The South African mining industry needs to claw its way back along a new path of collaboration, convergence and shared value, with mining companies taking a firm lead in driving collaboration and convergence.
With a mere 4% of global market share from 50% in the seventies, the country must show wisdom in driving a new era of shared value that has government, business and labour singing from the same hymn sheet, once and for all.
The country has the advantage of huge volumes of capital having already been sunk into mining, yet it has gone out of its way to hurt potential investors who have shown enthusiasm for wonderful mineral resources.
A major factor in putting off investment is the uncertainty about the application of the regulations for transformation, along with the ambiguity and mixed signals sent out.
Government makes South Africans look foolhardy by thinking it can get away with raising the bar and pushing out the goal posts and ignoring those who take the mining charter to heart but receive no recognition for the contributions made.
Civil servants should realise that the country will never be able to rise to its major redistribution challenge by playing fast and loose with potential investors, who vote with their feet.
There are many other mining jurisdictions that roll out the red carpet to foreign direct investment, export potential and jobs because they know that these three ingredients are indispensable to the well- being of modern national economies.
One assumes that government now also understands that mining does not have the bottomless pockets that it imagined it had.
If its civil servants are still unsure, they should consult the National Treasury so that they can be given the real picture.
The point needs to be reached where the public sector fully understands that mining is one of South Africa’s greatest assets, which the country cannot do without.
The point of realisation must also be reached that mining is a capital-intensive business that requires ongoing investment to survive and cannot have extraneous obligations in addition to taxes heaped upon it.
Wise heads need to get together to apply their minds to a common purpose on the basis of a solution to mining problems being a national imperative.
Telling a story in itself is that South Africans trained to be good managers and mining technologists are working in jurisdictions from “Kazakhstan to Chile to north of Canada”, as former Chamber of Mines president Rick Menell put it in an interview with Mining Weekly.
That reflects that other governments have run rings round the South African government by creating an enabling environment for their mining industries, which are growing sufficiently to be able to lure away our valuable human resources.
In contrast, the South African mining industry has been so buffeted that all it can hope for is brownfield investment to keep risk to a minimum.
Agreement must be reached on the fundamental principles surrounding productivity, transformation, ownership and procurement – and the private sector must refuse to take no for an answer.