Towards 'zero harm': South Africa's mining industry sees historic safety improvements in 2024

A worker underground at a mine located west of Johannesburg, Gauteng, on 12 October 2022. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

23 Jan 2025

A number of factors explain this improving health and safety record, and the government, companies and unions all deserve credit. But no one is keeping tabs on the number of illegal miners who die underground each year.

The goal of “Zero Harm” remains elusive in South Africa’s deep and dangerous mines, but progress is being made.

In 2024, 42 miners were killed on the job in South Africa — a record low for a calendar year since the onset of industrial-scale mining, the Ministry of Mineral and Petroleum Resources said on Thursday, 23 January 2025.

There was also a significant reduction in reported occupational diseases, with a 17% drop from the previous year to 1,864 cases.

“We are... encouraged that our efforts continue to show a sustainable downward trend in occupational diseases, injuries, and fatalities,” Minister of Mineral and Petroleum Resources Gwede Mantashe said in his prepared remarks.

The previous record low for a calendar year was 49 deaths in 2022. In 2023, 55 miners were killed in accidents, a number tragically inflated by the Impala Platinum catastrophe in November that year which claimed 13 lives when the cage hoisting employees to the surface jarringly reversed course into a rapid and lethal descent.

The 2024 total is also less than half of the death toll of 88 recorded just seven years earlier in 2017. A number of factors explain this improving health and safety record, and the government, companies and unions all deserve credit on this front.

Mechanisation, automation and digitisation

Mechanisation where South Africa’s arduous geology allows machines to replace humans in the danger zones is one, and automation and digitisation are also well under way. Measures such as the rollout of overhead netting and bolting have also greatly reduced fall-of-ground fatalities, long the leading cause of death in South Africa’s mines.

As the name suggests, this is literally when a rock or rocks from above fall on you with crushing force. But while there was a slight reduction of fall-of-ground deaths last year to 13 compared to 2023, that is more than double the six fatalities in 2022 that were linked to such incidents.

The Mine Health and Safety Act has imposed regulations that were flimsy or absent when the Randlords and apartheid state held sway, and the corporate embrace of ESGs — environmental, social and governance issues — has made health and safety a priority in the C-suite.

Much of this has been driven by investor concerns. Dividends drenched in blood just don’t cut it any more. Legal action has also focused mining minds in the wake of the R5-billion silicosis settlement with the gold sector in 2018. And another class action suit regarding occupational disease looms in the coal sector.

Historical perspective

Still, 42 meant that one worker was killed about every nine days in South Africa’s mining industry last year. That this shocking number represents progress underscores the sheer scale of the horrendous carnage of the past.

More than 80,000 miners have been killed in South Africa since the discovery in the late 19th century of mother lodes of gold and diamonds. In the 1980s, when black lives hardly mattered in apartheid-era boardrooms, the annual death toll reached as high as 800.

Mantashe, a former coal miner himself, noted this horrific history in his remarks.

“Just two days ago, on the 21st of January, we were commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Coalbrook disaster which killed 435 mineworkers,” he said.

Proposed Mine Health and Safety Act changes would impose a costly system on mines - law firm A worker underground at a mine located west of Johannesburg, Gauteng, on 12 October 2022. (Photo: Felix Dlangamandla)

It’s also true that South Africa’s mining workforce has almost halved over the past four decades, and so there are fewer miners these days in harm’s way. In 2023, the last year for which data is currently available, South Africa’s mines employed just over 479,000 people, compared with close to 800,000 in the 1980s.

But there has also been substantial improvement in other safety metrics such as the fatality frequency rate, a ratio of deaths per million hours worked. The bottom line is that while mining remains a dangerous occupation in South Africa, it is far safer than it was a few decades and even just a few years ago.

This declining labour force has also been marked by a plunge in the number of foreign mine workers — who mostly hailed from Lesotho and Mozambique — from close to 500,000 to about 30,000 today.

The sons and grandsons of many of those miners who were exploited as migrant labourers are now exploited by criminal syndicates seeking illegal gold, and this has been a focus of attention in recent weeks because of the starvation siege at Stilfontein.

Read more: The ‘surrender or starve’ saga in Stilfontein is a chronicle of deaths foretold

Mantashe said in his remarks on Thursday that South Africa’s economy is estimated to have lost R60-billion in illicit precious metals flows in 2024, and he reiterated his view that illegal miners were criminals, finish and klaar.

“We wish to assure the nation that the state will not take responsibility for the reckless actions of illegal miners,” he said.

Read more: Stilfontein mine rescue ends with 78 dead, 246 rescued and ringleaders in custody
There is no estimate for how many illegal miners died underground in 2024. But so far in 2025, we know that at least 78 dead bodies were pulled from the Stilfontein shaft. DM

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Business Maverick

Mechanisation, automation and digitisation

Historical perspective