It is critical for mines’ social and labour plans (SLPs) to have a strong focus on local economic development, stresses sustainable social solutions provider Umsizi executive director John-Mark Kilian.

He says that the company recently completed a socioeconomic analysis of the Matjhabeng local municipality, in the Free State, for a gold mining company that will soon start developing a project in the region.

The research was undertaken from March to June and included focus groups, key informant interviews, stakeholder engagement meetings, microconsultations and a structured household socioeconomic questionnaire survey, in which about 2 000 people participated.

The study revealed that the most critical issues facing the community, and therefore the proposed mine, were unemployment and income creation; a lack of education and skills; insufficient and ineffective communication; hunger and malnutrition; and a lack of service delivery.

Kilian highlights that these issues are a direct challenge to the sustainability of the mine, as mines have increasingly been used as a platform for local communities to vent their anger and disappointment at unmet expectations. This could result in project delays, increased costs and violent demonstrations that make the project economically unviable.

“The community is very poor and many are unemployed. There are 30 000 jobs needed in the area; however, the mine will create only about 1 000 jobs. Therefore, the number of jobs created by the mine will in no way be able to address the social and economic problems of unemployment in the local community,” he states.

Kilian emphasises that the high levels of unemployment pose a serious risk to the mine itself, which is also the greatest risk to the community and to South Africa, generally.

“Already an explosion is waiting to happen; pacifying will not work – only real prospects will convince people and it will have to be done on a large scale to be meaningful to the masses,” he asserts.

The mine has the potential to positively affect people’s wellbeing and develop an internal locus of control. Now, more than ever before, the mine’s focus must be on making it possible for local people from all levels of society to be gainfully involved in activities that will remain of value long after the mine is closed and to develop an internal locus of control, says Kilian.

He says that this can be achieved by mobilising the youth and creating employers (by assisting people to open their own businesses) through the development of entrepreneurial education programmes. “All of this will require the largescale involvement of the mining company with the community,” states Kilian.

SLP Programme

He highlights that the mine intends to implement its LED programme from the preconstruction phase of the project, which will demonstrate its proactive commitment to true LED and the empowerment of the community in which it operates.

The first five years of the SLPs will focus on community development. Once a workforce has been assembled and operations have started (estimated to be in around Year 5 of the project), revised SLPs will be submitted to the Department of Mineral Resources for the next five years.

The revised SLPs will include human resources development (HRD) programmes for the workforce. It will focus on community development and workforce development.

Kilian points out that the mine identified several requirements that its SLPs and LED had to fulfil. These included that they had to have an effect at a scale that would be relevant to the scale of the community’s need and there had to be easy entry to the programmes by every willing and committed resident.

Therefore, the programmes must build on what is immediately available to local community households and they must offer relevant options at different levels of the pyramid of needs.

“Food security is a primary need, as it releases people from worry and enables them to think ahead,” he notes.

Additionally, Umsizi emphasises that the mine had to tap into the best local and international innovations to effectively enable bottom-up economic development for the community.

“The proposed broad-based livelihoods programme for the local community addresses all these issues,” Kilian highlights.

He says the mine plans to positively impact on the community on a broad scale with “the poorest of the poor households” until real change is seen and felt.

“It is for this reason the mine is taking a long-term approach to address these needs with a minimum ten-year LED implementation plan. The mine’s LED programme will incorporate income generation, employer development, career building and food security projects. It will also have a multidirectional communication platform and a productive infrastructure fund,” Kilian concludes.

Kilian was a speaker at black-owned training and conferencing company Intelligence Transfer Centre’s recent Mineral Resources Compliance and Reporting conference, which was held in Johannesburg.