Christina Pretorius, a director at Denys, which represents the interests of mining investors, is right about one thing: certainty matters. No country can build a sustainable mining economy on administrative dysfunction, contradictory regulation, opaque licensing systems and institutions that are incapable of making lawful and timely decisions. But when we are told that Africa’s critical minerals opportunity “hinges on legal certainty”, we should immediately ask the question that is too often absent from these debates: certainty for whom, on whose terms and at whose cost?
For more than a century, the mining conversation in South Africa has been framed primarily around the certainty required by capital: certainty that mineral rights can be secured, that the regulatory environment is predictable, that production can proceed without interruption, that capital can be deployed with confidence and that the expected return can be calculated within acceptable margins of risk.
Yet the people who live on the land, drink the water, breathe the dust, absorb the blasting, endure the dislocation and remain behind when the mine eventually closes are rarely afforded the same language of certainty.
Surely they too are entitled to certainty that their water will remain drinkable, that their homes and land rights will not be sacrificed in the name of development, that consultation will mean more than being called into a hall after the essential decisions have already been made, that Social and Labour Plan commitments will become something more than words on paper, and that when the final profitable ounce has been removed from the ground there will still be somebody left to rehabilitate the land, secure the shafts, deal with the tailings and account for the economic and social wreckage that so often follows mine closure?
Once the question is framed in this way, the issue before us is no longer simply one of regulatory certainty, but of bargaining power, distribution, and the terms upon which South Africa allows its finite mineral wealth to be converted into private profit and public revenue.
Minerals are not just another commodity produced by the economy; they are inherited natural wealth, the family silverware of a society, and once they have been extracted and sold they are gone forever, which means that the threshold question cannot merely be whether somebody is willing to invest, but whether, once everything has been properly counted, the country and its people are actually wealthier, because that mineral was extracted, than they would have been had it remained in the ground.
Mining balance sheet fails SA
It is precisely at this point that the conventional mining balance sheet begins to fail us. While companies account meticulously for capital expenditure, wages, electricity, transport, taxes, royalties and shareholder returns, the wider social and ecological costs of extraction are too often pushed outside the frame, as though what cannot be conveniently entered into a corporate ledger somehow ceases to exist.
Mining-affected communities have long challenged this narrow accounting logic by insisting that extractive economies must be judged not merely by what they produce, but by what they deplete, destroy and transfer onto others. When we adopt that wider balance sheet, the apparent profitability of mining begins to look very different.
Where, after all, do we record the value of an aquifer contaminated for decades, the agricultural livelihood displaced by an open pit, the respiratory illness produced by dust, the house cracked by blasting, the community severed from land carrying generations of social meaning or the abandoned tailings facility that remains a danger long after the shareholders who benefited from the mine have moved on?
Those costs have not disappeared simply because they are absent from the company’s financial statements; they have merely been shifted elsewhere, onto the household that must now buy water, the municipality that inherits failing infrastructure, the worker whose body carries the cost of production, the community trying to survive after closure, the public purse that must eventually rehabilitate what private capital abandoned and the natural environment that is expected to absorb the cumulative burden of extraction without ever appearing as a creditor.
Accounting failure of mining
This is the accounting failure at the heart of South African mining: we count what leaves the ground with extraordinary precision, while remaining remarkably poor at counting what is left behind.
It is also why Mining Affected Communities United in Action (Macua) and others have submitted a petition to Parliament on the 100-Year Debt owed to South Africans and the environment.
The history of mining in South Africa is not simply a history of wealth creation. It is also a history of the profoundly unequal manner in which that wealth was accumulated and distributed, through land dispossession, migrant labour, racialised wage suppression, occupational disease, environmental destruction and the deliberate underdevelopment of the places from which both minerals and labour were extracted.
The mining houses grew, financial centres expanded, fortunes were made and mineral wealth travelled outwards, while the communities surrounding many of the shafts were left with dust, waste, polluted land, social fracture and holes in the ground, and although the democratic era altered the legal architecture within which mining operates, it would be intellectually dishonest to pretend that it has transformed the political economy that produced those outcomes.
One need only travel through many mining-affected communities today to see the contradiction laid bare. Some of the richest mineral deposits in the world continue to lie beneath communities marked by deep poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation and broken infrastructure, and it is this history that should make us cautious when we are once again told that the next great African opportunity lies in critical minerals.
Africa has heard this language before; gold was an opportunity, diamonds were an opportunity, coal was an opportunity, platinum was an opportunity, and now lithium, manganese, cobalt, copper, rare earths and the minerals needed for the global energy transition are being presented as the gateway to a new era of African industrialisation and prosperity.
Perhaps they can be, but only if we are prepared to change the underlying bargain. If the mineral changes, while the structure of extraction remains the same, if Africa continues to export raw value, while importing environmental destruction and social dislocation, then we will merely have painted an old extractive relationship green.
Importance of reforming the MPRDA
This is why the present reform of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) matters so deeply, because we should not simply tinker with an administrative statute or debate how quickly applications should be processed; we should be deciding what kind of relationship South Africa intends to establish between the holders of capital, the state that acts as custodian of the nation’s mineral wealth, and the communities who carry the most immediate consequences of extraction.
If the reform process ultimately judges success by the speed with which mining rights are issued, then we will have missed the central historical question, because a faster licensing system can just as easily produce a more efficient form of exclusion as it can produce better governance, and administrative efficiency without substantive justice will merely accelerate the old model rather than transform it.
Of course the licensing system must work, of course the cadastral system must function, and of course regulatory ambiguity and bureaucratic incompetence must be addressed, but the test of reform must be far larger than whether investors receive answers more quickly; it must also be whether communities receive meaningful information before decisions are made, whether informal land rights are genuinely protected, whether consultation gives people real influence over the future of their land, whether Social and Labour Plans are enforceable, whether rehabilitation liabilities are fully secured and whether the overall social benefit of extraction can be demonstrated rather than assumed.
That is why the developing jurisprudence through Bengwenyama, Maledu, Baleni and Sustaining the Wild Coast is so important, because these cases increasingly insist on a constitutional idea that should have been obvious from the beginning: communities are not inconvenient obstacles standing between an investor and a mineral deposit, but rights-holders whose dignity, agency, land rights and futures must form part of the decision itself.
Pretorius is also correct that mining companies cannot be expected to carry the entire developmental burden of a country, because they cannot and should not replace the state. But there is a profound difference between saying that mining companies cannot solve every developmental problem and saying that they should not be required to account fully for the developmental, social and environmental consequences created by their own operations.
If a mine damages a water source, repairing that damage is not charity; if it displaces a livelihood, compensating for that loss is not corporate generosity; if it leaves behind environmental liabilities, rehabilitation is not philanthropy; and if it extracts extraordinary value from beneath a community while that community carries the disruption, risk and long-term consequences, then requiring a fair share of that value to remain behind is not an unreasonable burden on investment, but part of the cost of the bargain itself.
Language of certainty
This is also where the language of certainty can become misleading, because mining companies routinely operate in jurisdictions with political instability, weak infrastructure, institutional fragility and significant risk when the mineral deposit is valuable enough and the expected returns are high enough, which tells us that what capital seeks is not certainty in some absolute sense, but a risk-return relationship it considers favourable.
That distinction matters for a mineral-rich country such as South Africa, because we should stop conducting this debate as though we are supplicants trying to persuade somebody to take our minerals from us. The minerals are here, the world increasingly wants them, and that gives us bargaining power, which public policy should use to secure a settlement in which extraction leaves the country, its workers and especially mining-affected communities, demonstrably better off than they were before.
So yes, let us have certainty, but let us refuse the narrow version of certainty in which only the investor’s risks are recognised while everyone else’s insecurity is treated as collateral damage.
Let us instead insist on certainty that water will be protected, that land rights will be respected, that communities will have real power in decisions affecting their futures, that rehabilitation will happen, that the costs of extraction will not be quietly transferred to the poor and to future generations and that whenever another piece of the family silverware leaves our shores we can show, honestly and transparently, what South Africa received in return.
Because after more than a century of mining, the question can no longer simply be whether investors are sufficiently certain to come; the far more important question is whether our people can be certain that, when the mine eventually closes and the capital moves on, they will not once again be left carrying the bill for somebody else’s wealth. DM
Comments
Scroll down to load comments...