Mining Charter III does not require exploration companies to do what it obliges mining licence applicants to do. The new charter does not insist that exploration companies have 30% black economic empowerment, 5% carried interest for labour and 5% carried interest for communities – the boxes that new mining ventures must tick.
Moreover, junior miners are also being looked at through a different regulatory lens, which is good news.
But it is not that good that South Africa can expect investment doors to be flung open. What the regulators must continue to bear in mind is that some other rival mining jurisdictions provide much more than a regulatory clean sheet and go so far that they actually subsidise exploration as an acknowledgement of the high risks associated with it.
In the absence of subsidisation, South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources needs to recognise that it must extend every bit of help to exploration candidates.
Moreover, it must put in place the most modern of mineral cadastres and list what is available with the utmost transparency.
“We have the most amazing gemstone diamonds in our extensive alluvial deposits of the Northern Cape and the North West province,” says diamond mining consultant Dr John Bristow.
But he laments that, instead of exploration drilling rigs being the order of the day in these areas, poverty is pervasive, which serves to emphasise that every possible step must be taken to open the way for wealth creation. At the ready are ultramodern exploration techniques that can see what was previously invisible.
But, even after successful exploration has eventuated, securing mining investment will be the next big challenge.
This was emphasised at last week’s Joburg Indaba, which heard that specialist mining investment funds are cold-shouldering mining investment globally, with South Africa all but totally falling off the investment radar screen.
Mining globally is attracting a mere 1% of the market capitalisation of the global Morgan Stanley Capital International Index.
“What the market is saying to mining,” Anglo American nonexecutive director Jim Rutherford told last week’s Joburg Indaba, “is: ‘Show me why I should trust you with my money’.”
Specialist gold funds have fallen 20% in the last 12 months and specialist mining funds have been posting negative returns over a long period, resulting in many being fed up with mining’s poor capital allocation and unpredictability.
South Africa no longer features on the investment lists of five of the top six specialist mining funds and this country’s level of capital expenditure in mining is now eight times lower than Australia’s.
Except for the likes of Glencore, Anglo American and South32, international mining equity investors have largely given up on direct exposure to South African mining, which they regard as being too complicated.
South Africa Inc thus needs to go all out to regain investor confidence, which is so essential for the wealth creation this country so desperately needs.