JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The underlying logic of the call to nationalise South Africa's mining industry was the mining sector's status as "a precious gem in our country's sovereign crown", Chamber of Mines (CoM) president Sipho Nkosi said in Johannesburg on Tuesday.

Nkosi, who was elected unusually to serve a third term as president at the CoM's 119th annual general meeting, said that the South African mining industry had the potential to satisfy two primary objectives of the policy formulations of the South African government, namely to contribute to the alleviation of poverty and to provide decent work opportunities.

"Mining is indeed a precious gem in our country's sovereign crown, and this quite likely is the underlying logic for the call to nationalise the mining sector," Nkosi said.

In spite of South Africa's generous resource endowment, the truth that currently confronted South Africa was that there had been negligible mining-industry growth between 2001 and 2008.

Nkosi said that South Africa had extracted minimal benefit from the recently ended commodities boom, in contrast to the world's other top mining countries that had achieved a compound annual growth of mining gross domestic product (GDP) of 5% in US dollar terms.

In the same period, South Africa's mining sector declined by more than 1% a year.

That missed opportunity for the mining sector lowered overall economic growth, reduced exports and retarded socioeconomic development.

Had the South African mining sector grown at the same rate as its foreign counterparts over the same time span, an additional R50-billion would have been added to the country's real GDP and as many as 40 000 direct industry jobs could have been created.