Gold-from-dumps miner DRDGold is losing its executive director and CFO to Australia.

Craig Barnes, a 42-year-old father of two, will leave the company and South Africa on January 1 next year.

He has served in various capacities in DRDGold’s finance department since 2004.

Following a series of appointments, he was promoted to the position of DRDGold CFO five years ago.

Since then, Barnes and DRDGold CEO Niël Pretorius have worked like a Tweedledum-Tweedeldee combination in transforming the JSE- and NYSE-listed company from a marginal underground miner to one that recovers gold from surface dumps.

The loss of forty-something South African mining executives to Australia and Canada has been a source of concern in mining circles for some time.

When Johan Schonfeldt, then 40, the former financial director of the JSE-listed Keaton Energy Holdings, left South Africa for Australia in late 2011, the then Keaton MD and now Nedbank mining investment execu-tive Paul Miller was outspokenly upset at the departure of his “phenomenally well qualified” FD, who has a master’s degree in financial management.

It was around that time that Chamber of Mines strategy executive Roger Baxter, then 45, left South Africa for Rio Tinto, in Canada. Fortunately, Baxter has since returned and is doing a fantastic job in the chamber’s relentless “putting South Africa first” campaign.

Mining Weekly understands that a Skype interview was sufficient for chartered-account-ant Schonfeldt, a former Eland Platinum financial manager, to secure his position with a Perth-based Asia-listed company.

In 2008, the then president of the Chamber of Mines of South Africa and Exxaro CEO Sipho Nkosi warned that the brain drain from South Africa had reached “national crisis” proportions.

“People are emigrating and we need to create the right climate for people to want to work in South Africa,” said Nkosi.

“We develop them and they go. This is real. It’s facing us as a country and we need to deal with it,” Nkosi insisted, but his warning has gone largely unheeded.