Vague Zwane fails to impress miners
The tension between mining companies and the Department of Mineral Resources was palpable at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town, where pleas from the local industry for certainty and greater consultation were met by stale and sometimes hostile responses from Minister, Mosebenzi Zwane.
Delegates expressed disappointment at the “bland” nature of Zwane’s address, which, for a second year, committed to creating certainty in the industry and finalising the Mining Charter and amendments to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act by March and June, respectively.
“That was a monumentally squandered opportunity,” said Peter Major, a mining analyst at Cadiz. “We’ve already heard everything he said today, last year, in fact. And nothing much has changed in the past year. It’s just become more difficult and uncertain.”
At a media briefing afterwards, the extent of the department’s frustrations with mining companies became apparent when Zwane warned them against threatening with litigation. He said the Chamber of Mines was not the only stake- holder to the third iteration of the charter that would encapsulate the ANC’s “radical economic transformation” objectives.
A number of court cases successfully brought by miners against the department over safety stoppages and mining rights have put the department on the back foot, while Sibanye Gold is pursuing Zwane and three officials in their personal capacity for R26.8m in damages arising from a stoppage at its Kroondal mine in 2016.
“Courts should not be used as a tool to stifle debate and threaten the government,” Zwane said.
“It has become the “norm that if you don’t agree with us, we will take you to court. No one should threaten us [with] court.”
Zwane’s ire about remarks by Anglo American CEO Mark Cutifani aimed directly at the minister was apparent when he told Business Day that Cutifani was “out of order”.
Cutifani said that contrary to repeated comments from the government, President Jacob Zuma and ANC officials spoke about the dominance of white monopoly capital, a broad range of South Africans owned large stakes in listed entities through a
combination of black economic empowerment and their pension and provident funds.
Cutifani said he hoped “people would understand that white and even black monopoly capital is a conversation that should be condemned to a difficult and dark” past. “For those who invoke these difficult, false and misleading images of the industry today, one really has to ask what their personal motives are when not referring to the facts or talking about the reality of what we are doing. To not acknowledge the progress we’ve made seems intellectually dishonest. Despite our challenges, we have come a long way.”
The next four months were “the most critical” of the past 150 years of mining in SA as the charter and amendments were finalised and would set the tone for its future, Cutifani said. “But everyone has to listen to everyone’s views and make [certain] the future we articulate brings everyone along with us.”
Zwane said the interests of the companies and those of the government were not the same. “You could hear Mark talk about the Mining Charter and being very firm, saying, ‘hey minister’, but I say, ‘hey Mark, I am government. I’m a regulator. So, calm down. I’m governing this country, not you’. But I’ll meet Mark outside here, we’ll drink tea together and I’ll say ‘but you were out of order, Mark’. So we’re fine. We engage robustly.”