CAPE TOWN (miningweekly.com) – The mining industry should do more to implement sustainable practices and empower local communities, as resource nationalism is evolving into a “tidal wave that threatened" mining, Gold Fields chairperson Dr Mamphela Ramphele said on Thursday.

“Every week there are new proposals on mining taxes, environmental obligations, indigenisation measures or other regulations being imposed on the industry somewhere on the globe. Governments, local communities and trade unions are making demands that are seemingly never-ending,” she said at the Investing in African Mining Indaba, in Cape Town.

Ramphele pointed out that mining activities impacted almost three-million households in South Africa directly or indirectly and contributed over R70-billion a year to the country’s wages and salaries. “These numbers undoubtedly make for impressive reading, yet if you look at the reality, some of South Africa’s mineral-rich areas are also home to the country’s most underdeveloped and underprivileged communities.”

She added that while there were exceptions, as a general rule large-scale mining had weak links to the local economy, which translated to a lack of social integration with the local communities. “Inevitably, this will create an environment in which it will become increasingly difficult for miners to operate. Our licence to operate is threatened by this disconnect.”

Ramphele said there were a number of ways in which the industry could respond. “In simple terms there is the old way: ticking the box on regulation, providing inadequate social and economic development and blaming government for the socioeconomic woes . . . I’m afraid even the current BEE [black economic-empowerment] regulations in South Africa mostly encourage this kind of thinking.”

However, a different form of response could address the real issues of: economic development of mining communities, training and skills development and the economic welfare of mining company employees.

Ramphele said she believed that some mining companies were making progress in these endeavours, giving the example of Gold Fields Academy having trained 4 845 learners over the past five years as artisans. “That is almost a 1 000 artisans a year in a country that produces only around 10 000 trained artisans per annum. The figure makes only a small dent in the shortage of skilled artisans faced by the South African economy. But it does improve the skills pool from which we and other industrial companies can grow.”

As a further example, she said that Kumba Iron Ore was running business development programmes and supported innovative projects that promoted environmental friendliness, including tyre recycling, compost projects and mine rehabilitation.

She also cited Gold Fields’ South Deep Community Trust and South Deep Education Trust that fund educational, skills development and community-based investments in the West Rand area adjacent to the mine. “This is an innovative way of combining BEE ownership requirements with socioeconomic benefits for the community,” she said.

Ramphele urged industry to focus on a few key points, including getting corporate South Africa to agree on what their collective contribution to the challenges faced by the country should be, the challenges being health, education and job creation. “We cannot afford to be bystanders as the government suffers from weak capacity to implement its own policies and in many cases is mired in politicking that keeps its eye off the ball."

In addition, she said companies needed to collaborate on investing in programmes in a coordinated way and went so far as to suggest a pooling of corporate social investment (CSI) funds. She also challenged that a set of criteria should be agreed upon to measure companies’ social impact more effectively and, in addition, to start getting to know the country and the communities around their mining operators better. “It’s very important the corporate social investment goes beyond the often marginalised CSI department and it’s seen as a major thrust of the company as a whole.”

Ramphele was firm that the mining industry needed to entrench sustainability into its operations. “I would like to see a situation where a mining company comes into a community and starts to sow the seeds of sustainability from the initial exploration phase right through to the eventual and inevitable mine closure. Unfortunately what we have seen for too long is a hole left in the ground with detrimental environmental consequences and a community mired in poverty.”
 

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