Every Friday morning, SAfm’s AMLive’s radio anchor Tsepiso Makwetla speaks to Martin Creamer, publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly.  Reported here is this Friday’s At the Coalface transcript:

Makwetla: South Africa’s top mining lawyer is urging South Africa to sign a respected global mining community pact that will prevent another Marikana.

Creamer: This is in the interests of preventing another Marikana. The pact that he is talking about is the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169. That reinforces the rights of near-mine communities.

We know that our Constitutional Court of South Africa in 2010 came down hard on the Department of Mineral Resources in the Genorah deal and involving the Bengwenyama community and said that they hadn’t consulted properly with the community and that they were going to throw their prospecting rights back. 

It is all about free consent from the community, prior consent from the community and informed consent from the community.  This is what this ILO Convention 169 lays down. This is what Peter Leon of Webber Wentzel Africa’s mining desk is saying that we should look to doing in South Africa, because it is global best practice.

He feels that the communities that live in the mining sectors need a better deal.  This is one of the fourth things that Leon has come through, with regard to making the mining sector more transparent. 

The one that he did last year was saying that South Africa should join the Extractive Industry Tansparency Initiative (EITI), which for some reason South Africa is still not wanting to sign. That will mean that it becomes far more transparent as to what these mining companies are earning.  There will be insight into seeing what the revenue situation will be like. 

Another thing that he is saying is that we should have a two-tier company structure, like they do in Germany.  In the top tier you have labour representation. Sometimes in Germany it is as high as 50%. So, you have this worker codetermination within corporations, which seems to have worked quite well in Germany.

This is all about what he is going towards which is a new social pact for mining so that you don’t only go and get your mining licence, but you get a social licence.

Makwetla: Strong initiatives are under way to stop South Africa losing more than R7-billion worth of water a year.

Creamer: The leakage and the amount of water that we use is called non-revenue water.  It is a staggering amount in South Africa. We are a water constrained country and to lose 37% of water in what they call non-revenue sectors like water leaking and commercial losses, is far too high. 

If you look at Australia they have got that non-revenue down to 10%. People are now saying that we have got to declare war on this and that it just cannot continue.  We see come strong action coming in with a combination of the Department of Water Affairs also the Water Research Commission coming down on municipalities where half of them don’t even know what there leakage situation is. 

here has to be a tremendous audit because losing R7-billion a year is one thing, but losing that water is even more important.  When you look across the way you see how much we are going to have to spend. Trevor Balzer, the Deputy DG of Water Affairs, said this week that we are going to have to spend something like R700-billion on water infrastructure and the revamping of it in the next 10 to 15 years. 

That is an enormous amount and certainly the first thing you have got to do is stop those leakages, which they are trying to do now.  Even on the leakage side they are going to have to spend something like R2-billion a year over the next 10 years.

It means that you have got to spend R20-billion to catch that water. It seems that we are charging too little for water in fact, because maybe that is the real problem where we are charging this R4,50 per cubic metre and we might run into that same problem we had with electricity. Giving the stuff away is not good because you destroy the business case.

Makwetla: 400 000 jobs can be created on farmable land in Gauteng that is lying fallow, says a leading provincial official.

Creamer: She is saying 400 000 jobs can be created on farmable land in Gauteng that is lying fallow.  You wonder what has Rina Taviv of Gauteng Province, she is the deputy mining director, been smoking?  But, she presents her case and says we have got this legacy from mining.

There is a lot of land that hasn’t been used because it is part of mining concessions, but if you drive around a lot of that land is arable. She is saying that in a small place like Gauteng, and lets face it, we have got the tiniest province, it is like 1,4% of the total land mass. The biggest province which is the Northern Cape, we can fit Gauteng in there 20 times and still have room. 

She is saying that we have still got this potential because of that mining land which she is appealing to the mining companies now to consider releasing that land in an orderly way so that you can have this agricultural spin-off from this.

She says this is very viable and we should look to it not only for jobs, but food security. We have got 11-million people here and have in-migration into Gauteng, people want to come here. They come from all other provinces and the continent. 

She is saying that there could be constraint with the water and when you think of the water we are losing on the leakage. If we could redirect that there could be a case for using this land lying fallow, which she says could create 400 000 jobs.

Makwetla: Thanks very much. Martin Creamer is publishing editor of Engineering News and Mining Weekly, he’ll be back with us at the same time next week.