I found myself sharing a lunch table at this week’s African Mining Indaba with a group of trade unionists who were toggling between the main event and the Alternative Mining Indaba down the road.
They were outraged that President Cyril Ramaphosa had used his keynote speech to accuse business and labour of “moaning”, telling them to stop criticising from the rooftops and “get into the ring”.
Ramaphosa went off script in a speech that otherwise said many of the right things, and even lauded the private sector for its willingness to partner with government. But while business people were polite enough not to lambaste him for his bit of populist blame-shifting, the labour folk weren’t holding back.
They pointed out that they spend many hours in all the many rings and consultation forums the president demands, as does business. But nothing much happens. My trade union friends had just been to a packed indaba session hosted by Ghana. There, they pointed out, government ministers were hugely welcoming to the private sector — and it takes just two weeks to get a mining exploration licence.
The bizarre politics of partnership with the government in SA was one of the themes at a gathering dominated by the dysfunction at Eskom and Transnet and the damage they are doing to investment, output and exports in the mining sector.
Outgoing Eskom CEO André de Ruyter was on stage not quite explaining why more than half of Eskom’s capacity — not just the old but also the brand new — was broken. Transnet CEO Portia Derby, who clearly is not outgoing despite calls to remove her, was on stage blaming everyone but herself for Transnet’s broken rail and port services.
Mineral resources & energy minister Gwede Mantashe called for the private sector to help with ideas. From their position on the alleged rooftops, the Minerals Council and individual mining company bosses detailed the partnerships they had already forged with government, and the progress already made — but called for more robust partnerships and faster action, and offered even more help.
So desperate is the private sector to help, for free, to fix what’s broken in government, that one almost feels pity for them. Does the point come when they conclude, in the words of the movie, “he’s just not that into you”?
When it first started decades ago (at the Cape Sun), the indaba was a smaller event, focused on mining in SA, which at that time was the world’s largest gold producer, among other things. The guys (just about all of them were guys) at those gatherings would hardly recognise the one today.
Now it’s officially the Investing in African Mining Indaba. And this year the enthusiasm was around mining in Africa — not in load-shed, rail-shed SA. Many languages were to be heard in the meeting rooms and at the parties; smaller companies were selling themselves and looking for projects; countries were selling themselves and looking for investors. The big global miners were there and so too were high-level official delegations from the world’s rich countries, led by the US.
The energy transition was a key theme. The large miners have set ambitious targets to cut their carbon footprints and in SA renewable energy is an imperative too, for security of power supply. So the indaba was swarming with renewable energy folk. But mining is also the source of the minerals and metals required for the transition, and Africa is rich in battery metals such as cobalt and copper, as well as in the sunshine and platinum group metals needed for the hydrogen economy.
Ramaphosa shared the stage on Tuesday with Democratic Republic of the Congo President Felix Tshisekedi, who had plenty of investors after his country’s cobalt, at least those willing to risk the odd bit of human rights abuse. On Monday US under-secretary of state Jose Fernandez took the main stage to talk about the growing need for critical minerals and the eight-month-old Mineral Security Partnership, led by the US, which is looking to lock in some of them and ensure they are mined to high environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards.
Romancing African mining jurisdictions is part of that thrust. But to the geopolitics experts the presence of US, Canadian, European and other officials was as much about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Not only did it highlight for them the need to counter Russia’s influence in Africa, it also highlighted the need to diversify their sources of supply of all commodities — not just “green” minerals — away from Russia, and perhaps China.
Delegates to the indaba of the Cold War years might not have found all that entirely unfamiliar. But they might be entirely bemused by the gender and human rights experts and community workers, and what one old-timer called the “cottage industry” of ESG experts who now feature strongly in the main stage panels, at the side events and cocktail parties. That theme reflects a fundamental shift in global mining in recent years.
Responsible mining, or whatever one wants to call it, is now about doing business, not just doing good. Shareholders are putting pressure on companies to mine in ways that do not damage the environment or risk harm to workers and communities, or breach human rights standards.
But in some ways that is the least of the pressure. Regulators or communities in parts of Latin America and Europe have not allowed companies to mine at all. Mine disasters have caused huge financial and reputational risk to some large companies. Miners are ever more aware that their “social licence to operate” depends on how they behave and how safely and ethically they mine.
Consumers are also starting to ask questions about where the metals in their smartphones or the lithium in their electric vehicle batteries come from and how it was mined. As one speaker put it, the “social licence to market” is also becoming a challenge — and a potential competitive advantage.
In a changing mining landscape SA has the disadvantage of coal-fired power but it should have multiple advantages, not least of which is that it is a strong democracy and one with an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI, one of the many acronyms at the indaba).
Perhaps the president could get into that ring himself.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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