By: Thabo Moloto - founder and CEO of Rootz Investments

South Africa holds the richest chrome endowment on Earth, yet we cannot keep our own furnaces lit. Two decades of shipping raw ore overseas have handed our jobs, our factories, and our profits to someone else. Beneficiation was meant to build our nation. Instead, we exported the opportunity.

Chrome exposes the core question running through everything we dig up: do we process it here, or do we ship it out raw and buy back whatever product created from it at a markup? We hold over 80% of global chromite resources in the Bushveld Complex. Yet, 70% of our mined chrome leaves as raw ore. Our smelters sit at half capacity. We built the furnaces - we just stopped running them.

Manganese tells the exact same tragic story. The Kalahari Manganese Field contains up to 75% of the world's manganese ore. Fifteen years ago, five domestic plants pumped out up to 850,000 tonnes of ferroalloys a year. But by early 2026, production crashed below 155,000 tonnes. Today, only one smelter remains: Transalloys in Mpumalanga. In 2025, we shipped over 26 million tonnes of raw manganese ore to India and China. We kept fewer than 400,000 tonnes to beneficiate at home.

Electricity is the brutal culprit behind this collapse. By early this year, only 11 of South Africa’s 66 ferrochrome smelters were still running. When the government finally stepped in this March with a 62c/kWh Eskom tariff, the relief was bittersweet. It arrived only after Samancor had already handed retrenchment notices to most of its workforce. Yet the stakes remain massive: get energy pricing right, and sector jobs could explode tenfold in just a few years.

The irony is devastating. The state owns its own coal miner, the African Exploration Mining and Finance Corporation. It was built for one job: supply Eskom directly to lower power costs. Instead, it has bled money for years. If Pretoria can slash electricity tariffs for smelters by political decree, why can't its own coal company do the same for our power stations?

Look at Steelpoort in Limpopo to see what happens when the lights stay on. Glencore's Lion Smelter fired back up in February, hitting near-full capacity in weeks and rescuing thousands of jobs across three provinces. But at Transalloys -  our very last manganese smelter - the story is a tragedy. Because tariff relief ignored them, operations were completely suspended on 1 July 2026. Hundreds of livelihoods are on the line today; thousands more hang in the balance. Without an immediate, workable tariff, South Africa's last manganese furnace will go cold forever.

None of this is a surprise. Government has spent fifteen years chasing the beneficiation dream through endless policy cycles. The latest attempt, the Critical Minerals Strategy, correctly flags chrome and manganese as make-or-break resources. But industry researchers keep warning us of the real problem: none of these separate policies have ever come together into a single, unified framework. Chrome isn't only a policy problem – it is a lopsided relationship. South Africa and its neighbours hold around 95% of the world's known chrome resource; China holds almost none of it, yet they built the world's biggest ferrochrome industry, importing 82% of that ore from us. Manganese follows the same pattern: in 2025, India and China produced more than 17.8 million tonnes of manganese ferroalloys, mostly from ore we sold them, against just 165 000 tonnes we produced here. Is that a balanced partnership, or a customer that's built its industry around processing what we can't finish ourselves? That's a conversation about recalibrating ties with the East, not just fixing our own smelters. And it's only half the picture: turning ore into ferrochrome or ferroalloys means little without somewhere nearby to turn it into something people buy — Africa barely registers on the world stainless steel map, under 1% of global production, even though most of it started out as our ore.

Minerals are finite. Mining cannot remain purely extractive forever. It is local beneficiation that creates the multiplier effects that ripple through an economy. Yet, despite holding some of the richest mineral deposits on Earth, mining’s share of our GDP has shrunk for two decades. Before investment returns, the industry demands three simple things: certainty over ownership, stable policy, and predictable rules. Tragically, these conditions only arrived after our furnaces went dark. This isn't just an abstract theory. It was the central focus in Durban at the SADC Industrialisation Week, which homed in on regional value chains for critical minerals. SADC Executive Secretary Elias Magosi put it bluntly: "Aspirations alone will not bring about transformation; real implementation and the creation of opportunities for industries and businesses must lead the way." Chrome is where South Africa finds out if it is actually listening.

To turn the tide, we need four immediate interventions: permanent tariff relief that reaches excluded producers like Transalloys, Balanced trade policy that restricts raw ore exports without destroying upstream mining jobs before downstream processing jobs are ready, Aggressive utilization of existing incentives, such as the Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone (SEZ) tax breaks, and a rapid Critical Minerals Strategy that thinks regionally, ensuring SADC's value chains become operational realities rather than paperwork.

A century ago, Hendrik van der Bijl solved this exact puzzle. He built the utility that became Eskom, using cheap, abundant electricity as the launchpad for South Africa’s first great industrial leap, the same foundation that birthed Iscor and our steel industry. The current 62c/kWh tariff is a welcome start, but it is an emergency rescue, not a long-term strategy. The real question is when we will witness our next Van der Bijl moment, perhaps Minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa will seize this moment.

Beneficiation is the ultimate test of whether South Africa can turn what is under the ground into livelihoods at home, or if we will settle for mere export earnings. It is the key to reversing two decades of lost ground. Get this right, and the success of Steelpoort will repeat across manganese, vanadium, and beyond. Get it wrong, and the 62c/kWh tariff will be remembered as a band-aid for a single crisis.

It is a simple choice: real, unified policy, or a political slogan while mining families wait to see if their next payslip arrives.