and processing, legally.

Making this difficult is leaving it open to organised crime, which benefits local corrupt governments, like that of Zimbabwe, and facilitates extraordinary abuses on all fronts, as foreign criminal cartels take over.

Let the people dig.

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