In a recent Daily Maverick opinion piece, Mmusi Maimane warned that the quiet replacement of the Public Investment Corporation (PIC) board signals a deep crisis in governance and public accountability.
Read more: Much greater oversight, accountability needed in appointing SOE boards
Maimane is right. But the implications of that crisis extend far beyond the composition of the board. For the communities whose land and labour built South Africa’s mineral wealth, the PIC’s silence on Anglo American’s planned exit from the country represents a betrayal of constitutional duty and economic sovereignty.
From public custodian to passive bystander
The PIC is the second-largest shareholder in Anglo American, holding roughly 7% of the company’s global equity. That makes it not just another investor, but a public custodian of national wealth, acting on behalf of millions of South Africans, including teachers, nurses, mineworkers and civil servants whose pensions it manages.
Yet, as Anglo prepares to shift its centre of gravity abroad through a R62-billion merger with Canada’s Teck Resources, the PIC has remained silent, offering no public statement, no conditional engagement and no defence of South African interests.
A century of extraction, a debt still unpaid
“For more than a century, Anglo American was arguably the single most powerful private actor in South Africa’s mineral economy, at its peak controlling over half of all shares traded on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and dominating gold production globally.” This wealth was built on cheap black labour, racial segregation and the dispossession of land and livelihoods engineered through the colonial apartheid state.
Now, having exhausted South Africa’s mineral base, Anglo is preparing its final act of extraction: an offshore rebranding that will secure its future profits in foreign jurisdictions while leaving behind derelict mines, poisoned rivers and collapsing towns.
The financial and social costs of Anglo’s slow retreat are measurable:
- Taxes and royalties paid to the South African government have fallen from R41-billion in 2021 to just R7.8 billion in 2024, a staggering 85% decline.
- Employment of local employees has dropped from 41,000 in 2021 to 32,000 in 2024, representing a 22% decline, leaving mining towns in deeper economic crisis.
- South Africa’s share of Anglo American’s global taxes fell sharply between 2021 and 2024, from being the largest single national contributor (47%) to a secondary one (23%) by 2024.
- Anglo American’s share price has declined sharply in recent years, from levels above 4,000 GBX in early 2022 to around 2,550 GBX on the London Stock Exchange by September 2025. This nearly 40% drop has eroded the value of the PIC’s holdings and the pension savings of South African workers.
For a fund mandated to deliver “long-term sustainable returns”, these figures should have triggered alarm bells. Instead, the PIC has treated Anglo’s exodus as a private corporate matter, even though its outcome directly affects national revenue, employment and the retirement security of South African workers.
A risk to public wealth
The PIC’s silence also raises questions about the financial prudence of the merger itself. Anglo American has justified the deal on the grounds that “synergies” between its Chilean operations, the Collahuasi and Quebrada Blanca (QB) copper mines, will unlock value for shareholders, including the PIC. But independent analysis paints a less optimistic picture.
Industry experts warn that the QB project is plagued by technical challenges and cost overruns. Juan Ignacio Guzmán, CEO of GEM, recently stated that “Quebrada Blanca has sizeable technical challenges to reach capacity. The synergies it could have with Collahuasi aren’t simple.”
If these difficulties persist, the supposed “synergies” could evaporate, dragging down the PIC’s investment returns in the process.
This is precisely where PIC oversight should come alive. As Anglo’s second-largest shareholder, the PIC has both the authority and the duty to demand assurances that the merger serves the best interests of South African investors, workers and communities. So far, no such public statement or engagement has occurred.
Policy courage and economic sovereignty
Maimane called for “much greater oversight” in the appointment of SOE boards.
We agree, but oversight cannot end at the point of appointment. It must extend to how public institutions exercise their power and defend the public interest.
The South African Reserve Bank’s Quarterly Bulletin reported foreign direct investment outflows of R73.5-billion in the second quarter of 2025, compared with inflows of R11.7-billion in the first. The outflows were largely due to Anglo American spinning off its platinum unit, Valterra Platinum, a move that epitomises the haemorrhaging of national wealth.
When major firms disinvest or relocate, it translates into fewer jobs, lower municipal revenues, weaker community services and a shrinking social wage.
In an era marked by capital flight and deepening inequality, fiduciary duty cannot be confined to balance sheets alone.
The Public Investment Corporation (PIC), as a state-owned asset manager, has a legal fiduciary duty to invest public funds prudently and sustainably, and may, within the scope of its clients’ mandates, support South Africa’s broader economic development objectives.
That is the legal floor. What remains is a question of political courage. Strengthening South Africa’s economic sovereignty requires that we demand more of both law and policy:
- Enhance Parliamentary oversight of state-owned enterprise boards and investment decisions, not to politicise them, but to deepen transparency and accountability as envisaged in the Constitution and the Public Finance Management Act.
- Mandate public disclosure of the PIC’s engagements with major investee companies, following global sovereign-fund standards of stewardship transparency.
- Introduce a “public interest exit test”, ensuring that corporations seeking to delist or redomicile abroad first account for their social and fiscal footprint in South Africa.
These measures would not dilute the PIC’s fiduciary obligations; they would modernise them, aligning prudent investment with the constitutional promise of shared prosperity.
Ecological and social debt: the unpaid ledger
Anglo American’s century-long footprint has left a trail of destruction that cannot be measured in balance sheets alone.
The company’s ecological debt includes:
- Local environmental harm, from acid mine drainage to air pollution in mining towns, damage that violates Section 24 of the Constitution and remains unremediated.
- Global climate debt, as Anglo’s coal-intensive operations contributed massively to greenhouse gas emissions, now subject to international legal obligations under the International Court of Justice’s July 2025 Advisory Opinion; and
- Resource depletion, as Anglo extracted non-renewable minerals without adequate reinvestment, breaching the duty of diligence and prudence recognised in cases like Nauru, where accelerated extraction without rehabilitation was ruled unlawful.
Reparations for this ecological and social debt are not a radical demand; they are a matter of justice and international precedent. The PIC, as Anglo’s major shareholder, must insist on a reparations and rehabilitation plan before approving or supporting the merger.
Reclaiming the public in public investment
The Anglo–Tek merger is more than a financial transaction; it is a litmus test for whether South Africa’s public institutions still serve the people or the powerful.
Every government employee whose pension is managed by the PIC, every miner whose community depends on Anglo’s operations, every young South African who hopes for a fair and sustainable economy, all have a direct stake in this decision.
Yet Parliament and the Executive have remained silent, abdicating their duty of oversight at the very moment when public wealth and sovereignty are most at risk.
Under Section 55(2) of the Constitution, Parliament must “maintain oversight of all organs of state,” including entities like the PIC and the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources.
Under Section 92(2), Cabinet members are “collectively and individually accountable to Parliament” for the exercise of executive authority. By failing to interrogate the PIC’s passivity and Anglo’s retreat, both arms of government have breached these constitutional obligations.
The finance minister, as the shareholder representative of the PIC, and the minerals and petroleum resources minister, as custodian of the country’s mineral wealth, have a legal and moral duty to ensure that South Africa’s assets are not quietly exported while our communities sink deeper into poverty.
To reclaim the public in public investment, oversight must mean more than annual reports and polite hearings. It must mean courageous intervention – compelling testimony, publishing shareholding decisions, and enforcing accountability on those who manage the nation’s resources.
Anglo built its empire on the backs of South Africans. If the PIC cannot defend their interests, and if Parliament and the Executive will not hold it to account, then all three betray not just their mandates, but the very constitutional promise that wealth and power exist to serve the people. DM