For the past 30 years, SA has followed an outdated approach to measuring its gold imports and exports, making it nearly impossible to quantify illicit gold flows and smuggling, said NGO Swissaid.
A report by the NGO paints a damning picture of the country’s “opaque” gold trade statistics, warning foreign investors and potential importers to approach even legally exported gold with caution.
According to the report, SA’s official export data, produced by the SA Revenue Service (Sars), only includes gold mined in the country, ignoring gold imports, which are refined and
re-exported.
Similarly, Sars only publishes data on gold imports for domestic consumption. Gold imports for refining and re-exporting, which represent by far the largest proportion of gold imports into SA and a significant chunk of the country’s gold exports, do not appear in the statistics.
As a result, official statistics are not representative of the actual quantities of gold that enter or leave the country each year, reads the report.
As evidence, official gold imports into SA from the rest of the world tend to be much lower than gold exports from all other countries into SA, pointing to a gap in SA’s reporting.
Sars also provides no indication of the countries of destination of gold exports, unless they are members of the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu), by solely reporting on SA’s gold sales figures instead of gold export figures.
According to Swissaid, this opacity dates back to the apartheid regime, when international sanctions imposed on SA made it advantageous for government authorities to hide the destination of gold exports.
“Apartheid has ended long ago, so SA authorities have had more than enough time to change their reporting practices. The fact that they have not — and that they appear relatively indifferent to this issue — is preoccupying.
“It may even be that the current practice violates international standards on trade statistics reporting. This would need to be assessed.”
The NGO urged SA authorities to “immediately adopt new rules and make information on the countries of destination of gold exports publicly accessible”.
Outdated rules
“As long as SA authorities keep the same, outdated rules on reporting of gold exports, SA players will face the suspicion that gold is exported illegally out of SA on a massive scale.”
Another ongoing concern is the lack of data on artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), given that ASM was considered illegal up until 2022, when the government unveiled an ASM policy aimed at formalising the sector.
The lack of official data means that estimates of illegal mining’s share in SA’s total gold production vary from 5% to 30%, ranging from R7bn to R70bn a year.
“Such a wide range means that little can be concluded with any certainty about the volumes of gold produced by the ‘zama zama’ in SA,” said Swissaid.
Gold smuggled from African countries such as Ghana, a major global supplier, passes through SA before being exported to the rest of the world.
SA, particularly, is a destination for smuggled ASM gold from Zimbabwe, which is estimated to have lost almost 60 tonnes of gold to smuggling in 2022.
In a previous report, Swissaid found that for almost every year in 2014-22, SA’s gold exports were “higher than the aggregate of total declared gold production” in SA.
The report estimated that more than 435 tonnes of gold with a value of $30bn (R525bn) was smuggled out of Africa in 2022.
Mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe said earlier this year that SA had lost about R60bn in revenue to illicit precious metal trade in 2024 alone.
“Gold laundering takes place within SA before the gold even enters the international market, and local refineries are implicated. Therefore, even sourcing legally exported gold from SA is risky and should be approached as such by potential investors.”
Correction: July 15 2025
The previous version of this article created the impression that the only London Bullion Market Association-certified refinery in Africa, Rand Refinery, is complicit in illicit gold. This is not true. Rand Refinery assisted in compiling the Swissaid report. We regret the confusion the earlier version created.
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