There was a time when SA didn’t need to beg for mining investment. The ground beneath our feet and the competence above it made us the envy of the world. Our engineers, metallurgists and geologists built the deepest and most technically complex mines ever conceived. Our mining houses, from Anglo American to Gold Fields, Gencor and Rand Mines, were global heavyweights that defined Johannesburg’s skyline and funded the modern economy.
Mining capital paid for our railways, our electricity grid, our early industrialisation. SA was a mining nation in every sense: productive, innovative, confident. The miners of the Reef and the engineers of the Rand were spoken of in the same breath as the oil men of Texas or the copper barons of Chile.
Today that legacy lies buried under a mountain of paperwork and a mine dump of missed opportunities. Most mining execs I speak to, and vocal legal critics such as Hulme Scholes or Peter Leon, who have to navigate its labyrinthine maze, agree that at the heart of our mining collapse lies the Mineral & Petroleum Resources Development Act, promulgated into law in 2002.
Each new minister promised certainty, transformation or transparency. What we got instead was a curate’s egg of bureaucracy and discretion. The once-proud department of minerals & energy, home to geological pioneers, became a patronage mill.
The result is an industry that has shrunk by half as a share of GDP since the early 1990s, and a country that now attracts less than 1% of global exploration spend. The Fraser Institute places us near the bottom of the world’s mining jurisdictions, below countries that didn’t even have geological surveys when we were leading the world in mining innovation.
Of course, SA’s legacy is far from perfect, and the migrant labour system and exploitation of cheap labour have kept distrust in the sector high to this day. But it worked. Skill and geology mattered more than political access. The only real issue that needed to be fixed was fair treatment of labour and equal opportunity of access.
Then came the great inversion. When the Mineral & Petroleum Resources Development Act transferred mineral rights from private owners to the state in 2002 it was meant to democratise opportunity. Instead it concentrated power in a bureaucracy that quickly learnt the value of discretion. Without a public digital cadastre, the department of mineral resources & energy became the gatekeeper to the nation’s wealth.
In SA, where the gatekeeper controls the queue, the queue soon becomes the business. Every company seeking a prospecting right must now navigate a paper maze spread across provincial offices that function like fiefdoms. Files go missing. Applications overlap. Decisions stall until someone “facilitates” them.
The Imperial Crown Trading scandal a decade ago exposed this system to broad daylight. When Kumba Iron Ore’s paperwork for the Sishen mine “went missing”, a politically connected newcomer appeared with rights to the same ground. The courts eventually overturned the award, but not before it was shown how easily paperwork could become patronage. Losing your file could mean losing your mine.
That was no aberration. Across the platinum belt and coalfields, overlapping rights and questionable empowerment deals have become the norm. Section 11 approvals, which are required for any change in control, can languish for years, in effect freezing transactions until someone inside decides, or is persuaded, the timing is right.
Meanwhile, the promised digital cadastre — the one reform that could disinfect the system with sunlight — has been “imminent” for 14 years. June 2025 became October 2025, and few believe even that, because a working cadastre would strip away discretion, and discretion is the currency of control.
The consequences are measurable. SA’s share of global exploration spending has collapsed from about 5% two decades ago to less than 1%. The Fraser Institute now ranks us near the bottom of 86 jurisdictions for policy perception, below Botswana, Namibia and even Ivory Coast. Every year of delay means fewer drill rigs, fewer jobs and another wave of capital migrating north of the Limpopo.
Yet we still produce world-class talent. Natascha Viljoen, an SA metallurgical engineer, has just been appointed CEO of Newmont, the world’s largest gold miner. Our people can run the biggest operations on earth, just not here. The intellectual export of excellence has become our new mineral trade.
Mines minister Gwede Mantashe insists government is acting. We have an exploration strategy promising to lift our global share to 5% within five years, and a Junior Mining Exploration Fund worth R400m. But that’s the cost of a single mid-tier drilling programme in Canada. These are gestures, certainly not solutions.
Real reform would mean a live, public cadastre, statutory timelines for licensing, and tax incentives to attract exploration capital. It would mean cutting the oxygen supply to the rent-seeking networks that thrive in the department’s blind spots. But that would also mean dismantling the political economy that has grown around the chaos, from the consultants to the fixers and intermediaries who trade in access rather than expertise.
As the Johannesburg Mining Indaba gathers this week, commodity prices are stirring again. Gold and platinum remain strong, copper and nickel are climbing, and the world’s hunger for critical minerals is only beginning. Another boom is forming, and we’re still standing in the bureaucratic departure lounge, shuffling paper while others board the flight.
Successive ministers have promised to fix the system. Susan Shabangu launched the SA Mineral Resources Administration System in 2011, an online application portal that collapsed almost immediately. Mantashe has since promised a modern digital cadastre no fewer than five times. A tender was eventually awarded in 2024, with a go-live date set for this month. And still we wait.
Every delay is explained as “getting it right”. But after 14 years it’s fair to suspect that getting it wrong suits some just fine. A functioning cadastre would destroy the shadow economy built around discretion. Files couldn’t vanish. Applications would be time-stamped. Overlaps would be impossible, and ultimately real transparency would end the trade in inside information.
Mining built this country, and it can rebuild it from the ruins. Unfortunately, I now believe that will be possible only once the ANC’s dead hand is removed from the levers of power.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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