Mantashe’s cadastre roll-out still proceeding at a geological pace

Another Cape Town Mining Indaba, another chance for Minerals and Petroleum Minister Gwede Mantashe to finally announce that the long-awaited South African mining cadastre is launching.

And once again, there are excuses and delays in the roll-out of a functional cadastre, which is widely regarded as crucial to unlock applications backlogs for mining and exploration permits and rights, and shine the light of transparency on the murky business of permitting.

During his opening remarks at the Indaba, Mantashe said there were data “issues” that were delaying the roll-out.

When asked to clarify the matter during a subsequent press conference, Mantashe handed off to Director-General Jacob Mbele, who echoed the minister’s earlier handwaving about information veracity.

“We are making progress I think, as the minister indicated during his address, but not as fast as we would have liked to,” Mbele explained.

“The main reason again is what the minister touched on. It has to do with the fact that the integrity of a cadastral system is actually the underlying data. For various reasons we are finding that there were issues with some of the data.”

There are many plausible explanations for “data issues” on this front. One that comes to mind is the fact that mountains of paper have been reported to be seen strewn around the offices of regional departments such as Mpumalanga.

Getting that digitised into usable data would indeed be quite a challenge.

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Mbele said the department has resolved data issues specifically for the Western Cape and has launched a map viewer (Daily Maverick’s findings suggest the data was last updated in 2022) for that region, which allows users to see exactly who holds which rights, providing what he called “first level of transparency”.

Mantashe also said in his prepared remarks that between February 2025 and January 2026, the department had granted 358 prospecting rights and 32 mining rights – as if this was a big deal.

Pointedly, he did not say how many applications had been made, nor did he specify the current size of the backlog.

Brief timeline of the winding, unfinished road to SA’s Mining Cadastre
⚒️ August 2021: The DMPR – then the DMRE – launches a tender to replace its dysfunctional Samrad system with a functional cadastre.
⚒️ October 2022: Director-General Jacob Mbele makes a commitment that a cadastre will be procured by the end of the financial year – by 31 March 2023.
⚒️ February 2023: At the Mining Indaba, President Cyril Ramaphosa says the cadastre procurement “is underway”.
⚒️ End of February 2023: Mantashe says the State Information Technology Agency (Sita) is still scrutinising bid specifications.
⚒️ August 2023: The department announces that a winning bidder has been selected to develop the cadastre, and the announcement will be made in October.
⚒️ January 2024: The preferred bidder is announced – three months late! – a consortium led by Canada’s respected Pacific GeoTech Systems.
⚒️ October 2024: Mantashe assures a mining conference that the cadastre will go live in June 2025.
⚒️ May 2025: The DMPR says the launch will be restricted to the Western Cape as a test drive.
⚒️ February 2026: It turns out that “data issues” delay the roll-out.

The industry once again reiterated the urgency of the matter at the Indaba. Northam Platinum CEO Paul Dunne, who is also president of the Minerals Council, said at a media briefing that the process needed to be “expedited” as a matter of urgency.

A proper mining cadastre allows companies or investors to seamlessly apply for mining or prospecting rights or permits while scanning the state of play to avoid practices such as “double pegging” – applying for such activities on land already allocated to someone else. Done properly, it can be a one-stop shop.

The transparency it lends will also help to remove the stench of corruption that hangs over the department on a range of fronts, including the issuing of dubious environmental authorisations for dodgy tailings dam reclamation projects and suspicious mining permits for coal in Mpumalanga.

The Minerals Council presented data on Monday that is testimony to SA’s failure to attract investment for exploration – and a key obstacle on this front is the lack of a cadastre.

“The lifeblood of mining is exploration. Without it the mining sector has no future. In South Africa, exploration expenditure was R781-million in 2024, down from a peak of R6.2-billion in 2006, according to Stats SA data,” said Mzila Mthenjane, the Minerals Council’s CEO.

Still, there are some bright spots on the exploration horizon in SA.

Last week SA’s Council for Geoscience (CGS) and BHP signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to advance collaborative geoscientific research and exploration.

“The agreement has potential to deliver significant value to the sector by transforming geoscientific data into actionable insights. This will enable more informed decision-making, derisked exploration, improved sustainability outcomes and increased discovery efficiency,” the two entities said in a statement last week.

The Northern Cape, for example, is regarded as relatively under-explored and is seen as having exciting copper prospects.

But beyond exploration, a cadastre will also help to lift investment in the mining sector more widely. When SA’s finally gets off the ground is anyone’ s guess at the moment. DM