African Arguments visited ten "active" coal mines around Ermelo in South Africa. Three were abandoned, and had been for years according to locals.
This story was reported with support from the Earth Journalism Network.
Standing on a rocky outcrop above his hometown in Mpumalanga province, Moses Madonsela sighs at the sight of the large artificial hills that scar the dry winter landscape. This was once a field on which his community farmed maize. It is now buried beneath a colossal pile of rocks and soil, interspersed with large water-filled holes.
These grey man-made mountains are the legacy of a coal mine that opened in 2015 before abruptly closing a few years later. Madonsela says the mine was called "Rivero", though there is no signpost or mention on a map to verify the name. Dark hills left behind by two other former coal mines - La Brie and Penumbra collieries - also loom over this terrain, casting shadows across the dirt road back to Madonsela's house.
"We call them 'fly-by-night' or 'Zama Zama mines'," he says, using a term usually employed in South Africa to refer to illegal artisanal miners. "They come, they dig, and then they run away."
Madonsela's village of Bambanani, near the town of Ermelo, is wedged between these three coal mines that have been all but abandoned, their mining pits left open and the hills formed by excavated soil becoming part of the landscape. It has been years since any activity took place on the sites, beyond occasional artisanal miners trying their luck at picking leftover coal.
Yet, officially, La Brie and Penumbra collieries are still in operation. Both are included on the list of over 2,000 active mines - including around 200 coal mines - published annually by South Africa's Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE). They are among the many "ghost" coal mines that local activists and experts say benefit from legal loopholes and the opacity of South Africa's mining sector to evade rehabilitation requirements.
In Mpumalanga, which produces about 80% of the coal that still accounts for most electricity generation in South Africa, the scars of mining are everywhere. The winter air smells of smoke and a thick smog descends on cold evenings. Cattle regularly fall down the open pits left behind by mine owners who might have gone bankrupt, are untraceable, or simply moved on under a new name once the mineral resources dried up. On several tragic occasions, children have also drowned in the abandoned pits filled with rainwater.
African Arguments visited ten mine sites around Ermelo listed as operating by the DMRE. Information on the mines' owners and their exact locations is extremely difficult to find and largely unavailable to the public. However, we could verify that at least three of the listed mines were in fact out of operation - and had been for years, according to local community members.
Under South African law, companies that wish to open a mine must have adequate financial provision to rehabilitate the site. When ending operations, they are required to apply for a closure certificate and meet various criteria such as treating polluted water and returning the land to its previous use as far as possible. However, loopholes are easy to find.
"It is much easier and cheaper for a mining company to go into care and maintenance - a managed process of temporarily pausing production - and then just be forgotten about, than to actually legally close a mine," explains Ingrid Watson, a researcher who leads the Responsible Mining Laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Lack of governmental oversight also makes it easy for a mine to simply slip off the radar. The DMRE does not make information on mining licences and closures publicly available, making it extremely challenging to identify owners and hold them accountable. For instance, the Penumbra colliery is still listed under the ownership of Ichor Coal, but a company representative told African Arguments that the mine was "sold years ago". The firm's website mentions Penumbra's sale in 2020 but does not name the new owner.
"This should be public information," says Watson, who has had to file multiple legal challenges under South Africa's Promotion of Access to Information Act for her research. "We need to know the status of land use, mines, and closures."
Paul Miller, a mining consultant, likens the coal sector in South Africa to "the Wild West". He has spent decades advocating for greater transparency and has created an interactive map of South Africa's mine. For this, he had to source data from South Africa's Heritage Resources Agency, which is hired to conduct archaeological and palaeontological assessments of prospective mine sites and makes the information public.
"It's absolutely ridiculous that it isn't published by the Department itself," he says. "This is an incredibly potentially damaging industry and yet we've allowed it to go dark. For more than half of all the coal produced, we don't even know the names of the companies or directors. They don't have telephone numbers or websites. They don't have social labour plans."
Up until the early-2000s, most coal miners in South Africa were large companies listed on the stock exchange and thus subject to rigorous requirements of financial disclosure and environmental reporting. However, this began to change in 2002 as a law aimed at encouraging previously disadvantaged actors to enter the mining sector was passed as part of South Africa's positive discrimination policy known as "Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment".
"What we saw was a proliferation of small-scale mining," explains Watson, who published a 2015 study on the issue. "These are smaller, privately-owned companies who don't have the same reputational risks or the same obligations around reporting. They haven't signed onto the same global commitments around transparency and environmental care."
Earlier this year, the DMRE announced it had hired a company to design an electronic cadastre system to facilitate prospecting and licensing. Miller welcomes this overdue development but points out that online maps of mining deeds have been the international standard for years in countries like Namibia, Botswana, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"Transparency is good for everyone, including the industry itself," he says. "There is no argument for why there shouldn't be transparency around mining - except corruption, cronyism, and incompetence."
The DMRE did not respond to African Arguments' invitation to comment.
On the other side of Ermelo, the Golfview mine is today a wasteland littered with rusting equipment and derelict buildings. The mine had been owned by the Netherlands-based Anker group, which was fined for environmental transgressions in 2009 and eventually went bankrupt.
With no funds available for environmental rehabilitation, the DMRE should have stepped in, says Miller. "But that rehabilitation never happened and as a result it can't be issued with a closure certificate," he explains. "Now you've got a zombie, an undead mine: nobody owns it, nobody's responsible for it, and it's probably leaking acid mine drainage into the watercourses."
In 2015, the coal left in the mine's underground tunnels caught fire. The blaze hasn't stopped since, though the local activist collective Khuthala Environmental Care Group managed to extinguish parts of the fire by covering them with sand.
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"No one is keeping track, no one is rehabilitating, and as long as there's coal and oxygen, the fire will continue," says Zethu Hlatshwayo, spokesperson for the group, which also runs environmental programmes in the area and supports communities impacted by the mines. "As long as there's no justice, we can't rest. We need to get the rehabilitation done. We've lost more than enough children to these open pits and underground fires. Do we want to wait for the next catastrophe?"
Across South Africa, the government has identified over 6,000 abandoned, ownerless, or derelict mines - mostly remnants of centuries of gold mining - each with severe environmental consequences. Activists fear the impact of future mine closures in Mpumalanga amid South Africa's plan to transition away from coal in the coming decade.
"We hear people say we must close all the mines, but they don't talk about rehabilitation," says Hlatshwayo. "We have to put rehabilitation as a priority."
He believes there is "a lot of untapped potential" on this front. In the absence of mining companies and the government, the Khuthala Environmental Care Group has explored cheap and effective ways to repurpose mine sites, such as turning landfill into community gardens or planting hemp to restore damaged soil.
"Unless we do something, the problem is going to be stuck with us and with our children," says Hlatshwayo.
Julie Bourdin is a South African-French freelance journalist based in Cape Town. Her multimedia work focuses on human rights and stories at the intersection of the personal and the political. She has reported extensively at Europe's borders on migration issues, and now focuses on stories in Southern Africa with a strong inclination for climate-related angles.
