CLOSE THE SUN

In his early years, Froneman had no connection with mining. Born in 1959, he grew up in Northcliff, Johannesburg, where he went to primary school and high school. His father was a chartered accountant, his mother a hairdresser. It was through a bursary from Gold Fields that he studied mechanical engineering at Wits University.

When first gaining work experience at Gold Fields, Froneman recalls how he was quickly given considerable responsibility. “The whole nature of mining, the large responsibilities, appealed to me and that’s how I ended up in mining and I’ve only ever been in mining,” he says.

Armed with what he describes as his “entrepreneurial flair”, as head of Sibanyestillwater Froneman has in five years built a mining empire and is one of the biggest employers in the country. He is responsible for about 64,000 workers and, by extension, 2% of the SA population. When a deal to acquire the distressed Lonmin platinum mine concludes, Sibanye-stillwater will employ 97,000 people.

More comfortable in jeans than a suit, Froneman describes himself as a simple person when it comes to his love for an unfussy Wimpy executive breakfast or a can of Coca-cola. His flashy side is reserved for fast cars, planes and helicopters.

In his downtime he takes on any project that might entertain his engineeringobsessed mind.

He is a tough, plain-spoken miner and labour representatives respect him for his frankness. For creating Sibanye out of unloved mining assets, he is commended.

But Froneman’s bold and aggressive growth strategy, executed in the name of sustainability, flies dangerously close to the sun. Should it fail, it would be ruinous for all those who’ve hitched their wagons to Sibanye’s star.

“The world and the media love building up heroes and demons, good guys and villains. It just runs on that sort of thing — selling shares, selling newspapers, selling hype,” says Peter Major, director for mining at Cadiz Corporate Solutions. He first met Froneman at the Gold Fields Marshalltown head office in the 1980s.

Froneman started his career in 1984 as a junior engineer on Gold Fields’ Libanon mine in Westonaria — which, in 2000, was amalgamated with three others to establish the Kloof mine and which today is part of the Sibanye-stillwater stable.

He was posted to head office for a project, then was sent off to Deelkraal (now part of Harmony’s Kusasalethu mine) as a section engineer and even transferred as a project engineer to the Northam platinum project, then part of the expansive Gold Fields empire.

Froneman moved on to Gencor, which later merged with Gold Fields to become Gold Fields Ltd. At the Kinross mine in Mpumalanga he met a young Bernard Swanepoel, who was the mine manager.

“We introduced some quite new and dynamic management concepts,” says Froneman. “And we worked very well together.”

Swanepoel took up the post of MD at Randgold’s Harmony mine in 1995 and through an acquisition, of which there were many, Froneman joined Harmony as an operations director.

Swanepoel was breaking Harmony out of just being one mine — though it was the world’s second largest, with 12 shafts — and buying up operations.

In some ways the Harmony story compares with Sibanye’s.

“They called it the ‘closure with dignity’ plan,” Swanepoel says of the business plan to

What it means: