JOHANNESBURG, October 30, 2026 — The ground beneath South Africa’s economic capital is caving in as illegal miners and industrial operations alike reshape the landscape. While local politicians point fingers at artisanal diggers, researchers argue that large-scale extraction is the primary driver of subsidence.
Water shortages at animal rescue sites
Cora Bailey has been treating injured animals in the Roodepoort townships since 1991. Her charity, Claw, relies on two 25,000-litre water tanks filled irregularly by the city government for rescued creatures. In mid-October, dozens of zama zamas arrived to dig across the dirt road from her facility. They began taking water for panning and processing from the organisation’s tanks.
“We’ve asked them really nicely and haven’t ever refused them water to drink … But, for the first time ever, we closed the gate at 12 [midday], because we literally had about two buckets of water left,” Bailey said. Police told her that the scale of illegal mining was too big for them to do anything about. About a week later, officers sheared away grass that had partly hidden the diggers. Within a few days, a smaller group returned, though they were now taking water only for drinking.
The scope of underground crime
South Africa’s police regularly trumpet their success in tackling illegal mining. On 19 October, officers said they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas across the country in the previous week. However, researchers put the number of illegal miners in the tens of thousands. In 2019, Marcena Hunter, a researcher at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, estimated that a tenth of South Africa’s gold production, worth about $1bn, was being exported illegally.
Police operations have also led to tragedy. In 2025, 93 bodies were pulled from a mine shaft in Stilfontein after officers blocked food and water from being delivered underground. Meanwhile, there is no end in sight to the dynamics driving illegal mining, including high gold prices, poverty, unemployment, corrupt politicians, police profiting, and the failure of mining companies to fulfil their legal obligation to seal shafts when they cease operating.
South Africa’s modern history is tied to mining. In 1884, gold was found on a farm, sparking a gold rush that led to the creation of Johannesburg. Gold production peaked in the 1970s, but South Africa was the world’s largest producer, a title it held for more than a century until 2007. In 2009, Morris Viljoen, a geology professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, estimated that the reef that gave the university its name had produced more than a third of the gold ever mined globally.
The city government claims there is still 40,000 tonnes of gold underground in the region. But with the remainder lying ever deeper, the costs of recovering it have risen. Mining companies are supposed to seal up old mine shafts and rehabilitate the environment around them. However, in 2025, mining minister Gwede Mantashe said there were “6,100 derelict and ownerless mines and 1,170 unsafe mine openings” in response to a parliamentary question.
Geology behind the collapse
The skyline south of Johannesburg is punctuated by the pale yellow ridges of mine dumps. Increasingly, the ground is also caving open. For politicians seeking votes in local elections on 4 November, the culprit is clear: illegal miners. In May, Kenny Kunene, the Johannesburg council member responsible for transport, took journalists on a tour of sinkholes that he claimed were the fault of zama zamas, including a section of Wemmer Pan Road that had completely collapsed.
The road was once the main artery linking the city’s central business district to the south-eastern suburbs. In one section it has completely disappeared, now raw earth pitted with the holes where illegal miners have been digging. However, when it comes to sinkholes, experts say zama zamas are being scapegoated.
Rosalind Morris, an anthropology professor at Columbia University, who has worked extensively with illegal miners, noted that the porous dolomitic rock to Johannesburg’s south and west 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.
“There are areas where there is a lot of residual gold, which are being very intensely mined by zama zamas, and some of that definitely causes structural collapse, there’s no doubt about it. But the idea that this was invented or caused for the first time by zama zamas is completely fallacious,” Morris added.
Gangs and ghost towns
Zama zamas are also frequently blamed for violence in mining areas, including a September mass shooting in Wedela township, west of Johannesburg. However, David van Wyk, the lead researcher at Bench Marks Foundation, said culpability lay with the often-feuding gangs that controlled access to the shafts. “The guys working in the mine are actually super-exploited cheap labour … The guys with the guns are the guys who take the gold,” he said. “They don’t go underground.”
In Khutsong, about 50 miles (80km) west of Johannesburg, illegal miners, local and foreign, kept the township afloat, said Vusi Cele, the youth secretary for the local branch of Mining Affected Communities United in Action. “Without those rents, it’s a ghost town,” he said.
Cele, 33, currently hustles above ground selling mobile phone covers and screen protectors. He said he too would mine if he could get a licence. “On the surface there’s peanuts,” he said. “Underground there’s money.”
Global context: environmental stakes
The instability beneath Johannesburg is not unique to South Africa. Environmental impact of mining can occur at local, regional, and global scales through direct and indirect mining practices. Mining can cause erosion, sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, or the contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface water by chemicals emitted from mining processes. These processes also affect the atmosphere through carbon emissions which contributes to climate change.
As markets in Central Asia and beyond watch commodity prices fluctuate, the human cost of extraction remains high. The company said that sustainable practices are essential for long-term viability. Data shows that without regulation, the environmental footprint grows. Officials noted that balancing economic gain with ecological preservation is a challenge facing nations worldwide.
Sources
Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
