Mining Matters with Sifiso: Safety Enforcement in Mining

Engineer Pasukawaviri, welcome to Mining Matters.

Thank you for having me in your program.

Thank you.

As Deputy Chief Government Engineer within the Ministry of Mines and Mining Development, what is your mandate and how many mines are supposed to be inspected by you and how many inspectors do you have on the ground?

Thank you for the question.

As the Deputy Chief Government Mining Engineer, I'm responsible for planning, organising... directing, controlling, and monitoring and reviewing the chain management systems in the country, in our mining industry.

And as far as our strength is concerned, we have about 60-60. inspectors, and these include engineers.

We have an average of about six people in the provinces.

As you might be aware, we have eight mining provinces.

In each province, we have about six personnel.

That includes engineers, inspectors of mines and explosives and inspectors for electrical and mechanical issues.

And we are supposed, we are mandated to inspect all the mines in the country.

But the situation is such that we have more than 50 registered mining claims, but not all of them are current.

They're not current.

We have operational mines which hover around between 10 and 12, depending on the season.

So those are our targets, the operational mines.