The Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) is making ill-considered demands that have little hope of being met. Instead of following the continent’s African Mining Vision and Zambezi Protocol, the DMR is going out on a dictatorial limb.
In April, when it gazetted a revised version of the Mining Charter outside the usual consultative process that characterised the first two charter iterations, it promised to engage with labour and business, but failed to keep that promise.
Instead, it cold-shouldered the Mining Industry Growth, Development and Employment Task Team, known as Migdett, which has been the three-part labour, business and government structure used to move South African mining forward.
The DMR now says it will gazette what is an even more threatening charter version before year-end. The hurdles of its latest charter iteration will be unsurmountable by an industry that last year lost R37-billion.
Despite mining being at pains to point out the ongoing challenges, the DMR is hell-bent on continuing to hinder rather than help, which is in sharp contrast to what has taken place in the other mining jurisdictions of the world, not the least of them Botswana.
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