The South African mining industry has been placed on a knife edge by the errant Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), which is threatening to gazette deleterious new mining levies before year-end. The DMR is ignoring mining’s huge contribution to exports, foreign exchange earnings and foreign direct investment, as well as its vital economic linkages to engineering, manufacturing and banking, to name a few. “It’s just very clear; we sit on a knife edge as an industry,” Sibanye Gold CEO Neal Froneman told Reuters. The time has come for the powers that be to discipline the DMR and instruct it to stop sabotaging the South African economy and destroying the national patrimony of the citizens of this country.