By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Two more bodies of illegal miners have been retrieved, bringing a total number of bodies to four in less than a month from a disused mine shaft in Stilfontein, North West.
The latest body was recovered from Shaft 11 at the old Buffelsfontein mine where an operation is currently under way to bring hundreds of illegal miners back to the surface.
Earlier this morning one body was retrieved, while the first two bodies were retrieved on Tuesday.
Community leader Johannes Qankase said the volunteers were devastated but motivated to retrieve the bodies.
“Many lives could have been saved on time if they listened to us on 21 October.
Our volunteers are psychologically affected. They are traumatised. We have asked them to soldier on. They will need counselling. They are not trained to handle bodies. They are doing it out of love, regardless of nationality,” Qankase said.
The standoff between the illegal miners and the police has been ongoing for over a month after the beginning of Operation Vala Umgodi.
National police spokesperson Brigadier Athlenda Mathe confirmed the body was retrieved from the mines where the illegal miners have refused to surface.
The retrieval of the bodies came after the community in Stilfontein was allowed to take down food to the trapped miners.
Mathe confirmed that police were monitoring this process as per the court order, and were not participating.
An urgent application was made at the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, on Sunday.
The community-based organisation, Mining Affected Community in Action (Macua), sought an urgent court order to compel the government to provide humanitarian aid to the miners.
The Minister in the Presidency, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, said, that no help would be given to the illegal miners.
“We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted. We didn’t send them there,” Ntshavheni said.
South Africa had once been the world’s largest producer of gold but that has been on the decline over the past few decades. A number of former mining operations now are abandoned and have fallen into disrepair.
Thousands of illicit miners pick through these shuttered mines in search of gold and other minerals in a practice considered extremely dangerous due to the state of the mines.