There is a peculiarly numbing deja vu quality to arriving at the Mining Indaba in Cape Town. The organisers consistently manage to underdeliver for the assembled media. Speeches still promise reform “imminently”. South Africa still stands on some of the richest mineral endowments on earth while watching capital, skills and ambition chase and announce deals and projects elsewhere.
The only noteworthy difference on the opening morning in 2026 was a spell of highly unusual wintry rain. Fitting, I suppose, given the department of mineral & petroleum resources’ damp squib effort at reinvigorating the local mining industry.
The tragedy is not that mining no longer matters. It is that it matters enormously and we are squandering it. Mining and its suppliers still support close to 900,000 jobs and the livelihoods of 3.6-million South Africans.
Mineral exports account for roughly half the value of the country’s merchandise exports and the sector contributes more than R100bn a year in taxes, royalties and VAT to the fiscus. Employee compensation alone runs at about R200bn annually. These are pillars of the economy.
Mineral exports account for roughly half the value of the country’s merchandise exports and the sector contributes more than R100bn a year in taxes, royalties and VAT to the fiscus.
I have written versions of this column before. In February 2023 I warned that the cadastre fiasco would hang over the Indaba like a storm cloud. We are still waiting for Godot to emerge from somewhere inside Gwede Mantashe’s enormous proclivity for turpitude.
In October 2025 I argued that the transference of mineral rights to the state sat at the heart of mining’s collapse. Little has changed on the policy front since either piece. What has changed, and dramatically, is the global context.
The world is now in an open, unapologetic race for strategic minerals. The US has just announced a $12bn strategic minerals stockpile, “Project Vault”, explicitly framed as a national security imperative.
Washington is courting Robert Friedland and Ivanhoe’s African copper assets, alongside a clutch of other African producers, to secure supply chains outside China’s reach. Defence budgets are rising, data centres are mushrooming, grids are being rebuilt and real assets are in vogue as the dollar debases.
This is all happening while South Africa, once again, is spectating. At Indaba receptions the conversation has shifted from “when will South Africa fix itself?” to “where else can we deploy capital?” Namibia comes up a lot. So does Botswana. Even jurisdictions with reputational baggage manage to sound more investable than a country that used to set the global standard.
South Africa’s own goal
The comparison with Namibia’s emerging oil and gas province is instructive and damning. On a shared offshore basin, Namibia takes roughly a 10% government stake and focuses on getting the project built. South Africa demands an effective 30% ownership structure layered with empowerment requirements, approvals and discretion. No prizes for guessing who is attracting capital.
The same logic has paralysed mining. The Mining Charter’s ownership regulations, combined with discretionary licensing under the Mineral & Petroleum Resources Development Act, have frozen investment in new mines. Exploration, the very lifeblood of any mining industry, is effectively dead. Capital does not drill where it cannot secure tenure, or price risk or exit cleanly.
The tragedy is not just what we are losing today. It is what we are baking into the future. Mining is a long-cycle industry.
In 2006 South Africa spent R6.2bn a year on exploration. By 2024 that figure had shrunk to R781m. The government insists this is transformation. In practice it has become the transference of mineral rights to the state, of discretion to bureaucrats and of value to those who can navigate the maze. The absence of a live, public, digital cadastre is the enabling condition for this system to persist. Where the gatekeeper controls the queue, the queue becomes the business.
The tragedy is not just what we are losing today. It is what we are baking into the future. Mining is a long-cycle industry. The consequences of policy failure are not immediate; they arrive with a lag of 10 to 15 years. That is roughly the lifespan of a modern mine from discovery to depletion.
South Africa is living off investments made decades ago. When today’s platinum, gold and coal assets reach the end of their lives, there is nothing meaningful in the pipeline to replace them. By then it will be too late to pretend we were unlucky.
This is why the present pullback in precious metals and the disorderly washout of speculative positions should not distract from the bigger picture. Yes, the deleveraging has been brutal. Yes, stop-losses have cascaded through futures markets. But stepping back, the structural drivers of this commodity supercycle remain intact.
Global resource nationalism
Dollar debasement continues in the background, creating a golden age for real assets. Global growth, while uneven, remains above the long-term trend. Resource nationalism is rising everywhere, not just in Africa. Defence spending is surging and armies — inconveniently for policymakers — are made of metal.
Data centre build-outs are extraordinarily commodity-intensive. Mega mergers & acquisitions are accelerating as majors scramble for scarce, high-quality copper assets (Glencore still looks mispriced in that context). And the eventual reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine will require a staggering quantity of steel, copper, cement and energy, whatever the moral language wrapped around it.
The world is preparing for a future in which minerals matter more, not less. Meanwhile, South Africa is preparing more excuses. The most damaging argument I hear from officials is that “getting it right takes time”. We have been “getting it right” for more than two decades. Fourteen years after the promise of a digital cadastre we are still waiting.
The irony is that this government does not lack examples of what works. Botswana’s cadastre is public and functional. Namibia’s petroleum regime is clear and bankable. Canada and Australia offer certainty, timelines and tax incentives that attract risk capital at scale.
Mining built this country once. It funded our railways, our power grid, our industrial base. It can do so again, but only if the government of national unity recognises that capital is mobile, geology is not, and skills will always follow opportunity.
If South Africa gets mining policy right now, from tenure security to a live cadastre, statutory timelines and a pragmatic approach to ownership, it could still ride the next decade of the commodity cycle. Sadly, we seem destined to get it wrong and the real damage will only become visible when the last generation of legacy mines winds down and there is nothing behind them but conference brochures and speeches.
By then, no amount of rhetoric at the Mining Indaba will be enough to fill the hole in the ground — or the one in the economy.
• Avery, a financial journalist and broadcaster, produces BDTV’s ‘Business Watch’. Contact him at michael@fmr.co.za.
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