Opinion Piece : The Price Children Pay for Mining’s Unfinished Business Abandoned Mines, Abandoned Responsibilities by Nhlakanipho Twala

Date: 03/06/2026


For millions of people living near mines, factories and polluted rivers, environmental destruction is not a far-removed climate concern but a daily reality that threatens their health, dignity and survival.

As the world marks the 53rd anniversary of World Environment Day and Child Protection Week in South Africa, these occasions arrive at a critical moment in the global struggle for environmental justice. Climate change and environmental harm continue to disproportionately affect communities in the Global South, where the consequences of extraction are often borne by those who benefit, least from it. While transnational corporations generate immense profits from natural resources, frontline communities are left to contend with polluted environments, unsafe living conditions, and weakened prospects for future generations.

Nowhere is this reality more visible than mine affected communities. People living alongside mining operations often face the cumulative consequences of environmental degradation with little protection and limited access to meaningful remedies. Among those most severely affected are children and young people, whose health, safety and development are frequently placed at risk by failures in environmental governance and corporate accountability.

Improper mining remains one of the most persistent challenges facing South Africa’s mining sector. It occurs when a mining operation is abandoned or decommissioned without adequate environmental rehabilitation, socio-economic transition planning, or compliance with legal obligations. The result is a landscape scarred by unrehabilitated pits, unstable infrastructure and dangerous waste facilities that remain embedded within communities.

Mining companies have a to implement appropriate safety measures, including secure fencing, monitored access points and visible warning systems. Yet many hazardous sites remain inadequately secured, exposing nearby communities to serious risks.

Beyond the damage caused to land, water and air, these neglected mining environments create life threatening dangers for children and their future livelihoods. The degradation breakdown of local ecosystems strips recreation and development, while simultaneously exposing young people to industrial hazards that should never exist in residential areas, disrupting their foundational developmental years and severing their future socioeconomic potential.

According to the , South Africa is a home to approximately 6 100 (six thousand one hundred) abandoned mines. In many of these locations, environmental degradation, unsafe land conditions and public health concerns remain largely unresolved. The failure to adequately monitor compliance and enforce rehabilitation obligations has created an environment where corporate convenience too often takes precedence over community safety.

For children living in mine affected communities, the consequences can be devastating. Children are exposed to life-threatening dangers that they ought to be protected from by basic human rights standards. Drawn by curiosity and a desire to explore, Children living near such areas commonly frequent them in search of adventure or play, they walk into unbarricaded and unmonitored mining land and fall into the tailing’s dams and pits – which leads to the demise of untimely and totally preventable fatal injuries or even worse- death, and more tragically, these events were entirely preventable. The innocence of exploration is met with industrial traps left behind by corporate neglect.

Across Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Northwest and other mining regions, families continue to mourn the loss of children whose deaths could have been avoided through basic safety measures and responsible environmental management. Entire communities are forced to live alongside hazardous landscapes that have become a permanent feature of their daily lives. Fencing off a mining area is a legal obligation of a mine that shares space with communities, but curiosity is a child-like quality without safeguards – it cannot be legislated against. When confronted on these fatal lapses, mining companies often shrug off accountability with cold, detached rhetoric, brazenly declaring that they are “not in the business of fencing, but in the business of mining.” This callous deflection entirely evades reality. Because a child’s behaviour remains inherently unpredictable, the entire burden of preventative protection falls strictly upon the physical infrastructure that corporations are mandated to build.

The responsibility does not rest with corporations alone but by the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources which is sworn to regulate and monitor the compliance of those corporations before tragedies occur. The checks and balances that exist have not been sufficient to prevent what seems to be a scourge on the lives of curious children.  The interests of future generations have rights inextricably linked to a harm-free environment. This generational equity is not a policy luxury but a foundational requirement for sustainable human survival.  As such, it should not be a ridiculous expectation for corporate giants to contribute to an enhanced environment that prioritises healthy child development, positive psychosocial integration, and overall general health.

When multinational corporations extract wealth from local communities while leaving behind environmental degradation and unsafe conditions, they must be held accountable for the full cost of restoration and remediation. Anything less amounts to the socialization of harm and the privatization of profit. If the legal obligations enshrined in our environmental policies and legislation are to hold actual systemic value, the state must immediately hold corporate actors legally responsible for comprehensive remediation. True environmental justice demands more than just empty promises, it demands that the entities profiting from the wealth beneath the ground are held completely accountable for preserving the safety of the human life that walks upon it.

It should be the strong consideration of corporate culture to align its insatiable appetite for profit to children’s right to an environment that is not harmful. A strong reflection of the regulatory and business sector should, on the 53rd anniversary of World Environment Day and Child Protection Week, consider the lives of persons living on the margins of the human condition, deliberately placed there by a relentless pro-capital posture and unrepentant attitudes of indifference in cases of unfulfilled environmental obligations.

On this day, we must remember those who continue to live on the frontlines of environmental harm. World Environment Day and Child Protection Week must be more than a symbolic observance. It must serve as a renewed call for environmental justice, corporate accountability, and a future in which no child’s life is placed at risk in the pursuit of profit, especially in a country where the best interests of the child are meant to come first.

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