JOHANNESBURG - If we are to win the fight against illegal mining in the country, there should be a specialised unit dedicated to rooting out illegal miners.
That's according to the Mineral Resources and Energy Committee Chairperson Sahlulele Luzipho who has been crisscrossing the country's illegal mining hotspots in recent months.
"There are quite a number of findings that we made, amongst those is the legislation gap that exists which needs to be reviewed so that it can be able to respond to those particular challenges," Luzipho said.
"Two is the fast-tracking of the process of what we call small-scale or artisanal mining and we said that it would be important for the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy to fast-track the issue of artisanal mining and small-scale mining.
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"On the side of the police, we've said one of them that we are proposing is that, yes we welcome the issue of the specialised unit but in those circumstances, such a specialised unit must be followed by resources," he said.
"Therefore our view is that to deal with and equip that specialised unit, there have to be resources in a form of a specific conditional grant or conditional budget that specifically talks to that."