I did see a backhoe parked outside the hosts compound, so presumably they do have access to that sort of kit.

Like I said before "made for the average man in the street".

I bet you a pound to a zloti that there's more to this than was shown on the box!

thought I saw a bit of JCB yellow in one of the yards!
I watched it for what it was really, but seems you cant take anything at face value these days, even the beeb stuff..grumble grumble..

BTW
nice one mr knocker, now we have an address to email complaints to!
good try sending it to mr k charlotte but you need to look outside cornwall for a working miner from production right now..........:glare:

It's difficult to believe that conditions at the Marikana mine are not much different to mining in South Africa over 100 years ago.

Miners tell of their poverty and witchdoctor’s invincibility potion

No one really lives at the Lonmin mine in Marikana. The local residents are immigrants, men who have left their families in search of a livelihood, if not riches, on the road paved with platinum that leads to this British-owned mine in South Africa.

Goats, scrawny dogs and chickens wander the dirt roads. There is electricity but only communal water taps.

The police shooting that killed 34 mine workers during a strike for better pay last Thursday has underscored the brutality faced by workers and exposed their dire living conditions: many are housed in shacks at the foot of some of the world’s richest platinum reserves.

Ian Buhlungu, 47, rents a corrugated iron and wood hut in a shantytown on a dusty plain outside the mine. He has no running water and uses a pit toilet. “I want to be with my kids but I can’t,” said the widower whose wife died of tuberculosis two years ago.

Like thousands of others, he travelled far to earn enough to feed his daughter and twin sons, left behind in the care of his family in the rural Eastern Cape. “People who are not educated get a low salary and can’t afford to feed their families,” he told the news agency AFP.

That many of the men are barely educated was tragically shown when the wildcat strikers believed stories that police bullets would not hurt them because they were dosed up on traditional South African medicines. Survivors of last week’s shooting said that a witchdoctor had been selling potions that he promised would make them invincible.

“We knew their weapons would not work on us as the inyanga [traditional healer] who arrived during the week told us so,” Nothi Zimanga, one of the strikers, told South Africa’s Daily Dispatch newspaper. He said the men who charged through teargas into a line of policemen armed with assault rifles and pistols had made ritual cuts across their bodies and smeared a black substance into the wounds for protection.

They were told that the medicine would stop bullets — if they always charged forward and never looked back, Mr Zimanga said.

A fellow striker, Bulelani Malawana, said he was offered the concoction for 1,000 South African Rand (£80). He turned it down. “After they got the muti [medicine], people were so aggressive. They just wanted to fight,” he said.

That was a significant amount of money — about a week’s wages — for most of the 3,000 rock-drill operators camped on a hill outside the Marikana mine to demand better pay.

The strikers said their 4,000-rand monthly pay from Lonmin was not enough to live on. It was better, they said, to starve at home than underground, toiling in a hellish mineshaft.

Africa’s largest economy was built on cheap black labour, workers harnessed to extract deep reserves of gold, platinum and diamonds. During the apartheid era, minority white rulers forced black South Africans to live in areas far removed from white cities, without job opportunities, forcing them to become migrant workers in the mines living in tough conditions.

Conditions today are little better. “Life here isn’t life,” said Belinia Mavie, 25, from Mozambique, who joined her husband in Marikana four years ago. Her husband left home in 1994. “We don’t have toilets, we don’t have water.”

Men often live in the company’s hostel. Others have no option but to house their whole families in shacks of wood and corrugated metal that keep out neither the heat nor the cold.

“A hundred years after mining began in this country, we still have the lifestyle of people above the ground that we had at the turn of the century,” Adam Habib, an analyst, told AFP. “The levels of inequality in our society, 18 years after our transition . . . the lives of workers on the ground have not changed.”

In a front-page commentary, The Sunday Independent noted that in mines, violence and “humiliating social conditions” persisted. “Most Marikana mineworkers live in a slum city, the epicentre of our social and moral breakdown and a fuse for violence,” it said.


http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/africa/article3514789.ece 

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I guess looking at previous postings I just watched a re-run of toughest place to be a miner, which shows illegal Ninja placer gold miner's on a tributary of Ongi Gol (river), Uyanga Soum (county), Ovorkhangai Aimag (province) , Mongolia.

1) The major mining is taking place on a total of 10 miles of two minor head-water tributaries of Ongi gol, NOT on the main river.
2) Correctly shows how unsafe these hand pits and drifts are.
3) points out the exactly the dishonesty and thieving that goes on almost everywhere in Mongolia.
4) Most importantly only mentions the reason herders are turning to ninja mining, extreme bad winters (or dzuds) but BBC clearly does not understand why the loss of livestock is occurring. When the Russians were in Mongolia herds sizes were controlled AND in cooperatives. Each soum centre had sheds filled with fodder for winter. With FREEDOM, attempts at democracy are taking place, but it is actually anarchy (in the truest sense) in the countryside and no regulations nor enforcement, as shown. Thus, herds have grown tremendously, overgrazing is occurring everywhere, so no extra grass, nor attempts to grow and store fodder! So, in winters animals are left to fend for themselves and when a dzud does occur the obvious happens, as described (animals eating each other, and huge death tolls). This is happening over most of Mongolia!
What is needed is more agrarian education, more regulations, AND enforcement to maintain what little open grasslands there are OR this cycle of range destruction (tragedy of the commons), followed by ninja mining and river and countryside destruction, will continue.

As shown in this program there are NO mines nor safety inspectors, very rarely any police around, and most officials are corrupt in any case, resulting in now between 150,000 to 200,000 illegal ninja miners throughout Mongolia with a population of only 3 million.
BBC needs to literally get to the ROOTS of the problem, which is self inflicted, rather than the sob story depicted!
Oh, by the way cows that Craig was planning to obtain,would definitely NOT survive in the environment of that soum. That is why they have sheep, goats, and a few yaks and horses.