Well-respected mining figure and consultant Roger Dixon has been honoured with the 2020 Brigadier Stokes award by the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.

He received the award during an online annual general meeting of the institute on August 13.

Dixon is the third SRK Consulting chairperson to receive this accolade. He joined SRK in 2004 and was appointed chairperson of the consultancy in 2009.

Prior to this, he worked at mining houses Anglo American and Anglovaal.

In a statement released by SRK, Dixon says receiving the Brigadier Stokes Award was a proud moment.

The award is bestowed for its recipients’ outstanding and unique contribution to mining.

“The mining business, and the country as a whole, is of course very different now to what it was when I arrived in Welkom as a graduate in 1971. But there has been one constant in my journey, which is the quality of the people I’ve worked with and the excellent teams that we have created.”

Dixon says he was fortunate to work with some of the mining industry’s leading visionaries, which led to his key role in developing the country’s first mechanised underground gold mine – the Target mine in the Free State – from 1995.

This was regarded as a pioneering technological step into twenty-first-century mining practice.

MD Vis Reddy says Dixon had, during his tenure as chairperson at SRK, pointed the company to the future of the mining industry, including by helping develop the next generation of mining consultants and embracing technological advancement.

“We want leaders in the mining industry to join our various teams and contribute towards making mining the positive force that it can be in South Africa. Technical development is vital to the mining industry, and we embrace in particular this element of what the Brigadier Stokes Award stands for,” says Reddy.