JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Independent nongovernmental organisation (NGO) Bench Marks Foundation on Thursday said the revised Mining Charter would fall short of its intentions of addressing shortcomings in broad-based black economic empowerment (BBBEE).

The NGO added that, despite its intention of reducing deficiencies in the current Mining Charter, the updated version failed to adequately deal with the “drastic” imbalance between local ownership and foreign ownership and ignored the negative impact that mining had on communities.

The revised charter, which was gazetted on April 15, brought to the fore several concerns for the Bench Marks Foundation.

“BBBEE ownership . . . still stands only at 26% . . . local ownership of enterprises is restricted to 26% and foreign ownership by law is 74%. Of the 26% BBBEE ownership, 5% must now go to an employee share ownership scheme and 5% to the community on whose land the mine is located,” said Bench Marks Foundation executive director John Capel.

Unpacking his concerns around the new charter, he said many communities did not trust the chief through whom that share was realised.

Further, the inclusion of a 5% workers’ stake would be realised through union representation on a trust, which the NGO did not believe would benefit individual workers, but would rather enrich the trade union bureaucracy.

Capel said communities should be compensated for the loss of now-unrecoverable land owing to mining, including fields for cultivation and grazing.

Compensation valued at a percentage of the value of the minerals mined should be allocated to the community, the NGO said.

The sale of shares to BBBEE shareholders meant that the employees and the communities needed to obtain bank loans to afford these shares.

“Bench Marks believe that the shares should be donated to communities as compensation for the loss of land and not sold,” Capel commented.

“We encourage others who also have concerns to use the invitation by the Department of Mineral Resources to submit their inputs and comments by May 31,” he noted.