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. Petrol-from-coal company Sasol is planning to build three new coal mines in Mpumalanga province.

Creamer: Yes, these will be replacement mines. Sasol needs at its plant out there about 40-million tons of coal a year from its own mines. It also buys some in from Anglo Coal and mines that have been serving it well since the 70s and 80s, Twistdraai, Brandspruit, Middelbult, they are coming to end of their life, so they have to have these replacement mines come in. The first of these, Tubelisha, is already 12 months into the making, the second is about two months into design already, and the third is a little bit further off. But in the next ten years, they'll have three new replacement coal mines in the Mpumalanga area of Secunda, where their main cash cow is, and that is Sasol Synfuels that churns out diesel and churns out petrol and chemicals.

But also now, the new growth prospect is no longer in Mpumalanga, it's moving north, towards Limpopo, where they've been drilling a lot and looking for coal there because they want to firm up a good coal resource there for a new coal-to-liquids plant and that is going to be called Mafutha and that will have a separate coal mine, but it's only at prefeasibility stage and this has still got to get into feasibility stage.

In the meantime, they've got that strong black economic-empowerment relationship with Ixia Coal, which is largely a women's group. Wiphold has got most of the shares in there and one of their ambitions going forward is to create a coal mine that is led, owned, managed and operated by women.

Modise: Now, Zondwa Mandela, the grandson of the former president has bought three gold mines in as many months.

Creamer: Yes, Zondwa Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, has been on a buying spree. He spent about R630-million in the last few months snapping up gold mines and his main target has been the stricken Pamodzi Gold assets. Of course, he bought first the Orkney gold mine, out in the North-West province, and he snapped that up for R215-million. Then he turned on the East Rand and bought the Grootvlei mine, which is a Pamodzi Gold East Rand asset. That was the latest announcement, R390-million, and then, in-between, he's been buying smaller mines. We saw him buy the Primrose mine for about R25-millon because his ambition on the East Rand is to be the lead consolidator, to consolidate all those mines, and he's also got ambitions in Africa and the backing comes from the Malaysians, the AM Equity fund. They seem to provide him with every financial means.

They are going to go onto the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, so this is a new gold force to be reckoned with. They say he's definitely appealed to the liquidators with his mantra of "No retrenchments" and he's managed to snap up the stricken gold assets and he's looking for many more.

Modise: And on the skills development front, it looks like apprentice training is back, with South Africa's metals industry training over 6 000 apprentices.

Creamer: It's fantastic, you know, apprentice training fell back very badly. I mean, if we had been training our apprentices like we should have with the government institutions Transnet and Eskom and SAA had gone ahead with those massive training programmes that they used to have, it would be fantastic and now there's a catch up.

We see the Steel and Engineering Industry Federation promising that they would. In 2008, they promised that they would put 5 000 apprentices into position and they surprised on the upside. They've nearly put 6 000 in, so it's 5 730 apprentices in training and in the metals industry.

They've put R10,3-million into their training centre, in Benoni, and they're even training people at Eskom for Kusile power station, but it's hit head-on this year into the global recession, firstly, and in February this year they employed something like 399 000 people, that's the Steel and Engineering Industry Federation members, they had an employment complement of 399 000 employees and they lost 57 000 jobs in five months from February to July and, hopefully, it's the end of the job loss. Not that that'll affect the training there, they are planning all these skills but there are tough times in manufacturing in South Africa because not only do you have this recessionary factor coming from outside, but inside you've got this very strong rand.

So, they're having to overcome all those issues but, in the meantime, they're continuing to press ahead with skills training and skills development, which is going to stand us in good stead in the future.

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.