Value your workers, Motsepe tells mines
THE entire South African mining industry will have to review its attitude to labour, as part of a wider structural rethink of the sector, according to billionaire Patrice Motsepe.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Africa this week, the founder of African Rainbow Minerals and chairman of Sanlam said the industry would need a massive review, including an entirely new dispensation, “at some stage”.
“At the heart of it must be inclusive growth and what I would call stakeholder benefits and engagement,” he said.
Motsepe said that as a young boy in Pretoria, he had watched his family of entrepreneurs run their grocery and bottle stores — while paying school fees for children in the community.
This, he said, taught him that a business had no future if the community it was based in did not grow at the same time.
Applying this principle to mining, Motsepe said the sector would have to rethink its engagements with labour.
“There are challenges about our engagement with labour. We have to re-engage with labour. I admire the way the German system has really engaged with labour as a partner in their businesses,” he said.
But shareholders were also an important element, he said.
“I have a duty to shareholders — the people who give us the money to open businesses. If my shareholders sitting in London and New York don’t think the mining industry is a good place to invest and will give them competitive returns over an extended period, I do not have a mining industry,” he said.
“I can guarantee you there is a huge commitment in the companies I am associated with, and in the mining industry as a whole, [to] create a future that is good for all its stakeholders.”
Motsepe sidestepped questions about whether he would follow wealthy businessmen such as Tokyo Sexwale and Cyril Ramaphosa into politics.
Laughing at first, he said diplomatically: “I could probably make a more significant contribution if I keep trying to bring people together and keep saying the things that are politically inappropriate, incorrect.”
Motsepe, a co-chair of the forum, said earlier in the week that it was the “duty of business” to comment on governance, corruption, xenophobia, freedom of speech and prudent fiscal environments in Africa.
He said there should be “zero tolerance” of corruption, but it “doesn’t send a good message if you as a government want to change the constitution” to extend the terms of government.