CEO designate of the world's biggest platinum producer, 48-year old mining engineer Neville Nicolau, said on the day of the announcement of his appointment that "safety is our moral licence to operate".

This came after his predecessor quit his job because of pressures around improving the company's safety performance.

"If we don't get our safety right, then you must expect society to take away our licence to operate, and then we would be responsible for closing mines and destroying work," he told Mining weekly Online.

Safety had perhaps become the foremost issue at the platinum giant, and has been a major contributor to it missing its production forecasts.

Nicolau said that safety was something that needed to be driven from the top.

"I will display visible, felt leadership in this regard," he said in a telephone interview.

At his former employer, AngloGold Ashanti, Nicolau played a leading role in improving safety in the company's South African mines - which he headed - and he said that he would continue this drive in his new job.

"I will try get unions, the Department of Minerals and Energy, and the Angloplat employees together to address the problem where appropriate for each of them," he stated.

Nicolau is set to begin as Angloplat CEO on June 1, after having served as Anglo American global asset optimisation head since March 1.

"What I will do is look at two broad areas," he stated.

"The first is a behaviour mindset area, where its an organisation development."

“This is where you look at the mindset of people and their attitude towards safety, and make sure that they understand that zero is possible, that it is what we are moving towards, and that fatalities are not acceptable,” Nicolau stressed. “Ultimately that people care about themselves and about each other.”

The second approach was a technical one, where he said that the company needed to “engineer out the risk”.

“This is the hard-engineering side – it’s to build the mine so that workers are intrinsically safe, and to identify risk and to engineer that risk out of the operations,” he detailed.

“If you cover those two broad strategies, safety will improve, and I think that zero ultimately is possible.”

Nicolau was taking over from joint-acting CEOs Duncan Wanblad and Norman Mbazima.

He had previously been an executive at AngloGold in charge of its South African operations, and then COO of the group, a position that he left after it was abandoned by that company’s new chief, Mark Cutifani.

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