South Africa’s mineral endowment places it at the centre of the world’s accelerating transition to clean energy, digitalisation and advanced manufacturing.
As the contest over cleantech supply chains intensifies, this endowment confers opportunity and obligation: opportunity to anchor new industrial value chains at home and obligation to deliver policy certainty, reliable infrastructure and investable projects that convert geology into jobs.
Recently, the US ambassador to South Africa, L Brent Bozell III, floated the prospect of US companies pursuing local beneficiation in South Africa, framing it as a prospective pathway to expand domestic industrial capacity and generate employment (“The art of the possible”, March 30).
Indeed, upgrading minerals into concentrates, alloys, battery precursors, catalysts, pigments or separated rare earth products multiplies earnings and anchors new industrial activity. Beneficiation smooths revenue by shifting earnings to higher-margin, more stable processed products.
This aligns with South Africa’s Critical Minerals & Metals Strategy (2025), which prioritises local beneficiation and downstream industrialisation. Countries controlling mineral resources and midstream processing enjoy far greater geopolitical and commercial leverage.
Few countries are as systemically important as South Africa for certain inputs. This dominance positions South Africa not merely as a participant in the global critical minerals market but as a strategic actor whose resources underpin global industrial stability.
The Bushveld Complex in South Africa holds about 63-million kilograms of platinum group metal (PGM) reserves, representing most of the world’s known 76-million kilograms of PGM reserves. This makes South Africa an irreplaceable supplier for catalytic converters, hydrogen technologies and high-specification industrial applications.
Few countries are as systemically important as South Africa for certain inputs. This dominance positions South Africa not merely as a participant in the global critical minerals market but as a strategic actor whose resources underpin global industrial stability.
The Critical Minerals & Metals Strategy explicitly frames PGMs, manganese, vanadium and rare earths as pillars of an energy transition industrial strategy, with execution pillars spanning geoscience mapping, beneficiation, research & development and skills, infrastructure and energy security, finance and regulatory harmonisation.
Consider manganese, the unsung hero of steel and emerging battery chemistries. South Africa is the world’s largest producer and holds the biggest reserves, estimated at 560-million tonnes, anchored by the Kalahari Manganese Field.
In 2024 South Africa accounted for a third of global output amid rising demand for high-purity battery materials. Yet only a sliver is beneficiated domestically, a gap the strategy seeks to close through targeted incentives and potential export policy levers.
Vanadium tells a similar story. South Africa is one of the leading primary producers globally (with an estimate of 430,000 tonnes of vanadium reserves), with integrated mining and chemical capabilities suited to the vanadium redox flow battery market. Similarly, South Africa remains the top exporter of chrome ore, a vital input to stainless steel.
However, electricity-intensive ferrochrome smelting has struggled under power and cost pressures, leading miners to favour raw ore exports over higher-value alloys. This underscores why grid reliability and cost-competitive electrons are the substrate of beneficiation. Recent industry data shows continued dominance in ore exports but persistent pressure on alloy pricing and domestic smelting capacity.
Beyond the Bushveld, titanium mineral sands represent a quietly pivotal value chain. Richards Bay Minerals is a world-class producer of ilmenite, rutile and zircon. In parallel, the Nyanza Light Metals project at the Richards Bay Industrial Development Zone aims to push ilmenite up the value curve into titanium dioxide pigment, 10 times the value of raw feedstock.
This is an archetype of how South Africa can move from ore to advanced materials if there is sustainable alignment of power, logistics and capital. The global economy needs South Africa’s minerals, and South Africa can leverage this demand to secure national development.
If PGMs, manganese and chrome are established pillars, rare earth elements (REEs) are South Africa’s stubbornly emerging wildcard. The Steenkampskraal monazite deposit in the Western Cape is among the highest-grade rare earth resources known, and its owners have outlined a six-phase plan to localise the full value chain.
If PGMs, manganese and chrome are established pillars, rare earth elements are South Africa’s stubbornly emerging wildcard.
Critically, the Industrial Development Corporation has released the first funding tranche to build phase one concentrator capacity, signalling public development finance intent to seed downstream technologies often monopolised elsewhere.
Geopolitics makes this more than an industrial curiosity. From 2027 US defence procurement rules will prohibit Chinese-origin rare earth magnets in weapons systems, forcing a rapid buildout of non-Chinese supply chains for heavy REEs such as dysprosium and terbium.
This hard deadline is already catalysing allied investments in metallisation and magnet capacity, and it is exactly in this context that a credible REE value chain in South Africa would command premium off-takes and strategic financing.
Cabinet’s approval of the Critical Minerals & Metals Strategy is a material step because it codifies a balanced approach: expand exploration through geoscience mapping and junior funding mechanisms; accelerate local beneficiation and localisation; invest in R&D and skills; fix infrastructure and energy; deploy blended finance for downstream projects; and harmonise regulation to reduce licensing friction.
The department of mineral & petroleum resources, working with Mintek and the Council for Geoscience, sets explicit goals to lift South Africa’s exploration share and seed domestic processing hubs (battery precursor production, ferroalloy revival, and resource development zones).
This is reinforced by complementary initiatives such as the Hydrogen Society Roadmap (2021), which leverages South Africa’s PGM advantage (for fuel cells and electrolysers) and targets domestic manufacturing of hydrogen components, green hydrogen hubs and export corridors, an industrial adjacency that can absorb PGMs and create technology pull for local catalysts, membranes and stacks.
‘Fragile foundations’
Yet ambition must be reconciled with the “fragile foundations” critics warn about — load-shedding and power costs; constrained rail and port logistics; permitting timelines; and inconsistent policy signalling. Without visible progress on these bottlenecks, South Africa risks repeating the pattern seen in chrome and some vanadium assets — exporting raw materials while value creation migrates offshore.
The strategy’s success will hinge on rapid implementation of energy market reforms, recovery of rail corridors for manganese and bulk commodities, and the implementation of a cadastre one-stop regulatory interface that collapses long, uncertain licensing paths.
The regional geopolitics also cut both ways. China’s accelerated infrastructure-for-resources model has reshaped Africa’s critical minerals map, most dramatically in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s copper-cobalt belt, where state-backed firms have captured an outsized supply and now face quota regimes designed to enforce local value add.
South Africa’s strategy must therefore be outward-looking, anchoring regional integration for electric vehicle and grid storage value chains while protecting domestic industrialisation from becoming a mere transit node in other powers’ supply strategies.
Global supply chains are being rewired. The US and allies are racing to derisk rare-earth and battery metal dependencies ahead of 2027 procurement rules, while China consolidates upstream and midstream positions across Africa through capital, technology and logistics. South Africa can choose to be a price taker in this reordering or a rule maker that sets the regional template for just transition industrialisation.
With the critical minerals & metals strategy in hand, flagship projects advancing from Richards Bay to Steenkampskraal, and a hydrogen roadmap that monetises PGMs in new ways, the elements are available. What remains is to stitch them into a coherent, bankable pipeline and to deliver the enabling basics: reliable power, efficient rail and ports and predictable regulation.
Do that, and South Africa will not merely ship the minerals that power the 21st century; it will manufacture the technologies that define it.
• Dr Tshitereke, an honorary professor at Unisa’s Thabo Mbeki School of Public & International Affairs, is chief of staff at the Minerals & Petroleum Resources Ministry. He writes in his personal capacity.
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