SRK cofounder Dr Oskar Steffen travels the world as a specialist.

At one stage, he did so with such frequency that it was said of him that, “if it was Tuesday, Oskar was in Australia, and if it was Wednesday, he was in Chile”.

Mining Weekly was fortunate to be able to make contact with him at the SRK offices in Johannesburg, and he imparted many early recollections.

He attributes the success of the business to the absence of personality clashes among the three partners he describes as being “all so different”.

Andy Robertson, the ‘R’ in SRK, was “definitely the entrepreneur”, who would try to chase down anything.

Hendrik Kirsten, the ‘K’ in SRK, was the technically brilliant and fastidious one and, in typically self-deprecating style, Steffen describes himself as “the common guy in between those two extremes”.

In truth, Steffen is the furthest thing from anything ‘common’.

A world-renowned authority on openpit mining, with a half-century of mining industry under his belt, Steffen was honoured with the London Mining Journal’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2010.

He is renowned from Australia to Zambia for turning mining assets to positive account and for being able to manage openpit risk

long before there was an array of technological tools to help one do it.

He obtained a civil engineering degree from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in 1961 and an MSc degree two years later.

He spent six years on the Nchanga copper mine, in Zambia, first as a section engineer responsible for openpit slope design, and then as a production shift boss, a mine captain and eventually an openpit mine manager.

In 1969, Wits appointed him a senior lecturer in soil mechanics and foundation engineering, which was the stepping stone to his doctorate.

While a lecturer, he accepted various consulting roles, which led to the establishment of SRK Consulting, today an employer of 1 400 staff professionals in 45 offices in 21 countries.

Continuing to act as an independent SRK consultant to SRK in his semiretirement, Steffen’s view is that the mining consultancy business has only scratched the surface, with its only limitation being the scarcity of skills.

He is delighted that South Africa’s higher education institutions are producing an increasing number of engineering graduates.

On SRK’s success, he recalls to Mining Weekly that the fact that there were three people meant that there was always a decision.

“But the basic concept that we set out with was that the business would not remain a three-person business.

“We took a very conscious decision that we would grow and, in the first year, we took on three Wits students because that set the pace for the future.

“We set out to take on young people every year so that we could continually bring the latest technologies into the business and that continued. In year three, we invited an overseas professor to do a sabbatical at our offices and this became an ongoing practice. Those two initiatives resulted in youngsters in the practice being exposed to top-class academics.

“The programme of bringing in students from South African universities advanced to also bringing in students from overseas universities. We had an arrangement with Surrey University to send five or six students to do a gap year with us, which meant that they would go out and practise. That was great for us because many of them came back to work for us.

“The other issue on staffing was that we would exchange these young students after a year or two with a student who had gone into construction. We would swop the two around, so we would lend a construction company our student for a year and we would take a construction company’s student for a year, so that they knew what the differences were, because, ultimately, in their own pattern of development, they would either go into construction for an extended period or remain in consulting.

“We also decided very early on that we would go inter- national. The reason was the many overseas consultants coming in and doing work locally, and our need to show that we were good enough to play in their fields as well. Going global actually arrived faster than we had expected because we had a phone call from a very good colleague, Doug Piteau, who had returned to Canada and set up a practice of his own. Out of the blue he called us, after splitting up with his partner, and asked for one of the SRK partners to come across to Canada. We had a debate and decided that the most entrepreneurial fellow, Andy, should go over. When he got over there, he discovered that he and Doug didn’t hit it off at all, so we made contact with Kay Pincock in Tucson, Arizona whom I met during my time in Zambia.

“We set up an organisation called Robertson Pincock Asso-ciates in Denver but eventually we separated out as SRK in Denver and some stayed and others went their own ways

.

“That was not the first cross-border foray. In 1976, SRK had set up its first cross-border office in Swaziland, specifically to try to access African intellectuals and bring them into SRK. Swaziland was very convenient, with no apartheid issues. Soon thereafter, SRK opened an office in Harare and those were the first cross-border initiatives.

“I made many contacts in Chile, through former Zimbabwean Dr Dennis Laubscher, who worked in SRK’s Johannesburg office. Laubscher, a world-renowned expert on the block cave mining method that is widely used in Chile, was invited to go across to Chile to assist and I became involved with him and have remained involved in Chile since then.

“Before we started the practice, I had worked at Nchanga for Bill Holt, one of the outstanding managers of his time, and was the first to introduce the term ‘stripping ratio’ in openpit mining. When he retired to the UK, I retained him as an extra consultant and he set up the office for us in the UK in 1988 and settled in Eastbourne.”

Dr Neal Rigby, who worked for SRK in Johannesburg, got a senior lecturer’s post at Cardiff University and later joined SRK in Cardiff. He later became the longest-serving chairperson of SRK Global for 15 years.

Steffen believes that the greatest challenge to mining in Africa is to put the image of the industry up where it belongs.

To attract top scientists, eco-nomists and entrepreneurs, mining must be made “the preferred industry to work in” and one that he regards as having enormous potential to improve the lives of the people of Africa.

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