Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Dhashen Moodley speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Moodley: The South African mining sector benefits eight out of every 10 South Africans “directly and literally”, an Australian has calculated. Can you tell us more?

Creamer: You know, an Australian has to come and tell us at their 123rd Chamber of Mines AGM that mining benefits, directly and literally, eight out of ten South Africans. In other words, it’s the small man, that is benefiting from mining and that is because of the way capital is formed in the modern world.   It comes from the pension funds, it comes from the provident funds, it comes from your insurance funds.  And if you give this industry a black eye, you give yourself a black eye, you know, you give your pension fund a black eye. If you look at Anglo American alone, the 60 % ownership now of its South African assets in coal, platinum, iron-ore, diamonds, manganese are held by historically disadvantaged South Africans.  That’s a massive transformation, so if the unions then actually unsettle this or legislation unsettles this industry, it is damaging our prospect of the eradicating poverty because this is the only industry that will have any chance of getting rid of poverty We’ve already had a value destruction of 40 %, a fourty percent value destruction last year, so we have to rebuild the foundation, but people have to realise that if you hurt this industry, you hurt that man crossing the street, you hurt that union worker out there, because his provident fund is going to be hammered, his pension fund is going to be hammered and when he comes to collect that, his kids are going to suffer.  We knew that from last year, when the Chileans tried to grab a slice of Anglo American in Chile through nationalisation stealth, our diplomats banged on that door and said, “hey, you’re not taking it from Anglo American, you’re taking it from our civil servants’ pension fund, you’re taking our unions’ pension funds.  You’re taking it from the little guy.  The penny dropped in Chile, and they did not seize the asset. It’s still got to drop in South Africa, where we realise, an injury to the mining industry, is an injury to all of us.

Moodley: We’ve been trying to get our gold sector back to the previous highs that we once had, and we’ve now just produced the fist batch of gold from an exciting new technology, it’s expected to change the face of mining.

Creamer: This exciting new AngloGold technology is just striding forward and again at the AngloGold Ashanti results presentation, where we saw that company come back into the black firmly after a series of cost cutting and production increases, they flashed onto the big screen, a picture which showed us how badly we’ve been mining for so long.  You know in the area where the gold is, which is only about as high as two loaves of bread, we are now targeting that for the first time, but we have been getting non-gold out of the big area, which is so wasteful, for so long. and the story now is that we won’t blast any longer. This is a very wasteful thing, when you blast, you scatter your precious metals all over the place and you’ve got to try and bring them back to collect them.  With this now, the raise-boring system where they showed us how you drill into the gold-bearing rock itself, and you take that out alone, and you bring that to surface, so you don't have this huge waste and they can do it not only for gold. It can be done for platinum, it can be done all day, every day, 365 days a year. That’ll change the face of the profits coming out of there.  And already, they’ve been able to go into areas where they haven’t been able to access before because of safety issues.  They can now take down pillars that they've left because we leave a lot of gold behind, because you have to hold up the whole structure.  They can go back there and get that gold and it’s very rich.  And they can make sure it’s done safely by backfilling, and of course this takes a bit of time, because it’s a whole new lot of machinery and so it will really only manifest itself in about two years.  In the meantime, there is another system which I’ve been advocating and that is the select blast mining method that can do it in the meantime, hopefully somehow we will mine far more constructively and less wastefully. 

Moodley:  Let’s talk more about the mineworkers now and we’ve been long supported by the migrant labour system in South Africa.  The apartheid government did it and we are still dependent upon the migrant labour system and they’ve been calling for a better system that allows them to visit their families. There is a new one on the cards that’s going to enable that. 

Creamer:  This is crucial, because unrest at the heart of the mining unrest has been this migrant labour system.  And it has been a legacy for a hundred years.  It has never been something that we’ve been proud of, but we still have it, and it really reached that crescendo when we found that the living-out allowance came in and people were taking that and then building shacks next to the mine and having two families.  They’re now saying, “hang on guys, we’ve got to change this whole system, what we want to go for is new shifts”. We saw this coming out at Teba at the conference this week where they are working with gold company Sibanye to make sure that people have four months of work, and then two months back in their rural areas with their family and this is being workshopped at the moment.  Hopefully then it will change the whole paradigm of this migrant labour curse. 

Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. He’ll be back At The Coal-Face at the same time next Friday.