The unlicensed scavengers digging through Roodepoort’s abandoned shafts are an ecological nightmare, entirely lacking the robust sustainability pledges of the multinational conglomerates that originally gutted the landscape.
I recently found myself on a rather distressing Zoom call with a local NGO in Roodepoort, just west of Johannesburg. The subject was the zama zamas—the Zulu term for the thousands of illegal miners who have descended upon the region’s abandoned gold shafts to eke out a desperate living. Across the dirt road from Cora Bailey’s Community Led Animal Welfare charity, dozens of these unlicensed prospectors have arrived to dig in the dirt. It is a tragic scene of scarred land, collapsing sinkholes, and unregulated extraction. And frankly, as an environmentalist, I am appalled by their complete disregard for corporate sustainability frameworks.
We are out of time, but go off. Let us all just pretend that a man swinging a rusted pickaxe in a collapsing tunnel to feed his family is somehow exempt from the global transition to net-zero.
When the major multinational mining conglomerates spent the twentieth century hollowing out the Witwatersrand basin, they did so with a sense of institutional decorum. Yes, they may have left behind a labyrinth of toxic, structurally compromised voids beneath South Africa’s largest city. But they also left behind beautifully typeset ESG reports. If a multinational conglomerate creates a sinkhole, you can rest assured that the resulting displacement of earth has been carefully audited, offset, and aligned with the Paris Agreement. The zama zamas, by contrast, have not published a single roadmap for reducing their scope-three emissions.
I tried to explain this at COP last year during a panel on post-extraction synergies, where I shared a stage with several executives who have successfully transitioned their companies away from active mining and into the much greener sector of simply ignoring the mines they already dug. They expressed a deep, profound exhaustion with the local populations who refuse to respect the pristine desolation of a properly abandoned corporate asset.
It is incredibly frustrating to spend millions of dollars legally reclassifying a toxic open pit as a passive biodiversity corridor, only to have unlicensed locals ruin the aesthetic by trying to survive in it.
Julian is entirely right, of course. The sheer entitlement of the zama zamas is staggering. As the price of gold has soared, these individuals have taken it upon themselves to bypass the traditional, environmentally conscious supply chain—a supply chain that involves flying executives to Geneva to discuss how to mine gold more softly. Instead, they are just digging it out of the ground themselves, completely circumventing the carbon-offset markets. It is greenwashing by omission.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration has proven entirely ineffective at stopping this scourge, largely because police action in Johannesburg has focused almost exclusively on the criminality of the trespassing, completely missing the broader ecological crime. When a zama zama is arrested, the authorities confiscate their tools and their gold, but they never once ask to see their carbon accounting. How are we supposed to reach a global tipping point if the South African Police Service refuses to enforce basic climate disclosures during a raid?
I have spent my entire career advocating for the earth, which is why I have zero patience for those who refuse to do the work. If these illegal miners truly cared about the scarred land they are currently standing on, they would form a Delaware LLC, hire a compliance officer, and pledge to stop illegal mining by 2050. Until then, they are nothing more than ecological vandals, ruining the perfectly good environmental disaster the conglomerates worked so hard to leave behind.