Mineral Department to take steps against illegal sand mining

Residents in the Kutama area and the Kutama Royal Council had warned strangers who came to mine sand in the area to refrain from illegal mining, but according to reports, the miners refused to adhere to the request.

A river runs through the Manavhela village, from which both villagers and sand miners have been mining sand for years. Now the river has run dry and there is no sand that they can mine from it. The miners thus started mining sand in the open surface in the grazing fields.

The Kutama royal council's chairperson, Vho-Leslie Ramabulana, said that the council had warned the sand miners to refrain from mining sand from the open surfaces because it might result in major land corrosion during rainy seasons. “What they are doing is illegal because that land belongs to other people,” Ramabulana said.

He indicated that the council had previously reported the matter to the Tshilwavhusiku Police, who said that they could not open any criminal cases against sand miners. “The police told us that they didn't have any Act on whose basis they could charge illegal sand miners,” he said.

Limpopo Mirror visited the area where illegal sand mining was taking place. A group of men and male youths ran away the moment they saw the newspaper team arrive at the place, leaving their shovels behind. They shouted from a distance and asked if the journalists had come to arrest them. However, they came back after some assurance that the journalists were not the police.

“Look, we are not criminals,” said one youth. “Truck men come here from wherever they live, and only hire us to load their trucks and they pay us per load. We come from this village. We get our daily bread from digging sand and loading it onto their trucks.”

Another resident in the Kutama area, Mr Gilbert Muofhe, said that it was painful for residents to just watch trucks coming in empty and going out loaded with sand. “They are damaging our land and enriching themselves in the process,” he said. “Surely they must stop what they are doing – or else the government must help us from these illegal sand miners.”

The spokesperson for the Department of Mineral Resources, Mr Aaron Kharivhe, said that a site inspection would be conducted by the department in order to establish if the said operators were holders of any right or permit issued in terms of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act.

“We will investigate to find out if said miners have an environmental authorisation in terms of the National Environmental Management Act to mine sand in that area and spot,” he said. “If they do not have the above, the department will take appropriate steps, including but not limited to pressing criminal charges, based on the findings.”

Date:16 July 2016

By: Tshifhiwa Mukwevho

Tshifhiwa Given Mukwevho was born in 1984 in Madombidzha village, not far from Louis Trichardt in the Limpopo Province. After submitting articles for roughly a year for Limpopo Mirror's youth supplement, Makoya, he started writing for the main newspaper. He is a prolific writer who published his first book, titled A Traumatic Revenge in 2011. It focusses on life on the street and how to survive amidst poverty. His second book titled The Violent Gestures of Life was published in 2014.

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