Former Harmony Gold CEO Bernard Swanepoel addresses the Joburg Indaba on 8 October 2025. (Photo: Ed Stoddard) 
Former Harmony Gold CEO and mega-mining personality Bernard Swanepoel summed it up on Wednesday, 8 October 2025, with his opening remarks at the Joburg Mining Indaba.
“There’s a vibe,” he said — and indeed there is a new vibe these days rippling through the South African mining industry, and it’s a good one for a change.
Hours before Swanepoel spoke, gold hit a record high of $4,000 an ounce — just six months after it reached the milestone of $3,000 and double the price it was fetching two years ago.
This has been driven by a range of factors including the geopolitical turbulence and uncertainty unleashed by the second Trump administration in the US — making the backdrop to this performance a double-edged sword for South Africa.
Meanwhile, prices for platinum group metals (PGMs) have been surging after years of languishing at depressed levels.
The “vibe” from this state of affairs has extended to the JSE, and as my colleague Stephen Grootes recently noted, its a key reason behind its record run. South Africa may only be the world’s No 10 gold producer these days, but it still has some weight on the JSE.
Read more: Why the JSE has been better to you than the US
Harmony Gold’s share price is up over 100% in 2025 to date, Gold Fields’ is more than 180% higher.
The share price of Sibanye-Stillwater, which is exposed to both gold and PGMs, is over 220% higher since the start of the year. Northam Platinum’s share price is up about 200% over that time frame.
“It’s a great time to be a miner,” Richard Sellschop, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, told the indaba.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/GettyImages-832673158-scaled-1.jpg "A worker pours molten gold into a mould during the refining of bullion at the Rand Refinery plant in Germiston, South Africa. (Photo: Waldo Swiegers / Bloomberg via Getty Images)")
This “vibe” is also reflected in the rand’s value. It is near its best levels in the year to date — below 17.20/dollar — and these gains have been driven in part by the sparkling gold price and platinum’s premium performance.
It’s a vibe that, at first glance, has not extended to the wider economy, which remains stuck in the rut of a low-growth trajectory. But it is a trend that can at least add some badly needed sparks, and South Africa is by far the world’s biggest producer of PGMs — so the rebound in the price of these critical metals is material to the domestic economy.
Other vibes
But there are other vibes at play as well.
Paul Dunne, the CEO of Northam Platinum and president of the Minerals Council, highlighted the mining sector’s unease with the proposed Minerals Development Amendment Bill.
“It is our considered view that the proposed bill in its original form does not encourage or sustain the growth and investment that the mining industry needs to realise its full potential to create employment, to stimulate the economy and to fulfil its social mandate,” he said in his remarks to the Indaba.
“Council has submitted a detailed document outlining our concerns, and we remain constructively engaged during this consultation phase. We do, however, expect somewhat of a protracted period before a redraft emerges, potentially extending into the new year.”
He went on to note how this policy uncertainty — a perpetual South African problem — was hampering investment.
“It costs R20-billion and 10 years to build a decent-sized mine. Very few mining companies have that type of money lying around on the balance sheet. Providers of capital will not put their money into risky environments where their returns are threatened by regulatory uncertainty, crime and corruption and failing infrastructure.”
That’s not quite raining on the “vibe”, and the government and industry are in talks about the draft bill. But it provided a healthy injection of reality to the proceedings.
One major pothole among many has been the lack of a mining cadastre and the years of needless delays in rolling one out.
The absence of a functional cadastre — an online portal that displays a country’s mineral wealth while allowing companies to seamlessly apply for mining and prospecting rights — has long been a deterrent to mining investment, leading to a massive backlog in applications.
Read more: Explainer — a mining cadastre and public transparency
Minerals and Petroleum Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe promised for months that it would be up and running by June this year — it is now October — but as is often the case with his department, the rollout is taking “longer than anticipated”.
Read more: Loaded for Bear: Mantashe’s mining cadastre is rolling out at a geological pace
Tseliso Maqubela, a deputy director-general in the department, said Mantashe would probably provide an update when he made the closing remarks at the Indaba.
But Maqubela did say that the cadastre’s delayed “test-run” stage in the Western Cape was launched on Wednesday, 1 October 2025, and that 37 right holders there had registered with the new system. So there is hopefully light finally flickering at the end of this long tunnel.
Mining is a fickle industry and it remains to be seen if the “vibe” is still vibing when the Cape Town Mining Indaba starts in February. But who knows, maybe South Africa’s new mining cadastre may finally be up and running then — and maybe gold will be fetching $5,000 an ounce. DM