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Africa Mining

SA Chamber of Mines admits mistakes were made in lead up to Marikana massacre – by Christy Filen (Mineweb.com – August 23, 2012)

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Chamber Vice President, Mark Cutifani said Wednesday, talks should have taken place earlier between the various role players in the platinum sector and AMCU.

JOHANNESBURG (Mineweb) – After expressing condolences and calling for all parties to be part of a solution to the devastating killings that took place at Lonmin’s Marikana mine last week, the Chamber of Mines of South Africa Vice President and CEO of AngloGold Ashanti, Mark Cutifani, has admitted that talks should have taken place earlier between role players in the platinum sector.
 
“Now in hindsight we probably all should have been talking even before the Impala issue and I think that we all agree that we’ve missed something in that process and we are trying to make that good” said Cutifani.
 
This comes on the back of the Chamber’s first meeting with rival union AMCU (The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union) on Thursday afternoon. The response by Cutifani was in answer to a question as to why a meeting with AMCU had not taken place after three people were killed at Impala Platinum’s Rustenburg operations in February.

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New Anglo Platinum wage demand a potentially ominous development – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – August 22, 2012)

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A new pay demand from Anglo American Platinum workers, bypassing the NUM union, is yet another disturbing development in the South African platinum sector.

LONDON (Mineweb) –  The latest note from Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) reporting that it has received an unspecified pay increase demand from workers on the world’s largest platinum mine is a possibly ominous development for the South African platinum sector.  The demand has come from workers directly, rather than through official National Union of Mineworkers (the principal mining union at the mines) channels, and this mirrors the demands at Lonmin’s Marikana mine where again no official demands were made to the mine owners via the union.
 
What is particularly worrying here is that the miners are bypassing the NUM suggesting a total lack of trust in the traditional mining union setup.  The NUM appears to be being seen as a vassal of the ruling African National Congress political party – i.e. part of the new South African establishment – where it is beginning to be felt that miner’s interests are taking second place to political interests (in this case the preservation of a key part of the South African economy).
 
By Western standards South African mine pay at the main workforce level is low with the average miner probably earning between $500 to $1000 a month to work in what many outsiders would consider dirty and dangerous conditions. 

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Lonmin miners return after violent strike – by Pav Jordan (Globe and Mail – August 22, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Employees are trickling back to work under heavy security at South Africa’s Marikana platinum mine, where clashes with police left 34 dead and more than twice as many injured last week amid strife between striking workers and Lonmin PLC, the world’s third-largest platinum miner.

The London-based company said a third of Marikana’s 28,000-strong work force reported for duty on Tuesday, allowing a partial resumption of some operations but no return to production, and warned it may not meet debt covenants as a result of losses.

Tensions have built for months between platinum miners and workers in South Africa, where politics – at the union, local and national level – mix with high unemployment, sinking metals prices and booming costs to create a tinderbox for labour unrest.

“I think everyone is on tenterhooks in the platinum area,” said Bruce Dickinson, a partner with Webber Wentzel law firm in Johannesburg who specializes in the mining. “I don’t think people are viewing this as isolated; where it hasn’t hit yet, people are waiting to see if it does,” he said from Johannesburg.

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Time to extract responsibility from the African mining industry – by Samantha Nutt (Globe and Mail – August 22, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Samantha Nutt is executive director of War Child and author of Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid.

Few things rankle Canadians like a debate about the mining industry. Perhaps it is because 70 per cent of the world’s mining companies are headquartered here, and throughout this lingering global recession we have enthusiastically (yet graciously, we’re Canadian after all) hitched ourselves to the resource economy wagon. It has protected us with titanium-grade, cadmium-laced, copper-plated armour from Wall Street’s profligacies. And from Greece. And from having to conjugate “austerity” as a verb.

But mining is, in the most literal sense, a dirty business. You cannot pan for gold and not get muck under the nails, as a poignant feature story by Geoffrey York examining the rampant exploitation of children in mining reminded us. It provided a moving portrait of children working as artisanal miners in one of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s many open-pit calamities, risking their lives with each toxic breath. The mine is owned by Vancouver-based KICO – not the “surface” rights to the land the kids scavenge, but the minerals beneath their shoeless feet.

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Ousted South African leader blames government for miners’ deaths – by Michelle Faul (Associated Press/Toronto Star – August 19, 2012)

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

JOHANNESBURG—Miners and their families welcomed expelled politician Julius Malema on Saturday as he told the thousands who gathered at the site where 34 miners were killed this week that South African police had no right to fire the live bullets that killed them.

Malema, the former youth leader of the governing African National Congress, arrived as family members continued to hunt for loved ones missing since Thursday’s shootings. Women said they did not know if their husbands and sons were among the dead, or among the 78 wounded or some 256 arrested by police on charges from public violence to murder.

“They had no right to shoot,” Malema said, even if the miners had opened fire first. Malema is the first politician to address the miners at the site during a more than week-long saga in which 10 people were killed before Thursday’s shootings — including two police officers butchered to death and two mine security guards whom strikers burned alive in their vehicle. He said he had come because the government had turned its back on the strikers.

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South Africa’s union war for platinum and how the miners got it wrong – by Ed Stoddard (Mineweb.com – August 20, 2012)

www.mineweb.com

Industry insiders, companies and unions know the sector has some very tough decisions to make, but it’s not just platinum that is at risk.

LYDENBURG, South Africa (Reuters) –  South Africa’s platinum promise of prosperity has turned into a heap of broken dreams for Vusimuzi Mathosi, one of 2,000 workers laid off by Aquarius Platinum at its Everest Mine.
 
“This place can only be sustained with platinum. What can we do now?,” he told Reuters near the one-room box he and his family call home in a dilapidated township on the outskirts of Lydenburg, 300 km (180 miles) east of Johannesburg.
 
He belongs to the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU), whose b loody turf war for members with the dominant National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) was the backdrop to Thursday’s killing of 34 striking platinum miners by police at the Marikana mine.

When Aquarius, the world’s 4th largest producer of the precious metal, closed production at Everest, it cited worsening industrial relations stemming from the AMCU/NUM battle which has turned workers into warriors across the platinum sector.

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A potential powder keg for miners and investors as police kill 34 striking workers [South Africa] – by Danny Deadlock (Stockhouse.com – August 17, 2012)

http://www.stockhouse.com/index.aspx
 
Institutional and retail investors are (wisely) avoiding many countries because of political risk – including risk of resource nationalization and heavy-handed taxation. But what happened in Marikana, South Africa this week is an entirely different ball game.

As you likely saw in the media, 34 people were killed when police opened fire on 3000 striking platinum mine workers who failed to leave. Many were carrying machetes or sticks and apparently the police felt threatened. Someone made the decision to open fire with automatic weapons and in doing so, they have potentially created problems for the entire mining industry of Africa.
 
This may be hard to relate to if you live in the city or have never dealt with the unionized mining industry, but around the world mine workers share a common bond. During the 1990’s, I worked in the Canadian mining industry and even the difference between mountain mine workers and prairie mine workers can be dramatically different. But when the smoke settles, they will fight tooth and nail to support their fellow union workers.
 
During mine disasters or funerals, mine unions will typically send representatives and this was evident during the highly-televised underground mine disaster in Chile (Aug 2010). Mine workers from around the world flew in to help and lend moral support.

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South Africa mine shooting leaves 34 dead and a nation reeling – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – August 18, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

One of the bloodiest police shootings since the days of apartheid has killed 34 miners and injured 78 at a South African platinum mine, leaving the nation in crisis and searching its soul over the rising levels of violent protest and police brutality.

South African President Jacob Zuma cut short a foreign tour, abandoning a regional summit in Mozambique to rush to the mine site. Politicians condemned the shooting, while the South African media called it a massacre and analysts accused the police of an excessive response to the striking mineworkers.

Mr. Zuma later announced that he will set up a commission of inquiry into the shootings at the Lonmin mine near Rustenburg. He said the entire country was “saddened and dismayed” by the “shocking” deaths. “The inquiry will enable us to get to the real cause of the incident,” he said.

The police opened fire with automatic rifles and pistols on Thursday when confronted by an advancing mob of mineworkers. Early reports suggested that as many as 18 people were killed, but on Friday the police announced that 34 were killed, 78 injured and 259 were arrested.

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Young and dying: the scandal of artisanal mining [in Africa] – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – August 18, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

With his Hulk cartoon T-shirt and his solemn face, Stephane Kapenda looks even younger and smaller than his 12 years. He knows he shouldn’t be here. But for years he has hauled tainted soil from this toxic waste pit into dirty pools of water so that he can search for bits of copper.

“It’s bad,” he says quietly. “I would like to leave it and go to school.” Asked what is the worst thing about the work, he thinks for a moment and then whispers: “The sickness.”

Twice, the effects of heavy-metal contamination have been so severe that he needed hospital treatment. Yet he keeps at it, alongside his siblings, to scrounge a tiny income for his parents – impoverished farmers who could not otherwise survive.

About 200 to 300 children toil daily in this vast open pit, a bleak wasteland outside a copper and zinc mine at Kipushi in the southeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, near the Zambian border.

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Potential impact of SA mine violence on platinum – and perhaps on gold too – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – August 17, 2012)

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The massacre at Lonmin’s Marikana platinum mine has huge implications for the country’s struggling platinum mining sector. Could it spread to the gold mines too?

LONDON (Mineweb) –  Nearly 50 years ago when I worked there on the mines, Rustenburg in South Africa used to be a relatively sleepy small town some 160 km from Johannesburg where big city dwellers would repair for a quiet weekend  at tourist resort Retief’s Kloof and farmers grew oranges, despite it being the site of Rustenburg Platinum Mines (then run by JCI) then and now still the world’s largest platinum mine.

Nowadays, with the expansion of the platinum sector, first with Impala and then with Lonrho (now Lonmin), Aquarius and others, the sleepy town has changed out of all recognition as the platinum mining industry expanded, and expanded.  Anglo American, which was a major shareholder in JCI, effectively decimated the latter company and absorbed Rustenburg Platinum into Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) and the town became even more the centre of the world for platinum mining and for exploration on the Bushveld Complex Western limb, which accounts for most of South Africa’s platinum output.
 
Nowadays the orange groves have virtually all disappeared and it is doubtful if many tourists from Jo’burg would consider the relatively short drive to the Rustenburg town for a weekend’s relaxation – at least not in the town itself – although the surrounding area – particularly the Magaliesburg and the Bushveld – remains a most attractive destination. 

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A country fractures: from the mines, a killing field in South Africa – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – August 17, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG — The wild volley of gunfire erupted for less than three minutes. When it was over, at least seven bodies – and perhaps as many as 18 – lay in pools of blood on a dusty South African hilltop.It took just a brief burst of gunfire to expose all of the worst ills of post-apartheid South Africa: a volatile cocktail of poverty, labour militancy, police brutality, industrial decline and an increasingly angry and radicalized population.

The deadly clash between police and striking workers on Thursday was the latest chapter in a saga of mounting violence in South Africa’s mining sector – historically the biggest employer in the country, but now in serious decline.

The assault by enraged mineworkers, which sparked the final volley of gunfire, should have been no surprise to the police. It followed a week of bloodshed at the Marikana platinum mine, about 70 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg, owned by London-based Lonmin.

Up to 3,000 police, backed by helicopters and armoured vehicles, have been facing off against about 3,000 striking workers, many of whom were carrying machetes, iron rods and wooden sticks.

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For Barrick, Tanzanian mines lose their lustre – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – August 17, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG — Barrick Gold Corp.’s mining operations in Africa have been a publicity nightmare for the company for years, but until now the company had always seemed confident that the mines were profitable enough to withstand the damage to its reputation.

With a steady drumbeat of violent clashes and civilian deaths in recent years, the company’s North Mara gold mine in Tanzania has been one of the most controversial Barrick mines in the world.

Protesters and activists in Canada and Tanzania have accused Barrick of turning a blind eye to human rights abuses at its African mines. Last year alone, at least five villagers were shot dead at North Mara when they invaded the site to steal waste rock.

A report by a respected Tanzanian group, the Legal and Human Rights Centre, concluded that 19 villagers were killed by police and security guards at North Mara from the beginning of 2009 to the middle of 2010. (Barrick says it disagrees with this estimate but won’t provide its own estimate.)

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Lonmin Mine Death Toll Reaches 34 as Police Kill Strikers – by Matthew Hill and Robert Brand (Bloomberg Business Week -August 17, 2012)

http://www.businessweek.com/

South African police killed 34 striking workers at Lonmin Plc (LMI)’s Marikana platinum-mining complex yesterday, the worst death toll in police action since the end of apartheid in 1994.

In addition to the dead 78 people were injured and 259 arrested, Riah Phiyega, the country’s police commissioner, told reporters at the mine today. Six firearms were recovered from protesters including one that had belonged to a police officer murdered in earlier violence at the mine this week, she said.

Violence erupted yesterday after police used tear gas and live ammunition to disperse thousands of workers gathered on a hilltop near the mine. Clashes between rival labor unions at the mine led to a six-day standoff with police in which 10 people had already died, including two officers. Police say they acted in self-defense yesterday after coming under attack from the workers armed with spears, machetes and pistols.

“There was absolutely nothing else police could have done,” Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa said in an interview with Johannesburg’s 702 Talk Radio. “People should not ignore the laws of the land.”

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South Africa police open fire at striking mine workers – by Jon Gambrell (Associated Press/Globe and Mail – August 17, 2012)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG — South African police opened fire Thursday on a crowd of striking miners that charged a line of officers trying to disperse them, killing some and wounding others in one of the worst shootings by authorities since the end of the apartheid era.

Police declined to offer casualty figures after the shooting at the Lonmin PLC mine near Marikana, a dusty town about 70 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg. However, the main South African news agency, SAPA, has reported that 18 people have been killed. Police ministry spokesman Zweli Mnisi acknowledged late Thursday some of the miners there had died as more police and soldiers surrounded the hostels and shacks near Lonmin’s shuttered platinum mine.

The shooting happened Thursday afternoon after police failed to get the striking miners to hand over machetes, clubs and other weapons. Some miners did leave, though others carrying weapons began war chants and soon started marching toward the township near the mine, said Molaole Montsho, a journalist with the South African Press Association who was at the scene.

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RPT-Striking platinum miners confront S.Africa police – by Siphiwe Sibeko (Reuters – August 15, 2012)

http://af.reuters.com/

MARIKANA, South Africa Aug 15 (Reuters) – Thousands of striking miners armed with machetes and sticks faced off with South African police on Wednesday at Lonmin’s Marikana mine after it halted production following the deaths of 10 people in fighting between rival unions.

Lonmin, the world’s third-largest platinum producer, has threatened to sack 3,000 rock drill operators if they fail to end a wildcat pay strike that started on Friday at Marikana, its flagship mine 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Johannesburg.

The illegal stay-away and the union clashes have forced London-headquartered Lonmin to halt mining at all its operations in South Africa, which account for 12 percent of global platinum output. South Africa has 80 percent of known platinum reserves.

On Wednesday, scores of police backed by helicopters lined up opposite a crowd of around 2,500 miners who had taken up position on a rocky outcrop overlooking the mine. “The situation is stable but tense. We are busy with negotiations and are maintaining a high visibility in the area,” national police spokesman Dennis Adrio said.

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