Poetic Licence: What separates a mining magnate from a zama zama

Patrice Motsepe’s name glows in gold, but the zama zamas dig in the dark. Their hands, cracked and calloused, carve through the belly of the earth, chasing the same promise that made billionaires out of men who never swung a pickaxe.

We are told that illegal mining is the crime of the desperate - the work of faceless shadows, scurrying underground like ghosts with headlamps. But the true ghosts, the ones who haunt South Africa’s stolen wealth, sit in polished boardrooms, cloaked in legality, their plunder protected by paperwork and power.

For every zama zama buried in a collapsed shaft, for every miner’s widow who wails at the pit’s mouth, there is a handshake behind closed doors, an overlooked permit, R700 million worth of illegally mined gemstones, shimmering, hoarded in hidden vaults far from the hands that bled to unearth them.

Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua’s) claim is not a revelation—it is a reminder of what the dust-choked miners have always known: the game was rigged before they ever set foot in the tunnel.

Four police officers from Stilfontein, North West province, have been arrested on charges of aiding the escape of alleged illegal mining kingpin James Neo Tshoaeli, known as "Tiger." Tshoaeli had resurfaced from Shaft 11 at the abandoned Buffelsfontein gold mine during Operation Vala Umgodi, a crackdown on illegal mining. Instead of being booked into custody, he vanished, prompting suspicions of police involvement.

The zama zamas, their lungs are still lined with dust, their dreams with disappointment. Yet they go down again, deeper, past the bones of those who never made it out. They do not have the luxury of ethics, only hunger. The law, like the mine shaft, is a tunnel with no light at the end - only the crushing weight of power pressing down from above.

Patrice Motsepe’s fortune was cut from the same rock they risk their lives for. But he will never be called a zama zama. That name is reserved for the poor, the expendable, the ones who are shot at by police while the other looters sip champagne in Sandton.

They tell us illegal mining is a national crisis. They are right. But the crisis is not just at the bottom of the food chain. It starts at the top, with men whose wealth is so vast it no longer has a scent of sweat or soil. It is clean, clinical, kept safe in offshore accounts, far from the rubble-strewn graves of the miners who died for it. Remember Marikana.

And still, the zama zamas go down. Because hunger does not negotiate. Because justice is reverberation in an empty tunnel. Because no matter how deep they dig, they will never reach the gold already stolen.

And so, the question remains—who is the real criminal? The man who digs with his bare hands, or the one who owns the mine but swears he never saw the theft?