Charter time frame extended
The third Mining Charter will be gazetted in October or November, once it has been ratified by the Cabinet and passed through a month-long extension to the public comment period to endAugust, says Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe.
In closing a two-day summit in Benoni, Mantashe said the process to draw up a charter from the draft document gazetted in June 2017 was not being rushed and would be as inclusive as possible.
An earlier target of June has been abandoned.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one delegate said this was the best way for Mantashe to give the Minerals Council SA one less reason to oppose the new charter in court.
The council (formerly the Chamber of Mines) used the lack of consultation by former mineral resources minister Mosebenzi Zwane to oppose the third iteration of the charter he had gazetted in 2017.
The summit pulled together hundreds of delegates from labour, communities and industry to discuss the draft document Mantashe released in June. Various participants spoke of an extremely heated session about ownership, with tempers fraying, resulting in the need for intervention from police and security personnel.
Mantashe said that the department would consider the wide variety of inputs to the draft charters in drawing up a final charter.
“We will extend the period of public comment by a month [to end-August]. It will do no harm. People will comment more and engage more,” Mantashe said. The acknowledgment of past empowerment deals that clauses in the draft charter recognised as counting towards empowerment credits was overwhelmingly rejected at the summit, Mantashe said.
He declined to say what this meant for the final version of the charter, which now acknowledges the concept of once empowered, always empowered, the inclusion of which the mining industry had lobbied for.
“We must finalise that discussion on once empowered, always empowered. We must find a way out of that debate,” he said. “In the commissions at the summit it was rejected by almost everybody.”