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The ten-point peace plan of President Zelenskyy is as follows:
1. Radiation and nuclear safety.
2. Food security.
3. Energy security.
4. The release of all prisoners and deportees.
5. Implementation of the United Nations Charter and restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the world order.
6. The withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities.
7. Justice – by establishing a Special Tribunal regarding the crime of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and an international mechanism to compensate for all the damages caused by the war.
8. The prevention of ecocide: the need for immediate protection of the environment.
9. The prevention of escalation by effective security assurances, for which Ukraine has put forward the Kyiv Security Compact proposal.
10. The confirmation of the end of the war by a jointly signed document.
Russian propagandists, as well as skeptics in the West, have denounced Zelenskyy’s plan as impractical because it does not offer Putin any concessions. But why should Zelenskyy offer Putin any concessions, especially at the beginning of a negotiation? Putin started this barbaric, unnecessary war. He is now losing, which he understands (more on this here.) Did Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill offer Hitler face-saving “off ramps” in 1943 after Germany lost the Battle of Stalingrad? Did the U.S.-led coalition of countries that pushed Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991 offer to give the Iraqi dictator twenty percent of the country he tried to annex in the pursuit of peace? Zelenskyy’s plan may not be the end point of a peace settlement, but it most certainly is a logical beginning. If Putin doesn’t like Zelenskyy’s ideas, he should publish his own proposal. To date, he has not done so.
When endorsing Zelenskyy’s peace plan and the idea of organizing a conference, Western leaders should refrain from undermining Zelenskyy’s negotiating leverage by publicly suggesting their ideas for compromises and peace settlements. Ultimately, it is only Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian parliament, and the Ukrainian people who have the authority to decide whether to agree to concessions or not. Right now, they are focused on liberating their entire country from Russian occupation. For Ukrainians, this remains the number one priority. And it should be for their international supporters, too.
Even if Zelenskyy and Putin succeeded in signing a peace agreement this year, the issue of sustainable security will remain. Several initiatives toward that goal should be started now.
First, the international community should begin now establishing the mechanisms for holding war criminals accountable. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s plan to establish a special international tribunal to prosecute Russians for their war crimes, recently supported by the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, is a welcome sign. Ukraine, the European Union, and the Netherlands have also already backed the idea of a special tribunal.
Ukraine is taking important steps on its path to the EU, while fighting an aggressor.
— Ursula von der Leyen (@vonderleyen) February 3, 2023
I know that they will keep the pace.
Because Ukrainians are fighting for a democratic future and the freedom of their children. pic.twitter.com/IjpnoN84vr
Second, leaders of the world must think more creatively about how to work together to help rebuild Ukraine after the war. A few weeks ago, the European Union, G7, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and European Investment Bank (EIB) came together to announce the launch of a new Multi-agency Donor Coordination Platform for Ukraine. This is a good first step, but only a first step. Next steps must include the creation of new funding streams, including the confiscation of frozen Russian Central Bank assets held in the West, the transfer of wealth from Russian oligarchs, and eventually reparations to be paid by the Russian government. Western and Ukrainian leaders must give special attention to creating ways for Ukrainian civil society to be involved in the decision-making about and monitoring of reconstruction spending. In fact, to do this giant task right, a coordination platform may not be enough. Maybe a new international agency should be created from scratch, complete with a new international advisory board to (1) monitor progress and spending, (2) liaison between the government of Ukraine and the international donor community (3) interface private sector actors, and (4) provide a special new emphasis on transparency, decentralization, and the strengthening of democratic institutions to create the permissive conditions for effective rebuilding.
Third, the day after the war ends, the United States and NATO must immediately begin rebuilding and strengthening Ukraine’s armed forces. Henry Kissinger, one of the most vocal critics of NATO expansion, recently wrote, “Ukraine has acquired one of the largest and most effective land armies in Europe, equipped by America and its allies. A peace process should link Ukraine to NATO, however, expressed. The alternative of neutrality is no longer meaningful, especially after Finland and Sweden joined NATO.” On this issue, Kissinger is right. NATO should build that link as deeply and quickly as possible right after the war. The best way to deter future Russian military attacks is by arming and training the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the fullest capacity.
Finally, once the ward ends, Biden and European leaders should propose a multilateral negotiation to enhance European security more broadly. Before the war started, I outlined some ideas for such a negotiation in Foreign Affairs, calling it Helsinki 2.0. (Check it out here!) While Putin remains in power, it is hard to see Russia playing a constructive role in any dialogue about European security. But any negotiations about a new European security architecture will take years to conclude, so better to start now, even without Russia for the time being.
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A Ukrainian soldier fires toward Russian positions outside Bakhmut, Ukraine, on November 8. (photo: Bulent Kilic/AFP)
"It's been pretty bad on the ground, a lot of casualties. The life expectancy is around four hours on the front line," Troy Offenbecker, the American fighter, said.
Eastern Ukraine's war-torn city of Bakhmut has been the site of some of the bloodiest fighting since Russia's invasion of its neighbor began almost one year ago. The battle for the city, which had a prewar population of about 73,000 people, is the longest-running of the war.
Fighting in Bakhmut is so bad, Offenbecker said, that it's been dubbed "the meat grinder." In early January, a senior US military official described combat in and around this town, which appears to have limited strategic significance to both Russia and Ukraine, as "really severe and savage."
"You're talking about thousands upon thousands of artillery rounds that have been delivered between both sides," the official said at the time. "In many cases, you know, you're looking at, you know, several thousand artillery rounds in a day that are being exchanged."
Bakhmut has been a major target for Russian offensive forces, which include both its regular military and the notorious Wagner Group, a Kremlin-linked mercenary organization. Russia has been under "increasing political pressure" to claim some victories ahead of the anniversary of the invasion, according to a Monday intelligence update from Britain's Defense Ministry.
"It is likely that Russia will claim that Bakhmut has been captured to align with the anniversary, regardless of the reality on the ground," the update said.
Bakhmut, which is in Ukraine's occupied Donetsk region, has been besieged by Russian forces throughout much of the war. Late last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said it had been reduced to "burned ruins."
Despite a months-long attempt by Russian forces to encircle the city, Ukrainian troops have provided a stiff defense that has prevented the Russians from capturing it. Meanwhile, Western intelligence estimates that Russia may have suffered as many as 200,000 casualties while fighting in Ukraine, including up to 60,000 troops killed.
"They have, in some categories, lost more than half of their military equipment in this war, and more than a million of the brightest and best Russians have left the country," Victoria Nuland, the US undersecretary of state for political affairs, said earlier this week. "So what is this war bringing the average Russian? Nothing."
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Body camera shows Pueblo County sheriff's deputies contacting Richard Ward in the moments leading up ti his fatal shooting on Feb. 22, 2022. (photo: Law Firm of Killmer, Lane & Newman)
Richard Ward, 32, was fatally shot by a Pueblo County sheriff's deputy on Feb. 22, 2022. He was waiting to pick up his younger brother from school when the deputy dragged him from the vehicle, a struggle ensued and the deputy shot Ward three times in the chest, according to the complaint.
The two deputies involved later told investigators they feared for their lives, and the district attorney's office determined their actions were justified.
"Pueblo County refuses to hold Richard’s killers accountable, and the County has ignored repeated requests to remedy this tragic and egregious situation," said Darold Killmer, an attorney for the family. "So we will turn to a jury to obtain the justice that Richard and his family deserves."
Ward's mother, Kristy Ward Stamp, said her heart is "broken" by the loss. "I have no words to explain this to Richard’s little brother. Our family has been ripped apart," she said in a statement Tuesday.
What happened to Richard Ward?
Ward was with his mother and her boyfriend in her white SUV waiting to pick up his younger brother in a line of cars parked at Liberty Point International Middle School in Pueblo West, Colorado.
While waiting for school to get out, Ward stepped out of the car for a "brief walk," the complaint said. He returned a few minutes later and accidentally got back into the wrong white SUV. He "quickly" realized his mistake, apologized to the surprised driver and got back into his mother's white SUV, the complaint said.
Minutes later, Pueblo County Sheriff’s Deputies Charles McWhorter and Cassandra Gonzales were dispatched to the school on reports of a "suspicious" man who may be "on something" and was "trying to open doors," according to an overview of the incident from the district attorney's office.
McWhorter arrived first and began questioning Ward as he sat in the back of the SUV. "I'm a little nervous 'cause I don't like cops," Ward can be heard saying in the bodycam video. "I have anxiety – they've done things to me." Asked why he feels that way, Ward says officers say things like "stop resisting" when people are "not resisting."
Ward "cooperatively and politely" answered questions for several minutes and told McWhorter he had "mistaken" another vehicle for his mother’s SUV, the complaint said. When McWhorter asked for Ward's identification, Ward began to search through his pockets and pulled out a couple of lighters.
McWhorter asked if Ward had any weapons, and Ward said he didn’t think so but that he might have a pocketknife, the bodycam video shows. McWhorter told Ward not to pull the pocketknife out if he did have it. Ward did not have a pocketknife on him, the complaint said.
Ward located a "prescribed anti-anxiety tablet" in his pocket and put it in his mouth, the complaint said. McWhorter "aggressively demanded" to know what Ward had placed in his mouth and "suddenly grabbed" Ward and dragged him from the SUV, the complaint said.
McWhorter and Gonzales threw Ward "violently to the ground, recklessly and deliberately initiating a wholly unnecessary and purposeless physical use of force against and struggle," the complaint said.
"It was a pill. It was a pill. Let me go," Ward can be heard saying in the bodycam video, which becomes blurred as the bodycam falls to the ground. "Stop resisting, bro," McWhorter can be heard saying. Gonzales's bodycam video appears to show both officers wrestling with Ward on the ground.
Ward did not "meaningfully" resist and offered a "paltry attempt at self-defense" as he was "trapped in the grips of two armed police officers," the complaint said. McWhorter did not issue any warning to Ward that he would use deadly force, the complaint said.
"Within only a few seconds of pulling Richard – who was unarmed – from the car onto the ground underneath the hands-on force being applied by both deputies, Deputy
McWhorter shot Richard three times with his service firearm, point blank, in the chest," the complaint said.
What happened after the shooting?
Ward's mother and her boyfriend can be heard screaming after the shooting. "What happened?" Ward's mother shouts. "Oh my god, no, no." She later asks: "Can you guys do CPR?"
Ward "survived for some time" after McWhorter shot him, "writhing in pain and shock," but neither deputy provided first aid or took a pulse, the complaint said.
"Instead, they stood and watched him bleed out as middle school students strolled by a few feet away," according to a statement from the family's attorneys.
Emergency medical personnel arrived and attempted to render aid to Ward nearly three minutes after the shooting, the complaint said. Ward was pronounced dead at the scene.
The officers then falsely arrested Ward's mother and her boyfriend, seized their property and interrogated them, the complaint said.
Gonzales had an injury to her right knee, and McWhorter had an injury to his nose, finger, lower back, right knee and neck, according to the district attorney's office.
What did the deputies say?
Three days after the incident, Gonzalez told investigators Ward was "putting up a fight," "not complying with verbal orders" and grabbed at McWhorter’s gun belt, according to the district attorney’s office. She said she thought Ward was going to hurt her or McWhorter.
McWhorter, who was interviewed more than a week after the incident, told investigators Ward had reached into his jacket "as if he was carrying a weapon." He said he pulled Ward out of the car "to handcuff him and to check for weapons." In the struggle, he said he felt Ward "messing with his gun side" and was afraid Ward would get his gun, knock him out or paralyze him.
Both deputies told investigators they did not render aid after the shooting because they believed the people in the car posed a threat, according to the district attorney’s office.
Was there an investigation?
The Pueblo County Sheriff’s Office, Colorado State Patrol, Colorado Bureau of Investigation, Pueblo Police Department and 10th Judicial District Attorney’s Office investigated the incident.
District Attorney Jeff Chostner reviewed the findings and determined the deputies' actions were reasonable and "justified" because they believed their lives or the lives of others were in jeopardy.
Pueblo County did not terminate or discipline McWhorter or Gonzales, and the sheriff's office did not offer any additional training, the complaint said. McWhorter was back working within days of the shooting, according to the complaint.
The Pueblo County Sheriff's Office declined to comment on the lawsuit Tuesday. Chostner 's office could not immediately be reached for comment.
What does the family say?
Ward's family says he was unarmed and presented no danger to McWhorter, his partner, or anyone else.
"The killing of an unarmed man, in broad daylight right in front of his mother, is yet another senseless killing by aggressive law enforcement officers poorly trained to handle even the most routine police tasks without resorting to dangerous and even deadly weapons," Killmer said.
Eddy Stamp, Ward's brother, said his family is "devastated" and "will not rest until justice is achieved."
Asked about the deputies' claims that Ward was a danger, family attorney Mari Newman said the deputies were "simply making things up." She added: "The video doesn't show him doing anything except for being yanked out of the car and thrown to the ground."
Newman also noted the misleading statements made by law enforcement in the wake of the shooting. On the day of the incident, Pueblo County Sherriff David Lucero told local KKTV that Ward "jumped out of the vehicle." Bodycam video shows he was pulled out.
The larger context
The lawsuit comes months after another high-profile police killing in Colorado. Last summer, Clear Creek County deputies fatally shot a man who called for roadside assistance. A grand jury indicted two officers in the case late last year.
Nationwide, police fatally shoot more than 1,000 people every year, including a disproportionate number of Black people, according to the Washington Post database.
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Higher profits and lower labor costs have coincided with increased train accidents. (photo: Xinhua)
The East Palestine disaster is a horrifying, spectacular version of what has become the normal occurrence of train derailments in America. Joe Biden could use this as an opportunity to overhaul a crooked and dangerous industry. So far, he appears uninterested.
The weeks that followed added several more: a train carrying coal derailing near Gothenburg, Nebraska; another chemical-bearing train going off the trails near Detroit, this one also operated by the same Norfolk Southern company behind the East Palestine crash; a pickup truck smashing into a train in New Caney, Texas, sending sixteen train cars off the rails. Maybe that last one doesn’t count, since a truck was the instigating factor. Then again, given how often trucks crash in the United States, especially those carrying the same kinds of dangerous chemicals that were spewed in Ohio, and how much deadlier those crashes are when you stack them up, that’s hardly a cause for relief.
A shocking number of train derailments take place in the United States every year: an average of 1,705, or 54,570 over the span of 1990 to 2021, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. While falling after 2008, the next thirteen years still saw over a thousand derailments a year, killing a total of thirty-one people and injuring 1,759. And East Palestine is far from the first time we’ve seen a derailment this destructive. In the winter of 2002, a Canadian Pacific train carrying anhydrous ammonia, a chemical that aggressively sucks all the moisture out from the human body, crashed outside Minot, North Dakota, injuring more than 1,400 people and trapping residents in their homes, stuck there in below-freezing weather while unable to turn on their furnaces.
Derailments in the United States are a particularly bad problem compared to other countries. While recording 777 million train-kilometers in 2019 (train-kilometers are the measure of a train traveling the distance of one kilometer), 1,338 derailments took place in the country. The EU, by contrast, only saw seventy-three derailments that year despite, by one count, recording 4.5 billion train-kilometers. For Japan, the same year saw more than 2 billion train-kilometers, according to Knoema, and only nine derailments. (In fact, the number of derailments in Japan over the past twenty-one years alone is roughly one-eighth of the amount the United States sees on average in a single year).
What’s behind this? The fact that Norfolk Southern’s accident rate was ticking up at the same time its profits were rising and its executives were assuring investors they’d keep costs down offers a clue. According to More Perfect Union, Norfolk was engaging in what’s known in the industry as “precision scheduled railroading,” one of those consultant-coined bits of jargon that means transporting more train cars and carrying heavier loads with a fraction of the workers. This approach allowed the company to splurge a gargantuan $4.7 billion on dividends and — what else? — stock buybacks, a 4,500 percent increase from two decades earlier, enriching their shareholders.
This was an industry-wide practice, with railroad companies across the board slashing operating expenses while raising train length and speeds, all as share prices grew and grew. Norfolk Southern was just one of the firms profiled by the Washington Post in January 2020 about railroad companies laying off more than twenty thousand railworkers in a year, the worst cuts since the Great Depression, while in the years that followed, operating profits rose while spending on labor plummeted. What seemed at the time like ingenious cost-saving efficiencies in supply chains led to the bottlenecks and shortages that have helped drive worldwide inflation; these railroad accidents are the cost-cutting chickens coming home to roost. Safety deregulation of the industry has only made things worse.
The sad fact is that train derailments (among many other types of accidents) have long been a regular occurrence in the United States — we’re hearing about them more right now because a particularly terrible one recently took place. A competent presidential administration might use this fleeting moment of public outrage and national attention to rally people and Congress behind overhauling this crooked industry. Instead, unless something changes, we seem destined to grow hoarse shouting about it and forget — at least until the next terrible accident.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said on Twitter that it's time for a four-day work week. (photo: Jay Paul/Reuters)
The progressive from Vermont chimed in on the four-day work week debate on Twitter, writing: "With exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it's time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs."
With exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it’s time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs.https://t.co/mIm1EpcZLu
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 21, 2023
Sanders was referencing the latest findings out of the UK on the four-day work week. A large-scale pilot program, spanning over 3,000 workers, found that workers slept better, firms made more money, and employees were less likely to say they did not have enough time to care for loved ones.
As the Washington Post reports, most of the companies involved in the pilot plan on continuing to use a four-day work week.
The concept of a four-day work week has increasingly caught on over the last few years, with firms and researchers alike taking the plunge to cut back hours without reducing pay.
As Insider reported in December, 4 Day Week Global — a New Zealand-based nonprofit — conducted a study involving 33 participating companies that employed 969 people based in the US, Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, who adopted a four-day work week in a pilot program over a six-month period, and it found it was a "resounding success on virtually every dimension."
"Companies are extremely pleased with their performance, productivity and overall experience, with almost all of them already committing or planning to continue with the 4 day week schedule," the report said.
"Revenue has risen over the course of the trial. Sick days and absenteeism are down," it continued. "Companies are hiring. Resignations fell slightly, a striking finding during the 'Great Resignation.' Employees are similarly enthusiastic. And climate impacts, while less well-measured, are also encouraging."
Some US companies have started testing out the idea, as well. A Chick-fil-A owner in Florida launched a three-day work week in November, and he received 400 applications for just one job opening due to the popularity of a shortened workweek.
This isn't the first time a four-day work week has caught the attention of lawmakers — the Congressional Progressive Caucus previously endorsed the "32-Hour Workweek Act," with Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal saying in a statement at the time that it's "past time that we put people and communities over corporations and their profits — finally prioritizing the health, wellbeing, and basic human dignity of the working class rather than their employers' bottom line."
Rep. Mark Takano, a Democrat from California, proposed that legislation. He previously told Insider that a 32-hour work week — which would become the new standard under his proposal — would help Americans craft the new normal of work that they've been demanding.
"I think there was a Great Realization among a lot of Americans — how hard they're working and that they wanted to move on from the jobs that they were working at," Takano said. "So a four-day work week is something that connects a lot of Americans."
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A woman employed as a rock crusher in the abandoned mining town of Durban Deep shows a handful of earth that will be processed to extract gold. (photo: Shaun Swingler)
When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.
Most of the surface infrastructure for this particular mine had been dismantled several years prior, but there was still a hole in the ground—a concrete cylinder roughly seven thousand feet deep. To assess the mine’s condition, a team of specialists lowered a camera down the shaft with a winding machine designed for rescue missions. The footage shows a darkened tunnel, some thirty feet in diameter, with an internal frame of large steel girders. The camera descends at five feet per second. At around eight hundred feet, moving figures appear in the distance, travelling downward at almost the same speed. It is two men sliding down the girders. They have neither helmets nor ropes, and their forearms are protected by sawed-off gum boots. The camera continues its descent, leaving the men in darkness. Twisted around the horizontal beams below them—at sixteen hundred feet, at twenty-six hundred feet—are corpses: the remains of men who have fallen, or perhaps been thrown, to their deaths. The bottom third of the shaft is badly damaged, preventing the camera from going farther. If there are other bodies, they may never be found.
As Welkom’s mining industry collapsed, in the nineteen-nineties, a dystopian criminal economy emerged in its place, with thousands of men entering the abandoned tunnels and using rudimentary tools to dig for the leftover ore. With few overhead costs or safety standards, these outlaw miners, in some cases, could strike it rich. Many others remained in poverty, or died underground. The miners became known as zama-zamas, a Zulu term that loosely translates to “take a chance.” Most were immigrants from neighboring countries—Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Lesotho—that once sent millions of mine workers to South Africa, and whose economies were heavily dependent on mining wages. “You started seeing these new men in the townships,” Pitso Tsibolane, a man who grew up in Welkom, explained to me. “They’re not dressed like locals, don’t talk like locals—they’re just there. And then they vanish, and you know they’re back underground.”
Owing to the difficulty of entering the mines, zama-zamas often stayed underground for months, their existence illuminated by headlamps. Down below, temperatures can exceed a hundred degrees, with suffocating humidity. Rockfalls are common, and rescuers have encountered bodies crushed by boulders the size of cars. “I think they all go through hell,” a doctor in Welkom, who has treated dozens of zama-zamas, told me. The men he saw had turned gray for lack of sunlight, their bodies were emaciated, and most of them had tuberculosis from inhaling dust in the unventilated tunnels. They were blinded for hours upon returning to the surface.
I recently met a zama-zama named Simon who once lived underground for two years. Born in a rural area of Zimbabwe, he arrived in Welkom in 2010. He started digging for gold at the surface, which was dusted with ore from the industry’s heyday. There was gold beside the railway tracks that had once transported rock from the mines, gold among the foundations of torn-down processing plants, gold in the beds of ephemeral streams. But Simon was earning only around thirty-five dollars a day. He aspired to build a house and open a business. To get more gold, he would need to go underground.
In no other country in the world does illegal mining take place inside such colossal industrial shafts. In the past twenty years, zama-zamas have spread across South Africa’s gold-mining areas, becoming a national crisis. Analysts have estimated that illegal mining accounts for around a tenth of South Africa’s annual gold production, though mining companies, wary of alarming investors, tend to downplay the extent of the criminal trade. The operations underground are controlled by powerful syndicates, which then launder the gold into legal supply chains. The properties that have made gold useful as a store of value—notably the ease with which it can be melted down into new forms—also make it difficult to trace. A wedding band, a cell-phone circuit board, and an investment coin may all contain gold that was mined by zama-zamas.
Welkom, once an economic engine of the apartheid state, emerged as an early—and especially dire—hot spot for illegal mining. Since 2007, officials in the Free State province, where Welkom is situated, have recovered the bodies of more than seven hundred zama-zamas—but not all deaths are reported to the authorities, and many bodies remain belowground. “We call it the zama graveyard,” a forensic officer said in a 2017 news interview, following an underground explosion that killed more than forty people. In decommissioned mines, the ventilation systems no longer function, and harmful gases accumulate. At certain concentrations of methane, a mine becomes a bomb that can be detonated by the merest spark; even rocks knocking against each other can set off a blast. In Johannesburg, about a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Welkom, there are fears that illegal miners may cause gas pipelines to explode, including those beneath Africa’s largest soccer stadium.
But perhaps the biggest dangers stem from the syndicates that have seized control of the illicit gold economy. Organized crime is rampant in South Africa—“an existential threat,” according to a recent analysis from the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime—and gold-mining gangs are especially notorious. Armed militias war over turf, both at the surface and underground, carrying out raids and executions. Officials have discovered groups of corpses that have been bludgeoned with hammers or had their throats slit.
In Welkom, getting underground became impossible without paying protection fees to the criminal groups in charge. By 2015, just nine shafts were still operating, in spots where there was ore of sufficient grade to justify the expense of hauling it out. Some syndicates took advantage of these shafts, bribing employees to let the zama-zamas ride “the cage”—the transport elevator—and then walk to areas where mining had ceased. There were also dozens of abandoned shafts, including separate ventilation channels and ducts for subsurface cables. “Companies have difficulty plugging all the holes,” a 2009 report on illegal mining noted. Each of these provided openings for zama-zamas. The miners climbed down ladders made of sticks and conveyor-belt rubber, which deteriorated over time and sometimes snapped. Or they were lowered into the darkness by teams of men, or behind vehicles that reversed slowly for a mile or farther, the ropes feeding over makeshift pulleys above the shaft. Sometimes the ropes would break, or a patrol would arrive, causing the men at the surface to let go. There were stories of syndicates deceiving miners, promising them a ride in the cage, only to force them to climb down the girders. Men who refused were thrown over the edge, with some victims taking around twenty seconds to hit the bottom.
In 2015, Simon entered the mines by paying a thousand dollars to a local syndicate boss, known as David One Eye, who allowed him to walk into the tunnels via an inclined shaft just south of Welkom. One Eye, a former zama-zama himself, had risen from obscurity to become one of the most fearsome figures in the region. He was powerfully built from lifting weights, and he had lost his left eye in a shooting.
The syndicate would charge Simon more than twice as much to exit the mines. He remained underground for almost a year, subsisting on food provided by One Eye’s runners. He came away with too little money, so he went into the mines again, paying the same syndicate to lower him with a rope. He became accustomed to life underground: the heat, the dust, the darkness. He planned to remain there until he was no longer poor, but in the end he came out because he was starving.
Zama-zamas are a nightmarish late chapter in an industry that, more than any other, has shaped South Africa’s history. Surface-level gold deposits were discovered in the area that became Johannesburg, sparking a gold rush in 1886. Twelve years later, the new South African mines were providing a quarter of the world’s gold. (To date, the country has produced more than forty per cent of all the gold ever mined.)
The reefs that outcropped in Johannesburg extend deep underground, making up part of the Witwatersrand basin, a geological formation that stretches in an arc two hundred and fifty miles long. Extracting this gold required tremendous inputs of labor and capital. The Chamber of Mines once likened the basin to “a fat 1,200-page dictionary lying at an angle. The gold bearing reef would be thinner than a single page, and the amount of gold contained therein would hardly cover a couple of commas.” Complicating matters further, this page had been “twisted and torn” by geological forces, leaving fragments “thrust between other leaves of the book.”
In the nineteen-thirties, mining companies began prospecting in a different province—a sparsely populated area that would later be called the Free State. After the Second World War, one borehole produced a sample “so astonishing that financial editors refused to believe the press release,” the historian Jade Davenport wrote, in “Digging Deep: A History of Mining in South Africa.” The yield was more than five hundred times richer than a usual profitable return, propelling the international gold-shares market “into complete dementia.” Land values in the nearest village increased more than two-hundredfold within a week.
But these new goldfields needed to be developed from scratch. There was no electricity or potable water. Vast maize fields spread across the grasslands. In 1947, a mining house called the Anglo American Corporation received permission to establish a new town, to be called Welkom—“welcome” in Afrikaans. The company’s founder, Ernest Oppenheimer, who was the richest man in South Africa, tasked a British planner named William Backhouse with designing the settlement. Inspired by housing developments in England, Backhouse envisaged a garden city with satellite towns and ample greenbelts. There would be wide boulevards and circles to direct the flow of traffic. At the outset, Oppenheimer’s son wrote, the region was “depressing in the extreme”: flat and featureless, choked by frequent dust storms, with a single acacia tree, which was later designated a local monument. Eventually, the city was planted with more than a million trees.
Across South Africa, white mine workers were perpetually in demand, owing to laws that limited Black people to menial and labor-intensive jobs. To attract white workers and skilled technicians away from the Witwatersrand, the Anglo American Corporation built subsidized houses in Welkom, along with lavish recreational facilities such as cricket fields and a horse-riding club. By 1950, Welkom was growing at an average rate of two families per day. “Welkom is going to be the showplace of South Africa!” the national finance minister declared on an official visit.
The economic logic of the mines also demanded an inexhaustible supply of cheap Black labor. Restricted from unionizing until the late nineteen-seventies, Black mine workers performed gruelling and dangerous tasks, such as wielding heavy drills in cramped spaces and shovelling rock; tens of thousands died in accidents, and many more contracted lung diseases. To prevent competition among companies, which would have driven up wages, the Chamber of Mines operated as a central recruiting agency for Black workers from across Southern Africa; between 1910 and 1960, according to one estimate, five million mine workers travelled between South Africa and Mozambique alone. Expanding the labor pool helped the mining industry depress Black wages, which remained almost static for more than five decades. By 1969, the pay gap between white and Black workers had reached twenty to one.
In Welkom, a separate township was built for Black residents, set apart from the city by an industrial area and two mine dumps. One of the city planners’ main goals, according to a history of Welkom from the nineteen-sixties, was to “prevent the outskirts of the town being marred by Bantu squatters.” Named Thabong, or “Place of Joy,” the township lay in the path of the dust from the mines. Segregated mining towns, which dated back to the nineteenth century, laid a foundation for South Africa’s apartheid system, which was formally introduced the year after Welkom was founded. Every evening, a siren sounded at seven o’clock, announcing a curfew for Black people, who faced arrest if they stayed too late in the white part of town.
Oppenheimer had imagined Welkom as “a town of permanence and beauty.” The cornerstone of the civic center, an imposing set of buildings laid out in the shape of a horseshoe, was a twenty-four-inch slab of gold-bearing reef. The council chambers were furnished in walnut, with crystal chandeliers imported from Vienna. There was a banquet hall and one of South Africa’s finest theatres. In 1971, just three years after the complex was unveiled, a guidebook to South African architecture described the design as “perhaps too ambitious for a town which will, in all probability, have a limited life.”
The crash came in 1989. The price of gold had fallen by nearly two-thirds from its peak, inflation was rising, and investors were wary of instability during South Africa’s transition to democracy. (Nelson Mandela was freed the following year.) The rise of powerful unions, in the final years of apartheid, meant that it was no longer possible for the industry to pay Black workers “slave wages,” as the former chairman of one large mining company told me. The Free State goldfields eventually laid off more than a hundred and fifty thousand mine workers, or eighty per cent of the workforce. The region was almost wholly reliant on mining, and Welkom’s economy was especially undiversified. The town’s sprawling urban design was also expensive to maintain, leading to a “death spiral,” Lochner Marais, a professor of developmental studies at the University of the Free State, told me.
I first visited Welkom in late 2021. As I drove into the city, Google Maps announced that I had arrived, but around me it was dark. Then my headlights picked out a suburban home, followed by another. The entire neighborhood was without electricity. South Africa is in the midst of an energy crisis and experiences frequent scheduled power outages, but that was not the cause of this blackout. Rather, it was symptomatic of chronic local dysfunction, in a municipality ranked South Africa’s second worst in a 2021 report on financial sustainability.
Welkom is surrounded by enormous flat-topped mine dumps that rise from the plains like mesas. The roads have been devoured by potholes. Several years ago, zama-zamas began breaking open wastewater pipes to process gold ore, which requires large volumes of water. They also attacked sewage plants, extracting gold from the sludge itself. Now untreated sewage flows in the streets. In addition, zama-zamas stripped copper cables from around town and within the mines. Cable theft became so rampant that Welkom experienced power failures several times per week.
As the gold-mining companies scaled back in South Africa, they left behind wasted landscapes and extensive subterranean workings, including railway lines and locomotives, intact winders and cages, and thousands of miles of copper cable. Many companies had devised protocols for withdrawing from depleted mines, but these were seldom followed; likewise, government regulations around mine closures were weakly enforced. “It’s as if they just locked the door—‘Now we’re done,’ ” a mine security officer said of the companies. Shafts were often sold many times over, the constant changing of hands allowing companies to evade responsibility for rehabilitation. By the early two-thousands, according to authorities, South Africa had a large number of “derelict and ownerless” gold mines across the country, creating opportunities for illegal mining. Mining researchers in South Africa sometimes joke that the story of gold mining runs from AA to ZZ—from multinationals like Anglo American to zama-zamas.
Authorities first became aware of the burgeoning illegal-mining industry in the nineties. A fire broke out in one of Welkom’s operational shafts, and a rescue team was called to extinguish it. The team discovered several dead bodies—the suspected victims of carbon-monoxide inhalation. The managers of the mine were not missing any workers, and the dead men were carrying no identification. They had been mining illegally in a disused area. “We weren’t aware something like this could happen,” a member of the rescue team recalled. A few years later, in 1999, police arrested twenty-eight zama-zamas in a nearby section of the tunnels. The men, laid-off mine workers, knew their way around like spelunkers in a cave network. An investigator involved in the arrest described them to me as “the forefathers of underground illegal mining in South Africa.”
Even before there were zama-zamas, South Africa had a thriving black market for gold. In 1996, a security manager at one of the country’s biggest mining houses prepared a report about gold theft, which he described as “the least reported and talked about criminal activity in South Africa.” Back then, workers often pilfered gold from processing plants. One cleaner smuggled out gold-bearing material in a bucket of water; painters on the roof of a facility removed gold through the air vents. An employee was caught with gold inside his tobacco pipe; he didn’t smoke, but had been using this method to steal for twenty years. Others used slingshots to shoot gold over security fences or flushed gold, wrapped in condoms, down the toilet, which they retrieved from nearby sewage plants. One official was observed, several times, leaving a facility with potted plants from his office; a security officer sampled the soil, which was rich in gold concentrate.
In Welkom, the main destination for stolen gold was in Thabong, at a dormitory known as G Hostel. During apartheid, hostels housed migrant workers as a way of preventing them from settling permanently in cities; these hostels have since become notorious for crime and violence. G Hostel had multiple entrances and was difficult to surveil. It functioned as an illicit smelting house, where teams of men would crush and wash the gold, then process it into ingots. Following the rise of zama-zamas, G Hostel developed into one of the largest gold-smuggling centers in the country. Eventually, around twenty-five hundred people were crammed into the compound, many of them undocumented immigrants. Police frequently conducted raids; in 1998, officers recovered more than ten metric tons of gold-bearing material. One dealer had been selling an average of a hundred ounces of gold per day.
During a raid in the early two-thousands, police arrested a zama-zama from Mozambique who gave his name as David Khombi. He was wearing a white vest, tattered cutoff jeans, and flip-flops. Khombi lived at the compound, where he supplemented his income by cutting hair, mending shoes, and tailoring Mozambican garments. Not long after the arrest, he was released and went underground, where he earned a small fortune, a former member of his inner circle told me. According to an expert on the illegal gold trade in the Free State, by 2008 Khombi had “started building his empire.”
In South Africa, gold smuggling is loosely organized into a pyramid structure. At the bottom are the miners, who sell to local buyers, who sell to regional buyers, who sell to national buyers; at the top are international gold dealers. The margins at each level are typically low—unlike many other illicit products, the market price of gold is public—and turning a profit requires substantial investments of capital, Marcena Hunter, an analyst who studies illicit gold flows, told me. To move upward, Khombi focussed his attention on a different commodity: food.
Sustaining thousands of zama-zamas underground is a complex and lucrative exercise in logistics. At first, many illegal miners in the Free State purchased food from legal mine workers, who sold their rations at inflated prices. But as the mines laid people off, and the number of zama-zamas grew, the syndicates began providing food directly. A new economy developed—one that could be even more profitable than gold. Men underground had little bargaining power, and markups on food usually ranged from five hundred to a thousand per cent. A loaf of bread that cost less than ten rand at the surface sold for a hundred rand down below. Fixed prices were set for peanuts, tinned fish, powdered milk, Morvite (a high-energy sorghum porridge originally developed for feeding mine workers), and biltong, a South African jerky.
Zama-zamas could also purchase such items as cigarettes, marijuana, washing powder, toothpaste, batteries, and headlamps. They paid with the cash they made from selling gold; when they were flush, some miners celebrated with buckets of KFC, which were available underground for upward of a thousand rand. Around a decade ago, one KFC in Welkom was supplying so much food to gold syndicates that customers started avoiding it: orders took forever, items on the menu ran out, and meals were often undercooked. Police contacted the owner, who agreed to notify them whenever large orders came in. On one occasion, officers observed a truck picking up eighty buckets of chicken.
Khombi began paying men to shop at wholesalers, package the goods in layers of cardboard and bubble wrap, and then drop the fortified parcels down the shafts. (They often used ventilation channels, the powerful updrafts slowing the rate at which the supplies fell.) As his earnings increased, Khombi began buying gold from zama-zamas, profiting doubly from their labor. He built a large house in Thabong, where he developed a reputation for sharing his wealth—“like a philanthropist,” one community activist told me. During his rise to prominence, he also made enemies. He was later shot in the face, but survived, and became known as David One Eye.
One afternoon, I met a former zama-zama whom I’ll refer to as Jonathan. He spent a year in the tunnels around 2013. “We were thousands underground,” he recalled. The men worked bare-chested because of the heat, and they slept on makeshift bunks. Khombi controlled the supply of food, and there were deliveries of beer and meat—“everything,” Jonathan said. For nearly three months, Jonathan was dependent on a group of more experienced miners, who guided him through the tunnels and shared their supplies. Finding and extracting gold required considerable expertise, and some zama-zamas were able to read the rock like mineralogists. But there were also other jobs underground, and Jonathan found work as a welder, producing small mills, known as pendukas, for crushing ore. The other miners paid him in gold.
Access to the tunnels was controlled, increasingly, by armed gangs from Lesotho, to whom Khombi paid protection fees. Known as the Marashea, or “Russians,” these gangs traced their origins to mining compounds on the Witwatersrand, where Basotho laborers banded together in the nineteen-forties. (Their name was inspired by the Russian Army, whose members were “understood to have been fierce and successful fighters,” the historian Gary Kynoch wrote, in “We Are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999.”) The Marashea dressed in gum boots, balaclavas, and traditional woollen blankets, worn clasped beneath the chin. Following the rise of illegal mining, they muscled in on the shafts. They carried weapons—assault rifles, Uzis, shotguns—and fought viciously over abandoned mines. Accordion players affiliated with the gangs wrote songs taunting their enemies, like drill rappers with nineteenth-century instruments.
Working with factions of the Marashea, Khombi seized control of large areas of the Free State goldfields. He structured his illicit business almost like a mine, with separate divisions for food, gold, and security. As his wealth grew, he and his wife acquired extravagant tastes. They built a second home in Thabong, so ornate that it drew comparisons to a compound built by Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s notoriously corrupt former President. On Instagram, Khombi posted photographs of himself wearing Italian suits and flexing his biceps in tight-fitting tees. (One caption: “Everyone talks about mother’s love but no one talks about a father’s sacrifice.”) He bought a fleet of cars, including a customized Range Rover worth an estimated quarter-million dollars, and opened a pair of night clubs in Thabong, rising above a sea of metal shacks. His wife, who was from an extremely poor family, began dressing in Gucci and Balenciaga, and often flew to Johannesburg for shopping trips.
In the nineteen-fifties, according to Welkom records, there were white women who “made a point of flying regularly to Johannesburg for a day’s shopping.” Their husbands, who worked in the mines, were “absolutely fearless, accepting hazard and risk, with a terrific driving force to earn the maximum possible amount of money.” The structure of the company town guaranteed that, for its white residents, there was plenty of money in circulation. Khombi rose to the top of a new hierarchy, one that enriched a different set of bosses but was similarly based on Black labor.
Today, a row of grand banks stands mostly shuttered, a putt-putt course has been taken over by drug dealers, and the public gardens are strewn with trash and stripped cables. This past November, a clock tower outside the civic center, considered one of Welkom’s landmarks, displayed a different incorrect time on each of its three faces, with a faded banner for an event in 2018. The commercial district has retreated into the Goldfields Mall, which was built in the nineteen-eighties; it has a giant statue of a rhinoceros out front. (In December, they gave the statue a Christmas hat.)
I met a former police reservist there one morning. He asked to be identified as Charles. For around nine years, he was on Khombi’s payroll, selling him gold confiscated from rival dealers, protecting him, and escorting zama-zamas to the mines. Charles used the money to buy a new car and pay lobola, a bride-price customary in many Southern African cultures.
Corruption is a corrosive force in South Africa. In Welkom, which has not received a clean financial audit since 2000, tens of millions of dollars in government funds have gone missing. Even in this context, Khombi’s influence was legendary. Charles estimated that seventy per cent of the local police force had been in the kingpin’s pocket; I took this to be an exaggeration, until a senior detective who works on illegal-mining cases corroborated the figure, laughing bitterly.
But Khombi, like any capable mafia don, was also propping up core services of the city. He repaired dirt roads in Thabong and donated supplies to local schools. In 2015, the national electricity utility threatened to cut off power to Welkom and its surrounding towns unless the municipality began paying off an outstanding bill of around thirty million dollars. Rumors circulated that Khombi had made a cash payment to avert the power cuts.
Corruption was just as pervasive in the operational mines. Smuggling in zama-zamas could cost as much as forty-five hundred dollars per person, according to the illegal-gold-mining expert. The process could require bribing up to seven employees at once, from security guards to cage operators; this meant that mine employees could earn many times their regular salaries through bribery. Some were caught with bread loaves strapped to their bellies and batteries hidden inside their lunchboxes, which they planned to sell to zama-zamas. They also served as couriers, ferrying gold and cash.
Mine workers who couldn’t be paid off were targeted by the syndicates. In 2017, a Welkom mine manager known for his tough stance against zama-zamas was murdered. Two months later, a mine security officer was shot thirteen times on his way to work. The following year, an administrator was stabbed ten times at home while his wife and children were in another room, and the wife of a plant manager was kidnapped for a ransom of one bar of gold.
Today, after a series of acquisitions and mergers, a single company, Harmony, owns the mines around Welkom. Harmony specializes in exploiting marginal deposits at so-called mature mines, which has allowed it to prosper during the twilight years of South Africa’s gold industry. According to a company presentation that I obtained, Harmony has spent roughly a hundred million dollars on security measures between 2012 and 2019, including outfitting its mines with biometric authentication systems. They have also demolished several dozen disused shafts. Company records show that more than sixteen thousand zama-zamas have been arrested since 2007; in addition, more than two thousand employees and contractors have been arrested under suspicion of taking bribes or facilitating illegal mining. But these arrests were mostly at the bottom of the illegal-mining hierarchy, and had little lasting impact.
One day, I met a team of security officers who patrolled some of the mines beneath Welkom; several of them had worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, and told me that the mines were more dangerous. The officers recounted coming across explosives the size of soccer balls, stuffed with bolts and other shrapnel. In shoot-outs, bullets ricocheted off the mine walls. “It’s tunnel warfare,” a member of the team said.
But in town, especially among poorer residents, there was a sense that this violence was peripheral to a trade that sustained a large number of people. Money from zama-zamas spilled over into the general economy, from food wholesalers to car dealerships. “The economy of Welkom is through zama-zamas,” Charles, the former police reservist, told me. “Now Welkom is poor because of one man.” A few years ago, Khombi began ordering brazen hits on his rivals, becoming the focal point of a wider clampdown on illegal mining. “He took it too far,” Charles said. “He ruined it for everyone.”
The first known murder linked to Khombi was that of Eric Vilakazi, another syndicate leader who had been delivering food underground. In 2016, Vilakazi was shot dead in front of his home while holding his young child in his arms. (The child survived.) Afterward, Khombi visited Vilakazi’s family to share his condolences and to offer financial support for the funeral. “If he killed you, he’ll go see the wife the next day,” the former member of Khombi’s inner circle, who accompanied him on the visit, told me. An aspiring kingpin named Nico Rasethuntsha attempted to take over the area where Vilakazi had been operating, but a few months later he, too, was assassinated.
In December, 2017, Thapelo Talla, an associate of Khombi’s who had tried to break away, was gunned down outside a party for Khombi’s wedding anniversary. The following month, a syndicate boss known as Majozi disappeared, along with a policeman who had worked with him; Majozi’s wife was found dead at their home, and his burned-out BMW was found near an abandoned hostel. (Informants said afterward that Majozi and the policeman were tossed down a shaft by Khombi’s henchmen.) Later, a gold smuggler named Charles Sithole was murdered after receiving death threats from Khombi, and a pastor in Thabong who had sold a house to Khombi, and was requesting the full payment, was shot and killed.
The incident that led to Khombi’s undoing took place in 2017, at a cemetery outside Welkom. Like the towns around it, the cemetery was running to ruin—a metal sign over the entrance, along with some headstones, had been stolen. The graves had been racially segregated during apartheid, and headstones of white people remained clustered at one end. Khombi suspected one of his lieutenants of stealing money and gave orders for him to be shot in the cemetery. The body was discovered the next morning, lying beside an abandoned vehicle.
One of Khombi’s men, who was at the cemetery that night, was also working as an informant for the police, and Khombi was eventually charged with murder. (The first investigating officer assigned to the case was found guilty of lying under oath to protect him.) Khombi was held at a local jail, where wardens delivered KFC to his cell. “They were treating him like a king,” the expert on the illegal gold trade told me. A man who was charged alongside Khombi was thought to have been poisoned—an effort, officials believe, to prevent him from testifying—and had to be brought to court in a wheelchair.
The trial began in late 2019. Khombi, who had been released on bail, showed up in designer suits every day. He presented himself as a businessman with philanthropic interests, alleging that he was a victim of a conspiracy. The judge was unpersuaded. “The entire murder has the hallmark of a hit,” he declared, sentencing Khombi to life in prison. Khombi’s legal team is petitioning the courts to overturn this decision, but he also faces other charges: for the 2017 murder of Talla, and for identity fraud. (Police discovered two South African I.D.s in his home, with different names, both featuring his photograph.)
I returned to Welkom to attend the trials for both cases. Last September, driving from Johannesburg along the arc of the Witwatersrand basin, I passed through a series of blighted mining towns, now home to armies of zama-zamas. It was the windy season, and clouds of dust blew from the mine dumps. The waste from South African gold mines is rich in uranium, and in the nineteen-forties the U.S. and British governments initiated a top-secret program to reprocess the material for the development of nuclear weapons. But a large number of dumps remain, with dangerously high levels of radioactivity. In Welkom, the dust blows into houses and schools. Some residential areas have radioactivity readings comparable to those of Chernobyl.
The magistrate’s court is in the city center—a modernist building with arresting red metal finishes where thousands of zama-zamas have been prosecuted. In the halls, there are posters that read “STOP ILLEGAL MINING,” with images of gold in its different forms, from ore concentrate to refined bars. Outside the courtroom, on the first day of Khombi’s trial for identity fraud, a garrulous man wearing a kufi hat with a red feather introduced himself to me as Khombi’s half brother, although I later found out that he was a more distant relative. Without my asking, he said of Khombi, “He worked with gold, I won’t deny it. But he wasn’t a killer.” The problem, he told me, was the gangs from Lesotho: “He had to work with them.” Khombi had become rich from the gold trade, and also arrogant, he added. “But the cops were in his circle. Who’s the real mafia here?”
Inside, Khombi was in shackles, laughing with the wardens. He wore a black sweatshirt pulled tight over his muscles, and his voice boomed across the courtroom. He had already begun serving his murder sentence, and in prison he was organizing prayer meetings for the inmates. (Khombi is a member of an Apostolic church.) Before the trial could begin, his defense lawyer secured a postponement, and Khombi was escorted back to the cells.
I was able to speak to Khombi two months later, at the trial for Talla’s murder. Our conversations took place as he was led in and out of the courtroom, with his wardens repeatedly shooing me away. When I introduced myself, Khombi greeted me like a politician and gave me a warm handshake, as if he had been expecting me. He denied being a gold dealer, but said that he knew many people involved in the trade. “From what I have observed,” he said, “it involves a lot of people—police, judges, magistrates, security. It’s too dangerous to talk about.” He also told me, smiling, that he had paid close to a million dollars for the municipal electricity bill, and made separate payments for water. “I’m not what all these people say about me,” he said. “I don’t sit and plot to kill people.”
One day in Welkom, I got lunch with Khombi’s legal adviser, a smooth-talking former attorney named Fusi Macheka, who was disbarred in 2011. Macheka is a lay pastor, and he blessed our food when it arrived. He told me that he had known Khombi since around 2007, claiming to have successfully defended him in an illegal-gold-dealing case at the time. “Ultimately he became my man,” Macheka said. “He calls me brother.”
While we were talking, a man with heavily scarred forearms arrived and sat down without greeting me. Macheka introduced him as Khombi’s lieutenant. “He’s a shock absorber for him,” Macheka explained. The lieutenant, who gave his name as Sekonyela, was wearing a yellow golf shirt that identified him as the chairman of the Stingy Men Association of Free State, which he was reluctant to elaborate on. He had known Khombi for close to three decades, working his way up from being Khombi’s gardener to being his right-hand man. Through the years, he said, Khombi had paid for his wedding, including lobola and a honeymoon to Cape Town, and had given him multiple cars and motorbikes.
A few days later, Sekonyela arrived on one of those bikes, a Yamaha with a top speed of around a hundred and thirty miles per hour, to accompany Macheka and me on a tour of Khombi’s properties. We began at Khombi’s newest home, purchased from the pastor who was murdered. It featured the only residential swimming pool in Thabong, Sekonyela said. A former chief interpreter of the Welkom magistrate’s court happened to be passing by, and he informed me, misleadingly, that Khombi was “never ever in court for one murder.” He added that Khombi had donated soccer balls and kits for two youth teams he managed. “He was for the people,” the interpreter said.
Many people in the township shared stories of Khombi’s generosity and lamented his absence. “He wanted people’s stomachs to be full,” one community leader said. I heard about Khombi paying for children to go to school and providing cattle to slaughter at funerals. Multiple officials I spoke with believe that Khombi remains active in the illicit gold trade, organizing deals from inside prison, but I got the sense that his power had waned. Weeds flourished outside his properties, and his night clubs were often closed. Khombi’s incarceration had left room for other syndicates to grow, but nobody had inherited his mantle as Thabong’s benefactor. Macheka wanted me to appreciate his client’s importance in the community, but he was evasive when I asked if Khombi had been involved in gold smuggling. “I can’t say that with certainty,” Macheka replied. “According to my instructions, he was a hard worker.” Macheka also mentioned that Khombi had given him two cars. “He knew about this secret of giving,” Macheka had said, a few days earlier. “In terms of my Biblical understanding, you give one cent, you get a hundredfold. Maybe that was his secret.”
Khombi’s murder conviction coincided with a joint operation, by various police agencies and a private-security firm contracted by Harmony, to bring illegal mining in the Free State under control. The project is called Knock Out, and its logo is a clenched fist. To circumvent the corruption in Welkom, fifty police officers were brought in from the city of Bloemfontein, a hundred miles away. The operation has recorded more than five thousand arrests; among those taken into custody were seventy-seven mine employees, forty-eight security officers, and four members of the military. Investigators opened cases against more than a dozen police officers. Some cops, in the face of increased scrutiny, preëmptively quit the force.
Central to the operation was cutting off food supplies for zama-zamas underground. Investigators raided locations where food was being packed. In parallel, some of the operational mines instituted food bans for employees, and Harmony closed off more entrances to the tunnels. At first, contractors capped old shafts with slabs of concrete, but zama-zamas dug underneath and broke these open, so the contractors began filling the shafts with rubble, sealing them completely. The company spent two years on one shaft, pumping in seemingly endless volumes of concrete; investigators later discovered that, inside the tunnels, zama-zamas had been removing the slurry before it could set. On another occasion, a syndicate sent three excavators to reopen a shaft. Security officers who intervened were shot at and almost run over by one of the machines. (The driver was later convicted of attempted murder.) To regain control of the site, officials sent in helicopters and erected a perimeter of sandbags—“like an army camp,” one member of the operation told me.
Sealing vertical shafts restricts access from the surface, but it does not close the entire tunnel network, and thousands of zama-zamas remained below Welkom, their food supplies dwindling. Many still owed money to the syndicates that had put them underground. They didn’t want to exit. How else were they going to pay? Jonathan, the former zama-zama, estimated that hundreds had died of starvation, including several of his friends. “The saddest part of it, the most painful, is that you can’t bury them,” he said.
Burials are of supreme importance in many Southern African cultures. In the past, when zama-zamas died underground, their bodies would typically be carried, shrouded in plastic, to the nearest functioning shaft and left for mine employees to discover. Affixed to the corpses were labels with a contact number and a name. The bodies were repatriated to neighboring countries or buried in the Free State. But now so many men were dying that it was impossible to collect them all. Simon, the zama-zama from Zimbabwe, told me that during 2017 and 2018 more than a hundred men died on just two levels of the mine he was living in. Using blankets as stretchers, he and some other zama-zamas had carried out at least eight bodies, one at a time; each journey had lasted around twelve hours. “The first time I see a dead body, I’m scared,” he recalled. As conditions worsened underground—at one point, Simon went fourteen days without food—he stopped caring, and would sit on the bodies to rest.
Operation Knock Out forced zama-zamas to go elsewhere in search of gold. Many left for Orkney, a mining town eighty miles north. One weekend in 2021, according to the South African Police Service, more than five hundred zama-zamas exited the tunnels in Orkney after their food and water supplies were cut off; days later, hundreds of men attempted to force their way back inside, culminating in a shoot-out with officials that left six dead. When I visited, a security officer took me to an abandoned shaft nearby that had been capped with concrete but blown open by zama-zamas. Ropes were strung over the mouth of the hole, which was more than a mile deep. The shaft was no longer ventilated, and gusts of hot vapor blew up from the tunnels. Marashean snipers were observing us from a mine dump; that night, more zama-zamas would lower themselves over the shaft’s edge.
In Welkom, the drop in illegal mining dealt yet another blow to an already ravaged economy. “Most of our illegal miners are our businesspeople,” Rose Nkhasi, the president of the Free State Goldfields Chamber of Business at the time, told me. I met her in a boardroom with framed portraits of her predecessors, almost all of whom were white men. Nkhasi, who is Black, acknowledged the violence and corruption associated with gold smuggling, but she was frank about its role in sustaining Welkom. She singled out Khombi—“He’s huge in the township, like the biggest mafia”—for his economic impact. “He employs a lot of people,” she said. “You can feel his money.”
Nkhasi owns a property with a car wash, a mechanical workshop, and a restaurant. In earlier years, she told me, zama-zamas would bring their cars in for repairs and order food, paying with two-hundred-rand bills—the largest denomination in South Africa—and declining change. Police vehicles cruised by to collect payments from Khombi’s henchmen. Nkhasi also has an independent town-planning practice, where syndicate leaders often brought her rezoning applications to build rental units. “They are the ones developing this town,” Nkhasi told me.
Investigators believe that there are still around two hundred illegal miners underground, roaming the passages beneath Welkom; they are adamant that, eventually, many more will return. The problems are deeply embedded. South Africa, once the world’s largest gold producer by far, now ranks a distant tenth. The country is still home to some of the richest gold deposits in the world, and there are many companies that would be interested in digging for them. But there is an increasingly strained relationship between the state and the mining sector, with ever-shifting policies—including a requirement that a large number of shares go to historically disadvantaged South Africans—and the spectre of corruption acting as deterrents to investment. Margins on gold mines are thin, and increasing security costs, combined with gold losses to zama-zamas, can “eliminate most of the profits,” the former mining chairman told me. “Nobody wants to go into the casino.” The gold-mining industry has come to symbolize the dispossession and exploitation that have shaped South Africa, today the country with the highest income inequality in the world.
One evening, before sunset, I drove out to an old shaft on the southern edge of Welkom. Sunk in the early nineteen-fifties, it once led to one of South Africa’s richest mines, producing thousands of tons of ore per day. The shaft was filled a few years ago, and all that remains is a low mound in the middle of a grassy field. Nearby, at a venue called Diggers Inn, where Khombi held his wedding, an end-of-year celebration was kicking off for the graduates of Welkom High School. A crowd had gathered to cheer for the teen-agers, many of whom had hired chauffeured cars. Not two thousand feet away, at the opposite end of the shaft, some men were at work with picks and shovels, scraping gold from the earth.
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The LOTOS Oil Refinery and a nearby gas station in Gdansk, Poland. (photo: Omar Marques/Getty)
European Union countries spent big to fight rising costs.
Global fossil-fuel subsidies doubled last year to $1.1 trillion, by far the highest number ever recorded, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency, or IEA. The surge in financial support for oil and gas was largely a response to the energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine, which caused many countries to abruptly reconsider their dependence on Russian fossil fuel reserves. Experts say the subsidies could be difficult to unwind, if consumers become accustomed to having a cushion against high prices.
Nevertheless, 2022 also saw record spending on green energy — indeed it was the first year in which the world spent as much on the energy transition as it did on finding and producing fossil fuels — leaving hope that the unprecedented fossil fuel handouts are only temporary.
“In an energy crisis, governments prioritize shielding consumers from damaging price impacts over commitments to phasing out subsidies,” wrote the report authors. “This reduced hardship but diminished the incentive for consumers to save or to switch to alternative sources of energy, thereby delaying a lasting resolution of the crisis.”
The world’s fossil-fuel consumption subsidies have risen and fallen over the last decade in tandem with the price of oil, but they have tended to hover somewhere between $400 and $600 billion. The biggest supporters of oil and gas over the past decade were large developing economies like Russia, China, Iran, India, and Saudi Arabia, with Iran spending almost one-fifth of its gross domestic product to pad fuel prices.
That dynamic changed last year with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The sudden loss of Russian oil and gas supplies forced European countries to seek out alternative fuel sources, causing oil and natural gas prices to soar. This in turn drove a huge increase in heat and electricity costs. Meanwhile, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, cut production later in the year, keeping crude prices high. The price increase wasn’t limited to Europe, either: As European countries outbid their poorer neighbors for shipments of liquefied natural gas, countries like Pakistan saw record prices and intermittent power outages.
Countries around the world responded with a slew of tax breaks and subsidies for homeowners and businesses who had come to rely on lower prices. Thailand and Peru capped the price of gasoline and diesel; South Africa and Belgium froze or waived fuel taxes; and Italy and South Korea sent direct payments to consumers who were struggling with energy bills.
However, more than half of the new fossil fuel subsidies that appeared last year were implemented within the European Union, or EU, according to the IEA. The EU spent $349 billion last year to cushion consumers from volatile prices — almost the exact same amount that the United States’ groundbreaking climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, allocates over ten years to subsidize clean energy. The rest of the world’s advanced economies added only $163 billion in new subsidies to deal with the energy crisis.
The authors of the IEA report argue that these subsidies could make political and social sense in some cases, since high fuel costs often hit poor populations hardest, and expensive gas doesn’t by itself speed a transition to clean energy. This is because energy demand is what economists call “inelastic” over the short term: Most consumers are unlikely to dramatically change their energy usage based on a change in price, and instead are more likely to cut back their spending on other needs. That’s why most energy subsidies go to consumers, rather than producers like oil and gas companies. While subsidies for consumers have skyrocketed recently, subsidy growth on the production side has been much smaller.
“High and volatile fossil fuel prices drive home the unsustainability of today’s energy system and underscore the benefits of energy transitions, but these episodes come with significant economic and social cost,” the authors write. “High fossil fuel prices are no substitute for consistent climate policies.”
But the authors also note that sunsetting financial support for gas and electricity payments can be “politically difficult,” and they argue that in general “it is far better for governments to spend time and money on structural changes that bring down fossil fuel demand” than to offer consumers relief only during periods when prices are high.
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