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

Kamwendo: Business Leadership South Africa this week called for the jailing of pension fund trustees who have failed to pay ex-mineworkers their pensions.

Creamer: This was raised at the Joburg Indaba and it was Bobby Godsell who is the head of Business Leadership South Africa, he’s also the former Chamber of Mines president and former CEO of AngloGold Ashanti, and this issue of non-payment of pensions and provident funds, and compensation to mineworkers.  We’ve discussed it before, there are about 200 000 people out there. There is R5-billion involved and it just goes on an on, and of course, that money is earning interest.  We know that there have been some changes to the legislation which means you can use some of the interest that has built up to trace the people. We know that Teba is there with 1.5-million names, so you can get to the correct people.  The exasperation point has been reached, and I think that’s why Bobby Godsell said, look, these trustees are betraying their trust, its not just the management trustees, but the labour trustees, they’ve got to get together, they’ve abused their trust, they should go to jail if they don’t pay this out, because this has the potential to alleviate poverty not only in our outlying rural provinces, but also in our neighbouring states. We know that the Ford Foundation has tried a move on this and the  Southern African Trust, but it doesn’t seem to dent the backlog.  The backlog is huge, so there is a lot of paperwork involved, but the people now feel that a point has been reached that you must have a sober mind and say, if people don’t do it, they must go to jail, perhaps that will help the situation.   

Kamwendo: Wescoal this week put up its hand up as the flag-bearer of black junior coal mining in South Africa.

Creamer: This is Robinson Ramaite, and he made a powerful statement this week and he wants to be the flag bearer for junior coal miners and black junior coal miners in particular.  He’s saying, look, I’m an operator already, I’ve got Wescoal, it’s listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, it’s a junior.  There are a lot of other juniors around there. He believes that there should be a consolidation of these juniors, because the gap between the majors like Anglo American and Glencore and Exxaro, and the juniors are so huge.  These juniors are down at 1.5-million tonnes a year, going to four-million tonnes a year.  There does seem to be a situation where the talk about this consolidation is actually going to result in action, because I hear on the grapevine that a coming together of two of these juniors is imminent and it will involve Wescoal, and they were whispering in the corridors that a lot of work has been done, and a lot of international companies who have invested in coal, they are on their way to withdraw. The coal prices are at a horrific level, so, there have never been a better opportunity to do this against the background that your biggest market here is Eskom.  They buy 130-million tonnes.  If these juniors can get their act together, they are going to have a very good market, and they can raise debt, because they get long-term contracts from Eskom.  If they do secure those, they need to be 51% black, which is an issue, but Wescoal is saying they will be 51% black by the end of next year.

Kamwendo: Sibanye this week put its new mechanised mining machine through its paces at the Joburg Indaba.

Creamer: Look at it, there’s a picture of it there, it looks rather futuristic, like a robot. We were sitting at the Joburg Indaba thinking that everything had come to an end.  It was right at the end of the session when Neal Froneman,  from Sibanye, who also put up his hand to be the mining champion, acted. Suddenly, we heard this noise and in he wheeled this new equipment right up to the podium and said, this is our answer to modernisation, but it’s only a small start of our whole modernisation programme. There’s a lot of issues to mine the way we do in South Africa, because they’re always really at the height of this table that I’m sitting at and you’ve got to go underneath that. So you know, it’s very difficult and so they’ve got this equipment that’s really low-lying and they want to remotely control it so that people don’t have to go into the vulnerable areas, so, the safety issue improves.  We know that there have been a lot of effort with this over a long time, and some of this investment is starting to bear fruit. We see that it’s not only Sibanye, but Sibanye is going to take over some of the Anglo American Platinum mines in Rustenburg and there’s Union also coming up. Those are still conventional mines where you use the hand held drill, but Anglo American Platinum are looking to a big modernisation programme.  If they can get these remotely controlled mining machines active, I think it’s going to at least, keep people away from the danger areas, have them using  X-box controls and all the other  controls that you use to mine and to move  the material out.  You can see there are all sorts of attachments that can be put on these and drill rigs, so hopefully on this track, because they are not on tyres, they are on tracks. We will be able to move them around, because one of the problems is that you are mining at the height of your kitchen table, its also undulating. So it’s been tricky, it’s been a code that people have battled to crack. 

Kamwendo: This picture I’m looking at, what is this one supposed to do?

Creamer: This is just an example of  what can move around in these low-lying areas.  You put attachments onto them, you turn them into dozers, and there’s also what isn’t shown here is the drilling rig, which does some of the drilling, and then they’re also working on a new set of locos underground. So, the whole theme of this Joburg Indaba was modernisation. Can we come out of the dark ages of mining? Yes, we can! This is the statement that has been made, and we know a lot of companies are really quite well on their way in this modernisation process. 

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.