Barely a week after the oversight committee of the Parliament Portfolio Committee on Minerals and Energy had departed, the Free State town of Jagersfontein received yet another deluge on Tuesday night from the collapsing walls of Jagersfontein tailings. Whilst the collapse did not occur in the sleepy hours of the morning, roads were reportedly immediately cordoned off as authorities feared the worst from a mine that has gained global icon status for its comical ESG failures. There are significant, glaring gaps in their Environmental management plan (EMP) laden with finger-pointing; the Mayor was on television lamenting the mine had no relationships with local communities. Add the murky directorships and Section 11 transfer of shares and Jagersfontein becomes the hill where noble mining died.
Xolani Tseletsele, Mayor of the Kopanong municipality, fielded questions from television anchors late into the night, slamming mine owners while also assuaging fears in a town that had experienced a September from hell: two tailings dam collapses within weeks can only make the community fear the worst is yet to come. They had witnessed fly-through visits from political leaders as high as the President, Minister Gwede Mantashe and his Deputy from the Department of Minerals and Energy, and Free State leaders assuring them that the mine owners would be held accountable for their widely publicized spit into the MPRDA.
“The World Got Diamonds. A Mining Town Got Buried in Sludge” The New Yok Times
The Jagersfontein disaster has caused alarm in a nation where heaping dams of mining waste, known as tailings, are part of the landscape. Experts estimate that South Africa has hundreds of tailings dams, which mining watchdogs say is the legacy of an exploitative industry that extracts lucrative gems for jewellery stores abroad, while poor communities are saddled with toxic waste at home… The sludge wiped out much of two residential neighbourhoods to the south and the east. Fields, stretching for miles, looked like frozen cement lakes, some dotted with mangled cars and sunken utility poles.
There is little doubt that Jagersfontein will be remembered as a blemish on an industry in transition: global operators are sharpening their ESG compliance frameworks with clean mining and technology-driven operations, energy input has become a critical point of transition with a renewable regime that is only emerging against the world’s dominant, yet reluctant, fossil-fuelled economies, and persistent, historically shameless legacies of inequities and environmental degradation in host communities.
Destructions of local infrastructures in a country where there is barely enough to go around for communities, rising unemployment, and a weak policy environment should be addressed quickly to resurrect some semblance of normalcy in what President Ramaphosa referred to as a “sunrise sector” at the Mining Indaba a few years ago. Communities will not demand public flogging of the mine’s mysterious owners, but Mayor Tseletsele would be pivotal in calming tensions among those still in mourning following the first collapse of the dam walls on September 11.
The South African Parliament has called for a thorough investigation into the Jagersfontein mine disaster and the company’s directors.
The portfolio committee on mineral resources and energy also wants to revise the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act to include regulations for “tailings dams and mine dumps.”
The committee wants to investigate not only the mining company’s directors but also the state of mine dumps in South Africa, and findings of the investigation reported to the National Assembly as soon as possible.
The committee also recommended in its oversight report that the Department of Water and Sanitation explain and make available the compliance report that it allegedly issued when it declared the dam safe in 2021.
It was “noted with concern” that the Department of Water and Sanitation declared the dam safe and ordered it to be reopened, only to have the disaster occur a few months later.
The Free State provincial government confirmed one person died from the dam wall collapse. Houses, livestock, and vehicles were swept away when the tailings dam burst into the mining town, knocking off telecommunications and electricity connections.
