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Jagersfontein Dam Collapse [ Cost of Negligence ] In Dutch, the word “fontein” has a strong linguistic connection to the word “fountain” - something many residents of South Africa's Free State learned the hard way in September 2022. 🌟On a Sunday morning in September 2022, a wall of mining waste broke loose in Jagersfontein and collapsed onto a nearby settlement like a sudden flood. Homes were submerged within minutes, cars and trees were swept away. Three people were killed, including a small child. ➡️ Jagersfontein is an old diamond mine in South Africa’s Free State. It was established in the 1870s by what would later become De Beers, and became the deepest hand-excavated hole in the world. Large-scale mining ended decades ago, but in recent years a private company returned to the site to reprocess old mine dumps and extract the remaining diamonds. The waste from this reprocessing was pumped into a nearby tailings dam. ➡️ In the weeks leading up to the collapse, local residents reported water seepage and wet spots on the dam wall. Between 2019 and 2021, consulting engineering firms and South Africa’s Department of Water Affairs concluded that the tailings dam was nearing capacity and had a future life of nine to 26 monthss. On 11 September 2022, part of the embankment collapsed, releasing an estimated one million cubic meters of tailings waste... #CostOfNegligence Devils Below

Marikana Massacre [ Cost of Negligence ] 2:32 🌟 On August 16, 2012, South African police shot dead 34 striking miners at the Marikana platinum mine, and 78 others were injured. It was the deadliest use of force by the state since the end of apartheid, and a scar that still remains on the face of South Africa's mining. ➡️The background The crisis began at British Lonmin's Marikana mine, where miners where some of employees demanded a base salary increase from about $400 to $1,200. An important factor was the competition between two South African mining trade unions - the NUM trade union, which traditionally comprised the majority of Lonmin's workers, refused to support the goal, considering it unattainable. However, NUM was suspected of having ties to the state at that time, so the workers listened to their competitors from the AMCU trade union, who promised the miners a higher salary, aiming to score points for themselves. Tensions were rising rapidly. In view of the above mentioned, not only Lonmin guards and government security forces, but even NUM stood against the striking miners. In the days leading up to August 16, 10 people were killed in multiple clashes, including miners, security personnel, and police officers. ➡️On August 16, the police decided to break up the strike and disarm the miners. ➡️ To do this, they decided to surround the strikers and use tear gas and other means to force them to disperse. ➡️ In response to the beginning of the movement of strikers, which the police considered an attempted attack, the police opened fire. After the shooting, President Jacob Zuma set up the Farlam Commission of Inquiry. Its final report in 2015 said the police operation to disarm and disperse the strikers was rushed and dangerously designed, and it pointed to serious failures of command. Even so, criminal accountability has moved slowly. More than a decade later, very few officers have faced charges linked to the 16 August deaths. #CostOfNegligence Devils Below

The Real Black Africa [ Cost of Negligence ] 🌟 In Nigeria's Ogoniland one must at all costs forgo smoking - as well as anything that is linked with fire. With soil displaying benzene levels more than 900 times above World Health Organization guidelines, the region is full of black, lifeless creeks where fish, mangroves and farm soil have been soaked in crude oil for decades. Oil arrived in Ogoniland in the late 1950s. In 1970 oil drops touched the soil, marking what was the first serious spill in the region's history. Between 1976 and 1991 alone, more than 2 million barrels of oil leaked in almost 3,000 incidents. The main reasons - low quality of pipes and careless maintenance, recurrent explosions, oil theft. ➡️ For years, oil companies and the Nigerian government pointed to billion-dollar clean-up projects as proof of action and awareness. However, the efforts existed mainly in speeches and reports. After the UN report in 2011, experts called for an initial $1 billion over five years to begin restoring Ogoniland. In 2012 Nigeria launched a special agency HYPREP for the clean-up and set up a fund paid into by Shell and other firms operating in the region. HYPREP only managed to start its work after in 2016 - and even so the remediation has started on only about 11 percent of the polluted sites. Today no site is still fully cleaned. On 13 March, 2025, Shell sold its Nigerian subsidiary SPDC - which provoked suspicion that the company is going to wash its hands of this tainted story. More than a decade after the UN’s alarm bell, many communities still wait for clean water, healthy soil and a shoreline where children can play without stepping into crude. #CostOfNegligence Devils Below

🇨🇩Small-Scale Mining, Large-Scale Death [ Cost of Negligence ] 🌟More than forty people died in one morning at a minein DRC's Lualaba province in what is described as either a landslide or a conflict with armed security guards. The site is located in sothern DRC and is run on a semi industrial licence with artisanal miners, who are on paper supervised by the Congolese artisanal mining watchdog SAEMAPE, working alongside CHEMAF - a copper-cobalt enterprise owned by Dubai-headquartered Shalina Resources. ➡️ Such a large number of victims is explained by the fact that the industrial miners allowed the artisanal miners only on weekends, which created a large influx of people. Three days earlier in the same province, the state cobalt company EGC was boasting of its first 1,000 tonnes of traceable artisanal cobalt. Officials presented this as proof that the country finally controls artisanal mining and offers miners safe, dignified work. This is still the mining system in Congo. On the front stage stand big operators, state companies and new labels - behind that curtain the ore comes from holes, filled with people who accept lethal risk for daily cash. #CostOfNegligence Devils Below

🇿🇲Steel Waters of Zambia [ Cost of Negligence ] About a hundred years ago, British miners working at Broken Hill in what is now Kabwe, Zambia, pulled a strange skull out of the rock. The fossil, later called Rhodesian Man or Kabwe 1, was shipped off to London and ended up in the Natural History Museum, where it still sits as a trophy of an old colonial venture. 🌟 On 18 February 2025, Zambia's new foreign partners - now from China - failed to manage a waste reservoir at Sino-Metals Leach Zambia, a copper mine just around 200km away from where the Rhodesian Man was found, and sent a wave of toxic liquid down into the Kafue River. Full of heavy metal elements, the released waste pointed to roughly 1.5 million tons of sludge, enough to fill hundreds of Olympic pools. With fish floating on the Kafue's surface, Kitwe, a nearby city of about 700,000 people, had its water supply shut off because the intake pipes were also drawing in poison instead of drinking water. ➡️The immediate response of the company and its backers in Beijing was to blame anything but poor management - either unusual weather, or vandalism. The company's representatives offered villagers small payouts in exchange for silence. Victims were offered sums as low as the price of a basic phone and asked never to speak publicly. The scale of the disaster made it impossible to ignore, pushing the government to order the mine to halt operations and call in the air force, which dropped large quantities of lime from planes and boats in an attempt to neutralise the acid in the water. Accidents in heavy industry do sometimes happen, however it is responsiblity of multibillion-dollar corporations and the governments to prevent and to rectify them, and not to offload the consequences onto people who live in one-room houses by the river. #CostOfNegligence Devils Below