Between Cause and Cure: The Mining Industry and HIV/AIDS Governance in South Africa

Abstract

The story of HIV/AIDS and the mining industry in South Africa is complex. It is also more controversial than that of other sectors discussed in this book. Two interrelated factors account for the particularity of the case. Firstly, mining companies have contributed significantly to the spread of HIV/AIDS through the use of their 120-year-old model of migrant labor. At the 2010 HIV/AIDS conference in Durban, the South African gold mining sector came under heavy criticism from medical practitioners, ex-miners, advocacy groups and the South African Minister of Health for its part in the tuberculosis crisis that affects the industry and its workforce. Tuberculosis is a so-called opportunistic disease of HIV/AIDS. An activist with the Aids and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa referred to the industry as ‘TB factory’.¹ The health minister, Mr. Motsoaledi, stated that ‘[if] TB/HIV is a snake in Southern Africa, we know that its head is in South Africa in the mines. We are exporting TB and HIV throughout the region’.² Secondly, the mining industry was early in identifying HIV/AIDS as a key risk to its operations. Already in the mid-1980s initial responses were developed. However, the overall exclusionary nature of these first approaches laid the ground for some of the difficulties in the implementation of comprehensive prevention and treatment policies later on.