Illegal Gold Mining Splits Johannesburg: Scapegoats and Sinkholes

By Olivia Hart, Business Bearings

South Africa holds an estimated 40,000 tonnes of unmined gold under Johannesburg, and much of it is being extracted illegally by tens of thousands of miners the government says it cannot stop. That figure, claimed by the city government, frames a crisis that neither police raids nor political blame has dented.

The pressure is now landing on ordinary operations on the ground. In late September, dozens of zama zamas — the Zulu-derived name for illegal miners, meaning roughly "to take a chance" — began digging across the road from Claw, an animal welfare charity in Roodepoort, west of Johannesburg. They drew water for panning from the charity's two 25,000-litre tanks, which the city fills irregularly for some 100 rescued animals.

"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," Cora Bailey, who has run the charity since 1991, said in mid-October.

Police told Bailey the scale of illegal mining was too big for them to act on, she said. Officers later cleared grass concealing the miners; a smaller group returned within days, now drawing water only for drinking.

How big is the illegal gold trade?

South African police regularly announce wins. On 19 October, they said they had arrested 71 suspected zama zamas nationwide in the previous week. That number sits against a population researchers put in the tens of thousands.

In 2019, Marcena Hunter of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime estimated that a tenth of South Africa's gold production — worth about $1 billion — was being exported illegally. Police operations carry their own costs: in 2025, 93 bodies were recovered from a shaft in Stilfontein after officers blocked delivery of food and water underground.

The drivers are unresolved: high gold prices, poverty, unemployment, corrupt officials profiting, and mining companies failing to legally seal shafts. Mining Minister Gwede Mantashe told parliament in 2025 that South Africa has "6,100 derelict and ownerless mines and 1,170 unsafe mine openings."

Why Johannesburg keeps paying for its past?

Gold built the city. A find on a farm in 1884 triggered the rush that created Johannesburg; production peaked in the 1970s, and the country remained the world's largest producer until 2007. In 2009, geology professor Morris Viljoen of the University of the Witwatersrand estimated the local reef had yielded more than a third of all gold ever mined globally.

Claw itself occupies the old offices of Durban Deep, a mine that shut at the turn of the century. What remains underground lies deeper and costs more to recover — leaving profitable seams for those willing to dig informally.

Who is really behind the sinkholes?

Ahead of local elections on 4 November, politicians have named a culprit. In May, Kenny Kunene, the Johannesburg council member for transport, showed journalists sinkholes he blamed on zama zamas, including a collapsed stretch of Wemmer Pan Road — once the main link between the central business district and the south-eastern suburbs, now raw earth pitted with diggers' holes.

Experts call that a partial truth. Rosalind Morris, an anthropology professor at Columbia University who has worked extensively with illegal miners, points to the porous dolomitic rock south and west of the city, which destabilises 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. Some zama zama digging "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."

Violence, too, is misattributed, said David van Wyk, lead researcher at Bench Marks Foundation, after a September mass shooting in Wedela township. "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."

Could licensing change the equation?

In Khutsong, about 50 miles west of Johannesburg, informal mining sustains the local economy. "Without those rents, it's a ghost town," said Vusi Cele, 33, youth secretary of the local branch of Mining Affected Communities United in Action, which campaigns for "artisanal miners" to receive licences. Cele now sells phone covers above ground but said he would mine if licensed: "On the surface there's peanuts. Underground there's money."

Most zama zamas are migrants from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, experts agree, though no comprehensive data exists. With no comprehensive data, no sealed shafts and gold prices high, the trade's incentives remain firmly intact.