Lol there's a lot of Zimbabwean and Basutho Zama Zamas (illegal miners) pulling that shit out the ground everyday and funding their little economies and even malicias, while the regulated miners are too busy faffing around dealing with dumbass license agreements that make a lot of those reserves unfeasible to pull out

Also when your energy production is so shit it adds to the hurdle rate making a lot of deposits cash flow negative to extract, so that gold is safe and sound and won't be adding to the stock to flow anytime soon 

 Sure but they’re not going to put anything of scale together. Ironically that would require further breakdown of society.

Whilst you still have “a government” they’ll be efficient in stealing from the most successful - only if it completely break down will the mining be properly efficient because then the mines will be self-sufficiently protecting themselves from government.