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Picture a village where gunfire punctuates the night. Where women gather their children and whatever they can carry, abandoning homes their families have lived in for generations, not because of war in the conventional sense, but because armed groups have decided that what lies beneath the earth is worth more than the people living above it. This is the reality unfolding right now in parts of Limpopo and North West, and the ANC Youth League has had enough of the silence.
The ANCYL stepped forward in early 2026 to demand urgent state intervention after more than 600 residents — drawn from over 400 working-class families, the majority of them women and children — were forcibly displaced from their homes by the violence and intimidation of zama zama groups, the informal and frequently illegal miners whose operations have become increasingly militarised across South Africa’s resource-rich provinces. What might once have been dismissed as a fringe issue has metastasised into a full-blown humanitarian crisis playing out in communities that already carry the weight of economic marginalisation.
The situation in Atok, a community falling under the Bapedi traditional authority, has drawn particular alarm. Agricultural land stretching between Mokopane and Polokwane — encompassing the areas of Kuschke, Ysterberg and Eerstegoud — has been consumed by nightly gunfire, turning farmland that once sustained families into a no-man’s-land controlled by armed illegal miners. The Bapedi Royal House, recognising that the state had been slow to act, moved through the courts to obtain an order granting it powers to halt illegal mining activities and begin rehabilitating the scarred land, a remarkable step that speaks to both the urgency of the crisis and the vacuum of formal authority that allowed it to fester.
Further south, in Bapong village near Brits in North West, the threat takes a different but equally disturbing shape. There, illegal miners have excavated open pits directly beside residential homes in their extraction of chrome, leaving communities to live alongside gaping wounds in the earth that pose daily safety risks, particularly to children. These are not abstract environmental concerns — they are immediate, physical dangers that reshape the geography of daily life for people who have no means to simply relocate.
The ANCYL’s call to action frames the crisis not merely as a law enforcement problem but as a question of whose interests South Africa’s natural resources are meant to serve. The youth league anchored its position in resolutions passed at its 27th National Congress, which explicitly called for the country’s mineral wealth to benefit its people and contribute to safer, more equitable communities. When chrome and gold are extracted under cover of darkness by armed groups while residents flee in terror, that vision is not just deferred — it is actively dismantled.
There have been signs that the state is beginning to respond with greater urgency, even if unevenly. Gauteng police conducted a week-long crackdown in Mohlakeng and Randfontein, arresting 39 suspects and seizing explosives, suspected gold-bearing material and illegal mining equipment — a significant operation that demonstrated what coordinated enforcement can achieve. Yet for the families still displaced in Limpopo and North West, a crackdown hundreds of kilometres away offers cold comfort. The ANCYL has been explicit that its immediate priority is the cessation of illegal mining operations in affected communities, pursued in collaboration with community structures and state security forces working in genuine partnership rather than in isolation.
For young South Africans watching this unfold, the stakes could not be clearer. The communities bearing the brunt of zama zama violence are not wealthy enclaves with political leverage — they are working-class families, rural and peri-urban, whose vulnerability has been exploited precisely because they lack the resources to protect themselves. If South Africa’s mineral wealth is ever to translate into genuine development and security for its people, the state cannot afford to treat the protection of those communities as a secondary concern. The earth beneath Atok and Bapong belongs to the people who live above it. It is past time the government acted like it believes that too.
