The Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) would soon issue compliance notices to mining companies that had recorded shortcomings in terms of complying with the Mining Charter, warned Mineral Resources Minister Advocate Ngoako Ramatlhodi during a media briefing prior to his Budget Vote speech earlier this month.

The DMR, in March, released an interim announcement – based on 80% of the compiled audit results – on the outcome of government’s Mining Charter audit, which assessed the extent to which mining companies had complied with the Mining Charter from 2004 to 2014.

The Minister said that the DMR would issue these notices to ensure that, “in no uncertain terms”, mining companies understood what they needed to do within a certain timeframe.

“The DMR will be quite firm [on this matter] and we will be accommodating in terms of giving companies sufficient time to comply,” stated Ramatlhodi.

He added that the final outcomes of the review of the Mining Charter would provide the required information for the DMR to determine the scale of transformation within the local mining industry over the past ten years.

Ramatlhodi said that lessons will be learnt from those outcomes, after which new tasks would be set, adding that this would entail a “relook at the Mining Charter broadly to ensure more black people are involved in the ownership of mines and receive sufficient benefits from the sector in general”.

The DMR and the mining industry’s interpretational dispute about whether the ‘once empowered, always empowered’ principle applies in terms of the Mining Charter’s requirement of 26% black ownership of mining companies has been sent to the High Court to obtain clarity on this matter.

Ramatlhodi said the DMR’s lawyers had been briefed and the department had commissioned Advocate Ishmael Semenya to represent them during court proceedings.

Additionally, he noted that the Chamber of Mines “had made some proposals [to address the black ownership matter] in this regard”; hence, the DMR’s engagement with the chamber on this issue.

However, Ramatlhodi stressed that it was still early days and he could not reveal too much about the proposals.

MPRDA Update

Further, Ramatlhodi said the finalisation of the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) Amendment Bill, which was referred back to Parliament last year, remained a priority for the DMR.

“I have been informed that it took a while for the legislators to determine where the Bill had to be sent for review. This issue has, however, subsequently been resolved and it is currently before the National Council of Provinces,” he said.

The Minister added that the Bill was being reviewed, but the DMR had not yet been invited to provide input on substantive issues pertaining to the Bill.

“We expect that we will soon be asked by the committee responsible for undertaking this review to submit our inputs and, thereby, bring finality to this Bill swiftly,” he said.

He added that, to assist in accelerating the process of passage of the Bill through the legislature, the DMR would not recommend decoupling gas and oil from traditional minerals in the new Bill.

“Therefore, we contend that the Bill will be passed . . . in its current form and then we will, at a later stage, amend the MPRDA to separate gas and oil from the Act,” said Ramatlhodi, who provided no fixed time lines in terms of how long this process would take.