This past week I attended the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa, as both a presenter and a student seeking opportunities. One of the highlights of the conference was former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s keynote address, during which he offered some crucial advice to African governments: To attract and foster a robust mining sector, a commitment to fiscal stability must be made.
Since 2009, Blair has run the Africa Governance Initiative, which counsels leaders in countries such as Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and others.
Simply put, without fiscal stability and predictability in taxation, capital will be unwilling to flow into any country—African or otherwise—for exploration and production. If a government changes its tax policy every three years or so, that instability discourages the inflow of financing. This is bad for Africa.
“The mining sector remains absolutely vital for Africa’s future,” Blair said, “and even with the sharp declines in [commodity] prices, there are tremendous opportunities and there will be, no doubt, an adjustment and reshaping of the face of mining within Africa over these next few years.”
I shared the following map last week, but it’s worth showing again, as it supports Blair’s point. Central and Southern Africa, especially, are extremely commodity-rich and maintain a large global share of important metals and minerals such as platinum, diamonds and gold.
Fiscal instability is also bad for investors in Africa. If foreign investment is not respected by a government, if it is punitively taxed or arbitrarily confiscated, further investment will not flow into that country Politically, African nations need to recognize that seemingly faceless investment institutions represent real people’s hard earned dollars.
In Zambia, for example, a huge 12 percent of the country’s GDP comes from mining, an industry that employs 10 percent of all Zambians. Yet its government has increased, rather than cut or at least eased, restrictive royalty taxes on mines. In the case of open pit mines, royalties were raised from 6 percent to a crippling 20 percent.
Speaking to Reuters, a mining industry spokesperson speculated: “Mining companies are not going to put another dollar in [Zambia]” if the government continues to be unreliable.
Less Friction, Fewer Disruptions
This is proof positive of what I frequently say: Government policy is a precursor to change. In the example above, the tax policy is leading to change that could very well hurt Zambia’s economy. With mining being such a strong contributor to its GDP, it seems the government would want to make it easier, not more challenging and costly, for international producers to conduct business there.
The less friction and fewer disruptions there are, the easier it is for money to flow.
But Zambia’s isn’t the only African government that’s placing roadblocks in front of miners. The Democratic Republic of Congo is in the early stages of hiking royalties on mines and revising its mining code. And in his recent State of the Nation Address, South African President Jacob Zuma announced that foreigners could no longer own land in the country, which raises the question of what implications, if any, this might have on U.S. and Canadian companies that own and operate South African mines. Zuma’s announcement comes at a time when persistent electricity shortages have stymied mining activity and rumblings of a miners’ strike similar to the one last year that brought platinum and palladium production to a five-month halt are intensifying.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/02/africa-mines-prosperity/