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

Modise: Welcome again, Martin. The thumbs-up has been given for billions of rand to be ploughed into a new South African platinum mine.

Creamer: In these uncertain times, people aren't going ahead with the big projects. In fact, they're pulling in their horns; they want to protect their balance sheets. But it's very interesting to see Northam Platinum going ahead with a project, which is being done in phases. It is a huge project out on the Eastern Limb of the Bushveld Complex.

Of course, because of the nature of Booysendal, which has a very long strike and which actually crops out of the surface, it's sort of an invitation to go ahead with mining, even in troubled times, because it's going to be a lower cost mine, because it does outcrop at surface, it's got a very long strike length so it's very flexible in the way you do it.

Northam, whose empowerment partner is Mvelaphanda, which was created by Tokyo Sexwale, has decided to go ahead with the first module, which they will start building next year. They'll spend the first R3-billion on that and another R3-billion is earmarked for the second module and the decline. It's an interesting area because it's on the Eastern Limb of the Bushveld, not on the Rustenburg side but on the Steelpoort side, it also is below that important Steelpoort fault so the ratio of platinum to palladium favours platinum, although the grade isn't anything to write home about at only 4 g/t, but it's still inviting in terms of shallowness, flexibility and long life because there are something like over 100-million ounces of platinum there.

Modise: And this year, a quarter of all the world's 3-Series BMW's will be built in South Africa and not Germany.

Creamer: When you think of little South Africa, it's a feather in our cap that we can build a quarter of the world's 3-Series BMWs. We have been building them here for some time, I think it's the fourth generation of 3-Series BMW that we're building, but we'll build 47 000 of these this year and 75% of those will go into countries that are very First World, that are buying this top brand. It's really now a co-offering from South Africa, and it'll go into places like the US, Canada, Australia and Japan, which is pretty fastidious about these cars.

So we see that it's a very important hub that is being developed there. Something like 42 000 people benefit directly and, indirectly, there are 56 top-tier suppliers for this, so it's an important activity going on in the automotive industry, yet a lot of anxiousness in the world automotive industry.

At the moment there is hardly a CEO in South Africa and a multinational that doesn't receive calls from their parent companies saying, "Why should we stay in South Africa, when we've got so much capacity elsewhere?" So South Africa is having to really prove itself and now, coming up with this new programme called the Automotive Production Development Programme (APDP) to replace the old programme, and there is much to keep this automotive industry going in South Africa.

We also saw a very important development in East London with the Industrial Development Zone carefully introducing an innovative way of attracting automotive suppliers by having a flexible assembly at the port so that there can be many different brands of cars and original equipment suppliers who can use the same facilities. So you could have an Indian car being made along that line then followed by a Chinese car and then it is right at the port, so they can re-export them. So there is some very interesting thinking to keep our automotive industry going.

Modise: Now, talking about motor manufacturing, motorists in South Africa are now going to have to prepay to use the country's array of new tolled freeways.

Creamer: Yes, we were starting to wonder. With all these freeways being developed, a lot of money going into that, the first phase of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Programme, about R15-billion, and that has to be funded from toll fees. That is the new funding model and you wonder how they're going to do it when half of our people in South Africa are really unbanked, many of them do not have fixed addresses, how do you actually work all this out? Now they're coming up with treating it in the same way as you do your prepaid cellphone contract.

They'll want you to open an account with them by phone, or through the website by using your credit card or whatever means, and then go to an outlet to collect your electronic tag. Then you display that in your windscreen and, instead of having to pay physically at these tolls, they will have gantries over the road, 185 km, of course, in the first phase of it, in the next phase there will be up to 500 km of road, and they'll have these gantries. As your car passes under these gantries, a laser beam will come down and it will charge you for your trip, but it'll also make sure that it records your licence plate.

It will be wrong to travel on there without tags and without number plates, of course, and they are now devising methods of how they'll pursue you. They have got a lot of satellite centres around there and, if there is any incident, they can send off medical assistance and they have a lot of tow trucks there already and there's a lot of closed circuit television so they'll be watching very carefully, but this is probably the model now that we're going to use in Gauteng and then migrate it right throughout the country.

Modise: That's Martin Creamer, the publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly. He will be back At the Coalface at the same time, next Friday.