MINING WITH A CONSCIENCE
ONLY those who hate South Africa with a passion will not wish for investment inflows to increase.
At the Mining Indaba in Cape Town this week, however, Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe would have been haunted by one incident even as he reassured delegates that certainty was returning to the industry. The same would have been on the mind of President Cyril Ramaphosa in his bold assertion that the sun was not setting on mining.
Numbers will suggest otherwise. Mining, according to Statistics SA, contributed 21% to the economy in 1980; it is well below 10% today. Employment has followed the same trajectory. But mining is not ever going to disappear.
No other industry has so ravaged African countries than mining and its extractive allies.
Civil strife at different intensity levels in Angola, Democratic
Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Zimbabwe were all about foreign interests in Africa’s mineral resources. One wonders how Minister Mantashe was able to not run into a gridlock regarding another case of Marikana simmering at Xolobeni, Eastern Cape, when he addressed guests in Cape Town.
As an investor, not only the Australian company Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM), one would wonder how Mantashe plans to ensure that we do not experience another conflict with the community as in Xolobeni, near Oliver Tambo’s home Bizana. This was thanks to the resistance by civil society, under the umbrella of Amadiba Crisis Committee.
TEM has tried to get the court to rule in its favour, protecting its rights to mine the titanium-rich sands at the Umgungundlovu area, on the Wild Coast. The community stood firm and some people were intimidated and attacked to protect what is rightfully theirs. TEM’S confidence had arisen from the tragic precedent in developing countries by multinationals – the type Ramaphosa and Mantashe were wooing – to run roughshod over the land rights of vulnerable communities in pursuit of mineral wealth.
This often follows a decision to grant them mining rights in what often turns out to be a compromised political structure and process.
In the North Gauteng High
Court, Judge Annali Basson last year pronounced that the Mineral Resources minister ought to obtain permission from the community before granting mining rights, since the community holds the rights to land.
The informal rights of customary communities were previously not protected by law, she said, but the people now had the power to decide what happens to their land.
Considering Mantashe’s floundering in resolving the
Xolobeni crisis, one can only hope that he had his ducks in a row when he told the Indaba: “The policy and legislative framework were (in the past) marked with concern about uncertainty. That has been addressed and investors coming to South Africa now know what they need to do.”
Let us trust that the investors will from now on “know what to do”, or even more crucially that the minister’s team is going to be more prudent in issuing mining rights to avoid another catastrophe. Kgomoeswana is author of Africa is Open for Business, media commentator and public speaker on African business affairs