Modern Mining April 2024

COLUMNIST

Reflections on another Mining Indaba By Dr Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at Good Governance Africa (GGA)

A nother Investing in African Mining Indaba has come and gone. To attract over 8 000 attend ees is quite a feat, no matter one’s feelings towards the event. The big idea is to get inves tors, miners, governments, the media, civil society and academia in the same room. It is an opportunity for countries to show what they have to offer, for investors to interrogate pitches, and miners to learn from one another. One could focus on any number of these for a post-match analysis column, but I can not stop thinking about just how different the South African government’s showing was to Zambia’s. Zambia is by no means perfect, but South Africa must send a much stronger signal to the market that it is credibly serious about attracting investment into its mining industry. To begin with, South Africa’s Minister of Minerals and Energy took a shot at certain ‘members of the media’ who had written about the severe backlog of unprocessed prospecting and/or mining licences. This is not something to get defensive about unless the numbers reported were materially different from the amount actually processed. The truth is that there simply shouldn’t be a backlog. A friend of mine builds cadastre software, and he has repeat edly told me that he would rather work in the DRC than in South Africa. I mention the cadastre because it’s been a bugbear of the industry for many years now. If the country had a functional online cadastre that was well managed, we wouldn’t have had the infamous Imperial Crown Trading (ICT) case in 2010, along with numerous other unnecessary debacles. I won’t bore you with the details, but the upshot is that a politically connected fly-by-night company (ICT) lodged a fraudulent claim for expired rights (belong ing to Arcellor Mittal SA) to which Anglo American had first rights. The Department of Minerals (DMR)

Dr Ross Harvey, director of research and programmes at GGA.

The opportunity to attract responsible players that will generate real value is there. backed ICT all the way to the Constitutional Court. The DMR claimed that ICT submitted their claim (which looked remarkably like Anglo’s!) first on the same day and that the right should have reverted to the state for distribution after expiry. ICT and the state lost the case. Had a functional cadastre been in place, an electronic fingerprint of the exact date and time of both applications would have been clear for all to see. That’s one of the most important things that a cadastre does – it makes it clear as daylight to everyone which company currently has which type of right over which piece of land and for what minerals. It avoids the stupidity of granting explora tion rights over an area currently being mined and so forth. At the Indaba, Minister Gwede Mantashe announced that a contractor had been appointed to build such a cadastre for South Africa and that it would take at least 18 months for it to become fully functional. While the news is welcome, the system will only be as good as the capability and capacity of the department that manages it. And this is the

Investing in African Mining Indaba attracted over 8 000 attendees.

36  MODERN MINING  April 2024