I’ll somehow re-emerge in the mining sector at some point in the future, outgoing Minerals Council South Africa CEO Roger Baxter said on Tuesday, when spoke to Mining Weekly in a Teams interview.

At the end of this month, Baxter will hand over to incoming CEO Mzila Mthenjane, who will inherit a Minerals Council that has been profoundly elevated to new heights of transformative safety, race, gender, and minerals diversity advancement. (Also watch attached Creamer Media video.)

When Baxter joined the overwhelmingly pale and male Chamber of Mines back in 1992, there were 551 fatalities compared with 49 in 2020/ 2023, the lowest level in South African mining’s recorded history.

While the chamber was dominated by the gold mining industry with a bit of coal and diamond mining thrown in, today’s members of the rebranded Minerals Council mine 60-plus different minerals, representing 90% of the value of mineral production in South Africa and more than 90% of employment.

Moreover, the Minerals Council’s 32-member board has been led by a lady president for the last three years and is race and gender diversified.

Changes at employment equity and ownership levels mean that significant numbers of black South Africans, who have earned their stripes in the sector, today own and manage operations across a broad front. Involved today are 72 500 women versus virtually no women before.

In partnership with the Mandela Mining Precinct, the Department of Science and Technology and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, modernisation has been advanced through an expenditure of R500-million in the last five years.

Mining Weekly: What regulatory environment does mining need in South Africa to be able to compete on a level footing with other mining jurisdictions?

Baxter: What's important to state is that the regulatory framework is just one aspect. If you look at the Fraser Institute survey report on South Africa for 2022, the worst ranked area for us was security, and we are focused on the issues around improving the security environment in South Africa, but we need government to come to the party on that. Two or three of the other critical issues are around the fact that our logistics has fallen by 40% over the last five years and we don't have reliable electricity supply. Those factors, which were very much to our advantage five to ten years ago, have now become negatives in the Fraser Institute survey report. We can have the best regulatory environment in the world, but if we're not sorting out crime, logistics and the heartbeat of the economy, which is electricity supply, we're not going to be able to grow mining.

On the regulatory front, we do need a transparent online off-the-shelf cadastral system that is very easily accessible for free, with all the precompetitive geological information, showing who's got what prospecting right, so you can go in and apply. We need to have the regulatory framework organised in a way that it takes no more than two to three months to get the prospecting right versus the current 354 days, which simply doesn't work, particularly for venture capital exploration. We need to get all the backlog of the regulatory approvals cleared out the way, which the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) has now committed to do.

We need to have a exploration plan, and a lot more incentives around venture capital funding. In our view, this should be the flow-through shares equivalent, which is borrowing from the Canadian model, to get venture capital funded exploration ignited in South Africa, to unlock a pipeline of new exploration projects, which could unleash more investment in the mining sector. Those are the areas that we've been certainly engaging government on and the Minister did say last week that the five preferred candidates for the cadastral system have been being listed and they’re going to be looking at choosing one of them by the end of July, so let's see what happens.

If given the right envi...