Get a plug-and-play system for mining

There’s a system that’s almost as easy as plug-and-play for an online method to track mining, prospecting and exploration rights transparently. Nearly 20 African mining jurisdictions have opted for Trimble Land Administration, including Mozambique, Namibia, and Lesotho, and near-neighbour Zambia. This is just one system finding favour in Africa.

It is astonishingly easy to use. It throws up a map of a country, shows all tenements in various colours for different rights, and, with a click on the block, shows which company is working on each tenement.

The data block tells viewers all they need to know: the date the right was applied for, when it was granted, when it expires, the name of the company and the minerals for which it applied. There’s a tenement code and how large the tenement is under the permit.

It gives instant, transparent access to local and foreign investors, who can be anywhere with a computer and data. It is achingly simple. The question prompted by visiting these sites through the Trimble website or the mineral department sites for relevant countries is equally simple.

How does SA, economic and mining powerhouse on the continent with its mineral wealth, not have anything remotely as transparent, userfriendly, easy and accessible?

The department of mineral resources and energy has an online portal, but instead of using a tried, trusted and readily available package, it built a clunky system condemned by all those trying to use it.

To access the Samrad Online system, an individual or company registers on a page that demands a fax number as a mandatory field, giving the first disturbing clue that this system is not 21st century or modern.

Samrad ’ s home page offers the reams of documents needed for a mining or prospecting right, but not a single map. It’s impossible to tell immediately if the area you want a right over is occupied. At two mining conferences towards year’s end, year, most notably the event focused on junior mining, the question of a workable, userfriendly, transparent, corruption-free online system was the most pressing. Without one, SA is close to dead in the water when it comes to exploration and developing fresh resources to replace exhausted or depleted deposits.

The department admits the moribund domestic exploration sector is a critical aspect of the country ’ s mineral industry to rectify and rejuvenate.

At the heart of that strategy is a functioning online cadastral system. But buying an online cadastre program is the easy bit. The core challenge is populating the system with clean, legally sound data. This entails resolving disputes in overlapping tenements that stem from the dysfunctional management of mining and prospecting rights over the past two decades, sometimes due to corruption and favouritism, and the chaotic maintenance of the rights system. It is highly unlikely the department will again opt to build its own system and will instead go for a tried and tested international software package.

The department’s real test is addressing the lack of skills and adequate staffing to populate and maintain the system. It feeds into similar problems within other departments that give inputs into decisions over the granting of mineral rights.

The Minerals Council SA has offered the vast skill sets available inherent in its 83 members to help fund, staff and expedite a solution to the cadastral system. But this touches on historic mistrust between the department and mining companies. It also brings in the added, and sometimes unsolvable, matter of union buy-in to potentially outsource and speed up data capture.

Ideally, the population of data sets in the new cadastre system should be done within months and in less than a year. Anything more and it becomes tricky.

CEOs have spoken of a willingness to crowdfund a new system and the work entailed to make it functional and up to date. But there are still elements in the department it does not suit to have a corruption-free, inviolate system of dispensing rights; or a major cleanup of data for fear of exposing dodgy deals. That’s for mineral resources minister Gwede Mantashe to resolve quickly.

There is a huge job to get done, but time is precious. SA can no longer procrastinate on the most fundamental aspect of regulating our mineral rights: dispensing and managing prospecting and mining rights in an honest and transparent way.

Mantashe and officials must make tough decisions fast. There will be aggrieved parties but this process cannot be sidelined by pandering to unions and political ideology, and dragging it out through consultation after consultation.

This is too important for the future of SA mining, the 450,000 it employs and the tens of thousands more it can absorb if it grows to its potential.

The government must decide whether it wants investments and jobs in a growing, healthy mining sector or satisfied unions and other social partners with an ailing industry. It cannot be utterly beholden to unions and avoid business-friendly decisions that encourage investment and longterm prosperity.

There’s too much dithering about much-vaunted economic recovery plans Business for SA and its underlying business groupings presented as workable, tangible schemes. The government could lose the formal sector’s goodwill if it keeps avoiding pragmatic investor-friendly decisions for fear of alienating unions.

One of the department’s decades-long problems has a willing counterparty to help resolve the issues. It must make the ballsy decision to accept the hand reaching out to it.