***For more than a century, South Africa's goldmines have provided jobs for thousands of workers in the region. The current slump in the industry, reports Gemini News Service, has brought widespread hardship and economic dislocation.***

Johannes Khesuoe is a broken man with a precious dream.

Until his retrenchment four years ago. Khesuoe provided for his wife and seven children by working in the goldmines across the border in South Africa.

Now desperate and destitute — his 3.000 rand severance package long since spent — the 20-year veteran of the mines hopes against hope for a chance to return to Egoli. the famed "City of Gold."

Almost every morning at eight. Khesuoe and about 100 other laid-off workers wait outside the offices of a mine-recruiting agency in Maseru

On some days, a man in a green suit comes out. chooses a few workers and quickly shepherds them into the nearby office to sign a contract.

The man in green has not appeared for a long time, and life in the small, mountainous kingdom in the sky" has become increasingly bleak.

"1 have many problems to solve, but no money," says Khesuoe There are always quarrels with my children, who blame me for not having

money."

Since 1987. a slump in the South African mining industry has resulted in the lay-off of more than 200,000 miners, with devastating effects on many rural economies in southern Africa. Lesotho — sometimes described as a "fourth world" country — has been the hardest hit with 17.000 retrenched in the last 18 months, due to what industry analysts describe as the "worst -ever crisis" to hit the gold market.

Matters came to a head last January when a prolonged period of nigh rand value and low gold prices shrank the profitability of the local market and left the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the leading trade union, with no choice but to accept the dismissals demanded by the mining industry.

This has had a very bad impact on our economy and society.' says Puseletso Salae. coor-

dinator of the Basotho Mineworkers' Labour Cooperative. Communities are falling apart, especially in the rural areas."

For nearly a century, pools of cheap migrant labourers from all over southern Africa have gravitated to the mines, the backbone of the South African economy. Most are illiterate herdboys or ill-educated villagers for whom going to the mines is almost a rite of passage.

With up to 30 per cent of miners' paychecks being remitted to their families back home, the industry is one of the region's largest sources of income and employment.

But as the remittances have dried up. so have local economies, says Salae. Few families have enough money to send their children beyond primary school.

Family cohesion is one of the first victims of the layoffs.

Divorce, although not always legal, has skyrocketed. It is not uncommon for a woman — unhappy about her husband's alcoholism or used to being the sole decision-maker in the household — to tell her husband she is going to visit her parents and not return, adds Salae. "Many boys that are not able to go to school end up leaving the rural areas for Maseru where they become Tsotsis (thugs)." he says. "Girls also come to Maseru to get work, but most end up as prostitutes. This is a direct result of the retrenchments."

As the poor are pushed deeper into poverty by the retrenchments. unions and mineworkers organisations are calling on the industry to halt the layoffs.

Their appeal intensified following the July announcement by Gold Fields, the second largest gold company In South Africa, that its operating profits — largely as a result of currency

gains in the wake of the rand's collapse against the dollar — had soared to R207 million, from RI 7 million the previous year.

"Rural economies that are completely dependent on the mines have been blasted by the retrenchments." says Kate Philip, chief executive officer of the Johannesburg-based Mineworkers Development Agency. "The NUM made all kinds of concessions to get the Industry out of the recent crisis. Now is the time to re-hire.

They're now making record profits. The honourable thing is to invest in programmes or jobs for those that paid the price in the recent crisis." she says. Anything else is cynical and dishonourable."

Philip is also lobbying mining companies to contribute to a R80 million project aimed at promoting self-employment schemes among discarded workers.

Supported largely by the British government and the United Nations Development Programme, the project plans to trigger economic growth in rural areas most affected by the lay-offs.

Cooperative poultry and vegetable farms, bakeries and the brewing of indigenous marula beer are among the projects under way.

' The idea is to start with local products for local consumption." says Philip. "But that locks people into low margins and poor markets. The challenge is to build on that, to identify more value-added opportunities. facilitate a product's development and create linkages into more affluent markets."

The hope is that such schemes will also break the cycle of despondence and dependence gripping many former miners, such as Khesuoe. and their families.

Alan Martin is a Journalist reporting for Gemini News Service from southern Africa on a fellowship funded by Canada's International Development Research Centre.