Fourteen miners died near Rustenburg on August 13 when the earth gave way beneath them. One survivor, Lerothodi Nale, a migrant from Lesotho, described it to Al Jazeera in a single sentence: “It happened in a flash, and the earth swallowed a dozen.” Without a passport, Nale fled the scene immediately afterward, too afraid of arrest to seek help.
The collapse happened at a disused mining site near Nkaneng, an informal settlement outside Rustenburg in the North West province. North West police commissioner Lieutenant-General Arthur Adams told journalists that more miners could still be trapped underground. For the families waiting at home, that uncertainty was its own kind of catastrophe.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/9/6/south-africas-chrome-riches-fuel-a-deadly-underground-economy.
Additional reference context is available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/south-africas-chrome-riches-fuel-a-deadly-underground-economy.
Dineo Motho, 29, travelled roughly 400 kilometres overnight from Lesotho to Marikana police station after hearing about the disaster. Her husband, Kgadi Ntuli, 35, was among the missing. “He left home in January to try his luck in Rustenburg chrome pits because with drying lands in Lesotho, there was no water to nourish our goats, crops or fruits. There were no jobs, no food,” she told Al Jazeera. Ntuli had been moving between Lesotho and South Africa’s chrome fields, sending money home. Now he was gone.
South Africa sits atop the Bushveld Igneous Complex, one of the world’s richest geological formations, containing vast deposits of platinum-group metals and chrome. The country is the world’s largest chrome producer and exporter, with much of its ore feeding global supply chains, particularly China’s stainless steel industry. Alongside the formal sector, illegal extraction has expanded sharply, with authorities raising concerns about unauthorized operations, environmental destruction and criminal groups exploiting abandoned mine sites.
The public health toll is severe and largely invisible. Metals governance expert Tapuwa Nhachi put it plainly to Al Jazeera: “The disused mines are sitting graves with no geologists to confirm if rocks are still stable down there.” Thousands of abandoned shafts remain scattered across the country. “Not a month goes without fatalities in abandoned mine holes,” Nhachi said. The South African government has announced programmes to rehabilitate abandoned mines and close dangerous shafts, but critics say the scale of the response remains far below the challenge.
Chrome draws illegal operators for a specific reason. Deposits often sit closer to the surface, lowering extraction costs compared with deeper underground mining. Environmental remediation expert Shamiso Mupara explained to Al Jazeera: “For criminal networks, it becomes easier to extract, process and move the ore into supply chains.” The result is a system where profits concentrate among those controlling equipment, transport routes and buyers, while the miners absorb all the physical risk.
The recruitment pipeline runs across borders. Undocumented migrants from Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, alongside unemployed South Africans including former mineworkers, are recruited by intermediaries who offer transport money and promise work around Rustenburg’s chrome fields. Once underground, workers are divided into groups controlled by criminal networks that supply food, equipment and, according to Nale’s account, explosives. Nale alleged that criminal groups take 70 percent of earnings and hold miners in debt bondage, forcing them to keep working until debts are repaid. Workers can be transferred between groups and sent into unsafe conditions to extract additional ore.
Migration expert Loren Landau at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg identified the engine driving this cycle: “The pipeline sending scores of young male migrants to subterranean death does not pause because there are few viable job options left.” Economic hardship and worsening environmental pressures across parts of Southern Africa have widened that vulnerability. “As soon as this batch of miners dies or gets injured, more destitute men are on the bus to replace them,” Landau told Al Jazeera.
Meanwhile, the damage reaches beyond individual workers into the communities around the mines. Mmanotshe Ramokoka, traditional leader of the Baphalane Traditional Council in North West province, described the situation bluntly: “It’s an ecological warzone.” Illegal mining has damaged farmland, threatened water supplies and generated conflict between communities and criminal groups. Open pits endanger livestock. Waste from illegal processing sites contaminates local environments. “The gangs have millions to rent industrial equipment for stripping soil for chrome. Migrant diggers die for a tiny fraction of the profit,” Ramokoka said.
For years, illegal mining in South Africa was associated mainly with abandoned gold mines around Gauteng province, where informal miners known as zama zamas worked old underground shafts. Some experts and community leaders suggest that Operation Vala Umgodi, launched in 2023 to target illegal mining, has pushed some criminal operators toward less-monitored chrome-producing areas in North West province.
Police have rejected allegations of widespread complicity. Lieutenant-Colonel Tinyiko Mathebula of the Hawks, the South African Police Service’s specialised organised crime unit, told media outlets including Al Jazeera that 23 illegal mining cases had been registered in the Rustenburg area over the past two years, with 63 accused charged. Authorities had also seized 20 trucks and 15 excavators linked to illegal mining activities.
Enforcement alone, though, has not broken the cycle. As long as poverty drives workers toward dangerous pits and criminal groups control access to chrome wealth, the system finds new recruits. Landau’s assessment was short and difficult to argue with: “Nothing scares the hungry.” The open question is whether any combination of mine rehabilitation, border enforcement and economic development can change that calculus before more families make the overnight journey to a police station.