President Jacob Zuma and Minerals Minister Susan Shabangu – who both spoke from the same podium at last Friday’s function to mark the launch of Kalagadi Manganese’s integrated mine, sinter plant and planned smelter – were more hawkish than ever on mining reform.

Shabangu said bluntly that there was no place in South Africa for mining companies that refused to transform.

“It’s either you are with us or you ship out,” the Minerals Minister said hawkishly and ominously in view of the intense current industry discussion under way ahead of the imminent potential enactment of far-reaching legislative amendments to South African minerals legislation.

Just back from an official visit to Ghana, the President said mineral beneficiation was the new rallying cry of the African continent.

“Beneficiation is the way the whole of Africa has to go,” Zuma commented, adding – seemingly in jest, but then many a true word is spoken in jest – that he had instructed Shabangu to make bene-ficiation a condition of mining licence awards.

Both were inspired by a black South African grandmother being able to deliver an integrated mineral beneficiation project in the teeth of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression as well as losing her husband and partner in the midst of project plight.

Kalagadi Manganese executive chairperson Daphne Mashile-Nkosi, project cofounder with her now deceased husband and struggle veteran Stanley, refused to back down in the face of seemingly impossible project odds, pressing on in the face of a troubled partnership and even litigation.

“Daphne has shown that it can be done,” Shabangu said.

The resolve of the politicians on both transformation and bene-ficiation came to the fore after they had walked the corridors of the sinter plant and observed the power, water, rail and road infrastructure in place on the shifting sands of the Kalahari at Hotazel, in the Northern Cape.

If this woman can do it from scratch against such great odds, longer-established and better-heeled South African mining companies must be compelled to beneficiate and transform, they said in their subsequent speeches.

Both refused to pull any punches, significantly at a crucial time of far-reaching amendments to the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act Amendment Bill, many of which have evoked strong opposition.

Government is making it clear, on the eve of the auditing of the Mining Charter, ahead of the April deadline, that it will be taking no prisoners.

The President’s singling out Glencore-Xstrata for special praise could also be construed as the head of State letting those already in South Africa know that huge resources multinationals were prepared to nail their colours to the South African mast despite all the opposition mining companies already in the country were generating.

He also went on to deal a heavy blow to the South African mining establishment when he spoke of the Big Hole of Kimberley, which is in the same province, being “a painful reminder” of the way in which mining should never again be allowed to be done.