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Africa Mining

South Africa’s ANC vetoes plan to nationalize mining – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – December 21, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

BLOEMFONTEIN, SOUTH AFRICA — After years of damaging debate, South Africa’s ruling party has finally vetoed the idea of nationalizing its mining sector.

The announcement is part of a broad defeat for the left-wing factions in the African National Congress, reassuring investors and allowing more influence for pro-business leaders in the party. But in a compromise with the left-wingers, the ANC agreed to impose some form of higher taxes on the mining sector, and it promised a bigger role for a state-controlled mining company.

As the world’s biggest platinum producer and the fifth-biggest gold producer, South Africa should be attracting interest from mining investors from around the world. But many companies are scared away by its poor labour relations, heavy government involvement in the sector, and the continuing talk of nationalization.

Many Canadian mining companies have avoided South Africa, preferring to invest in other places, especially West Africa, where governments are seen as friendlier. Canadian mining companies are among the biggest investors in West African countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Senegal.

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Where Canadian ‘self-interest’ leads: The Congo example – by Yves Engler (Nelson Daily – December 11, 2012)

http://thenelsondaily.com/

Former Vice President of the Concordia Student Union, Yves Engler is a well-known left-wing journalist. His recenlty published book is called: THE UGLY CANADIAN – Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy.

Thank you Julian Fantino.

The International Co-operation Minister caused a ruckus last week when he said that the Canadian International Development Agency should actively promote the country’s interests abroad rather than primarily focus on poverty reduction. Fantino defended “aid” that was given to groups partnering with Canadian companies building mines around the world. He said CIDA has “a duty and a responsibility to ensure that Canadian interests are promoted.”

While some commentators suggested the former Toronto police chief stuck his foot in his mouth, we should thank Fantino for his comments because they raise some important questions that Canadians seldom talk about.

How is Canadian foreign policy made? Which countries are we friendly towards and why? Which do we work against and why? What should be the primary purpose of Canadian foreign policy and aid?

As the author of five books on Canadian foreign policy, I know the answers to these questions can be controversial and complex. A short essay is certainly inadequate to properly address the subject.

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TOP 10 MINERS: A tough year, for CEOs and for stock prices – by Barry Sergeant (Mineweb.com – December 6, 2012)

http://www.mineweb.com/

The CEO’s of major top miners have faced relentless pressure this year, both from poor metal price performance and, increasingly demanding shareholders.

JOHANNESBURG (MINEWEB) – For listed mining companies everywhere, this year has been all about stock prices facing headwinds, along with relentless pressure on CEOs.

The benchmark stock, BHP Billiton, the world’s biggest diversified resources group, saw its stock price in US dollar terms peak out in the latter stages of 2010. Given the wobbles in the global economy, the fall from there has been relatively modest, from around US$26.00 a share to recent trades around US$19.00. Vale, the world’s No 2 miner by market value, has seen its stock price fall by just over 50%, to current levels around US$17.00 a share.

Over the past 12 months, Vale and Anglo American have underperformed, probably on the back of a heavier exposure to developing markets, where regulatory uncertainty has been on the rise, over the past two years, in particular. This week in Johannesburg, outgoing Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll decried a number of factors that had contributed to uncertainty in this country, and appealed, in effect, for improved leadership at all levels.

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Thunderous applause as Anglo CEO commits to SA mining solution – by Martin Creamer (MiningWeekly.com – December 4, 2012)

http://www.miningweekly.com/page/americas-home

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa had succeeded in extricating itself from its grave political problems in the past and the country would succeed again in finding solutions in the wake of the horrific Marikana tragedy, Cynthia Carroll said on Tuesday.

At the same time, the Anglo American CEO, who is stepping down after six years, warned that South Africa had to restore stable labour relations and foster a business environment attractive to international investors.

Carroll drew thunderous applause from a packed Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) audience when she concluded her 30-minute address by saying that “the naysayers and the doomsdayers constantly forecast disaster, but in response, I say loud and clear, South Africa has done it before and it will do it again”, by arriving at a post-Marikana solution to which her company was also totally committed.

She said that the Constitutional foundation that had been laid when South Africa transitioned from the “dark night of apartheid to the new dawn of democracy” would help the country disentangle itself from its post-Marikana crisis.

She observed that the curse of unemployment had resulted in mineworkers often having a large number of economic dependents, against the background of the migrant labour system loosening the bonds of family life and dislocating communities.

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To Save Congo, Let It Fall Apart – by J. Peter Pham (New York Times – November 30, 2012)

http://www.nytimes.com/

J. Peter Pham is director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council.

THE Democratic Republic of Congo, which erupted in violence again earlier this month, ought to be one of the richest countries in the world. Its immense mineral reserves are currently valued by some estimates at more than $24 trillion and include 30 percent of the world’s diamond reserves; vast amounts of cobalt, copper and gold; and 70 percent of the world’s coltan, which is used in electronic devices. Yet the most recent edition of the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index ranked Congo last among the 187 countries and territories included in the survey.

Instead of prosperity, Congo’s mineral wealth has brought only an endless procession of unscrupulous rulers eager to exploit its riches, from King Leopold II of Belgium to Mobutu Sese Seko, who was allowed by the logic of the cold war to rule the same area as a private fief. And last year, the current president, Joseph Kabila, who inherited the job from his assassinated father more than a decade ago, awarded himself another five-year term in elections that were criticized by everyone from the European Union to the country’s Roman Catholic bishops.

If some enterprises, public or private, can be said to be “too big to fail,” Congo is the reverse: it is too big to succeed. It is an artificial entity whose constituent parts share the misfortune of having been seized by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley in the name of a rapacious 19th-century Belgian monarch. From the moment Congo was given independence in 1960, it was being torn apart by centrifugal forces, beginning with separatism in the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga.

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Keep resource companies out of foriegn aid? You’d only be hurting Africans – by Lucas Robinson (Globe and Mail – December 3, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

 Addis Ababa — Countries throughout Africa are discovering an abundance of minerals, gas and oil beneath their territory. Madagascar is touting trillions of dollars in potential profits from its offshore gas reserves. Zambia continues to pull almost 1900 tonnes of copper from the ground every day – contributing to year-on-year economic growth rates of over 6 per cent.

Ethiopia, where I live, is currently home to 19 million people living on less than $1 per day, and appears to be pinning at least part of its financial security on discovering two to three billion barrels of proven oil reserves. Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania are also looking to exploit newly discovered gas and oil fields, just as Ghana and Nigeria shore up their investments in these sectors.

And yet “supporters of Canada’s foreign aid” are busy criticising the Canadian International Development Agency and International Co-Operation Minister Julian Fantino for what amounts to a very minor engagement with extractive industries. After Mr. Fantino announced a new policy in which the private sector, especially mining companies, would be more directly involved in the delivery of foreign aid alongside CIDA, the response from many quarters was nothing short of venomously hateful. Indeed, many in Canada’s aid community appear to be against any engagement by the private sector in reducing global poverty.

This is not a constructive approach to reducing poverty.

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Blood minerals feed conflict in Congo – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – December 1, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

GOMA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO — A few hours after rebel fighters swept into Goma last week, a mysterious convoy of six trucks rumbled up to the Rwandan border on the edge of the city. They were loaded with “conflict minerals” – including tin and tantalum – from warehouses in Goma.

The potholed streets of this sprawling, refugee-filled city, built on volcanic rock, were largely empty. Most people were huddled inside their shacks or high-walled compounds as the rebels seized the city. But at about 5:30 p.m., just before the frontier closed, the trucks reached the border and the guards allowed them to cross from Congo into Rwanda.

“A convoy of six trucks at the same time is unusual,” said Fidel Bafilemba, a conflict-minerals researcher in Goma who received a flood of calls from witnesses when the trucks crossed the border. “Rwanda knew the city had fallen to the rebels, yet they allowed those trucks to enter. They should have stopped them.”

The M23 rebels have been promising for several days to withdraw from Goma, although the pullout was delayed on Friday when United Nations peacekeepers refused to allow the rebels to take a cache of army munitions and equipment from Goma’s airport.

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BRICS mining: the lay of the land – by Chris Lo (Mining Technology.com – January 5, 2012)

http://www.mining-technology.com/

The so-called BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are the world’s emerging powerhouses, in more ways than one. As well as exerting an ever-growing influence on the global political stage, these burgeoning economies are building up an industrial base that is closing the gap with the developed western world – or, in some cases, even surpassing it.

No sector illustrates this process better than mining. Competition from low-cost, large-scale mining projects in the BRICS nations has simply been too much for many European and US operations, which are struggling with higher overhead costs and more complex regulatory regimes. As a consequence, countries such as Brazil and China have become hotbeds for international investment.

BRICS countries look outward

BRICS mining investment, however, isn’t just a one-way street – increasingly, these countries are looking to tap into overseas resources in addition to their own domestic deposits. Indian companies including Adani Mining and Lanco Infratech have been assertively investing in Australian coal mining projects, while Brazilian iron ore giant Vale’s funding of iron ore projects in China proves that there are lucrative opportunities in inter-BRICS investment.

In Africa, BRICS countries, particularly China, are becoming more prevalent as investors in new mining projects, both for profit and to provide materials for massive infrastructure and construction projects.

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Africans should reap the benefits of their resource bonanza – by Paul Collier (Globe and Mail – November 26, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Paul Collier is a professor of economics and public policy at Oxford University. This article is based on the Hagey Lecture, delivered at the University of Waterloo on Nov. 22.

Canada is about to take pole position in a race that will determine the well-being of a billion people. The poorest countries on Earth, many in Africa, are in the throes of massive new resource bonanzas. In the past, such bonanzas have been the path to plunder rather than prosperity. The default option is that this dismal history gets repeated: Corruption and violence remain powerful drivers. But across Africa, many brave people are saying “never again.”

In this momentous struggle, on which the future of a billion poor people hangs, Canadians must now decide where they stand. Although this is a struggle that must be won in Africa, Africans alone do not have the power to win it.

Guinea is a brutal current example of the limitations of what decent African governments can do. For decades, the country was mired in dictatorships, culminating in a military coup so grim that the African Union refused to recognize the regime.

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In case you missed it: This is the ‘African century’ – by Doug Sanders (Globe and Mail – November 24, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Are we living in the “African century?” That is what many people in business and politics have begun to call it. You may not have noticed – because so many headlines are devoted to dramatic events north of the Sahara – that there has been a quieter but more dramatic change for so many of the 900 million people living in the lands to the south. In some ways, this has been the larger revolution.

The economies of many once-destitute African countries are taking off. While the economies of the West are barely moving and China has been stalled, Africa experienced economic growth of 5 per cent this year and is projected by the International Monetary Fund to see 5.7 per cent growth next year. Six of the world’s 10 fastest-growing economies today are in Africa.

After decades of rising poverty and malnutrition, Africa is moving the other way: For the first time since 1981, fewer than half of Africans live in absolute poverty (defined as an income of less than $1.24 per day). About three million Africans a year escape absolute poverty. This is also having health consequences: In Senegal, for example, the child mortality rate fell from 12 per cent to 7 per cent over five years (though this still means that every other family has suffered a child death).

As Charles Kenny of the Center for Global Development observed this month, the GDP and growth figures from Africa may be disguising larger improvements.

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SA mining’s uneasy truce with labour – by André Janse van Vuuren (Mineweb.com – November 27,2012)

http://www.mineweb.com/

While labour relations in the country have entered a period of relative calm, fears remain that the truce remains at risk.

JOHANNESBURG (MINEWEB) – Labour relations in South Africa have entered a period of relative calm in recent weeks, but the uneasy truce that exists between workers and their employers is at risk from a host of simmering tensions.

Normality has to a large extent returned to South Africa’s mining industry following the sector wide strikes which have shut the majority of the country’s biggest platinum and gold producing shafts for more than a month. Gold miners like AngloGold Ashanti and Gold Fields report the ramp-up process is largely going according to plan with no interruptions.

Similarly, the mass gatherings and often violent protests around the platinum mines of the North West province seem to have quietened down, while some mining bosses say they’re looking forward to a new era of multi-union relations.

But, some trouble spots remain. Kumba Iron Ore’s Sishen mine in the Northern Cape is, according to company spokesperson Gert Schoeman, still plagued by some no-shows and intimidation.

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Banro calm in face of turmoil in Democratic Republic of Congo – by Peter Koven (National Post – November 26, 2012)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Amid one of the the world’s most troubled regions, Simon Village maintains that it is business as usual for his company. All the same, he will admit to being a little alarmed by recent events near his operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“If you remember, the M23 were just sitting in the bushes north of Goma. And then, all of a sudden, they were in Goma. It caught people by surprise,” the chief executive of gold miner Banro Corp. said in a phone interview from the DRC.

The Eastern Congo leapt into the news last week after the M23, a breakaway group of former soldiers, seized the city of Goma and promised to “liberate” the entire country.

The surprise move has de-stabilized the already-volatile border region near Rwanda, triggered fighting with the Congolese army, and displaced thousands. It is widely believed that the rebels are being backed by Rwanda, a country that has fuelled prior unrest in the Eastern Congo.

Goma is a city of one million people on the north end of Lake Kivu. Roughly 200 kilometres to the south, Toronto-based Banro continues to dig up gold at its Twangiza mine. Banro also has an operating office in Bukavu, a city on the south end of the lake that the rebels want to seize, according to reports.

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Goma’s fall leaves Congo afraid of score settling and all-out war [mineral resources] – by Geoffrey York (Globe and Mail – November 21, 2012)

Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

JOHANNESBURG — The rebel takeover of the key Congolese city of Goma has sparked fears for the future of one of Africa’s biggest and most war-torn countries.

In the short term, the victory by the M23 rebels could trigger a wave of reprisal attacks on civilians in the city of a million people. Thousands of displaced people, in the chaos of the rebel advance, are fleeing out of Goma or into the city from rural camps.

In the longer term, the rebel victory could destabilize and weaken the fragile government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, opening the door for a foreign carve-up of eastern Congo, a mineral-rich region that has attracted rebels and invaders for many years.

The Rwandan-backed rebels, commanded by indicted war-crimes fugitive Bosco Ntaganda (known as “the Terminator”), walked into Goma almost unopposed on Tuesday after the city was abandoned by Congo’s notoriously underpaid and unreliable army.

United Nations peacekeepers, who had deployed helicopters to strafe the rebels with cannons and rockets on Sunday in a futile attempt to slow their advance, appeared to give up and just stood by watching as the rebels took the city. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said it was “absurd” that the 17,000-member UN force was unable to stop a few hundred rebels.

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Why DR Congo’s volcano city of Goma matters – by Theodore Trefon (BBC News Africa – November 20, 2012)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/

Theodore Trefon is senior researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa and author of the blog Congo Masquerade: The political culture of aid inefficiency and reform failure.

Goma lies at the foot of an active volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo and on the border with Rwanda. It matters today because it testifies to the powerlessness of the Congolese government and the United Nations to stop fighting and tit-for-tat violence.

The border city also matters because it could be an indicator of the unravelling of the Rwandan president’s authority. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame is under pressure from hardliners frustrated by the continued presence of opposition forces who have found sanctuary on the Congolese side of the border.

President Kagame is also increasingly seen as an embarrassment to touchy foreign partners. M23 rebels have now entered Goma; the governor of North Kivu has fled to Bukavu by boat and hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the city helter-skelter without having anywhere to go.

War, rape and the illegal extraction of minerals – an old story – matter more and more.

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Coltan: Michael Nest – Book Review – by Stephen Williams (African Business – September 10, 2012)

http://africanbusinessmagazine.com/main-articles/ic-publications

Just one of many resources that the DR Congo has in abundance, coltan, has received an unprecedented amount of attention from Western-based NGOs. They accuse the world’s technology corporations of fuelling the bloody conflict in the eastern Congo region where this metal is found. More accurately termed columbite-tantalite, but universally known by its abbreviation ‘coltan’, author Michael Nest explodes many of the myths that have grown around this controversial metal.

Like any good researcher, Nest takes the time to crosscheck and corroborate the basic facts and figures. One of the first ‘facts’ that he debunks is the commonly cited figure of 80% as the DR Congo’s share of the world’s reserves, or even the world’s production of coltan.

The earliest article he could find that gave this figure was a story from Agence France-Presse that quoted the 80% as Africa’s total, which was then repeated in March and April 2001 respectively by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and New Scientist magazine. It was the BBC News website, in the same year, that first attributed the 80% tag to DR Congo itself.

Nest tells us that there is no shortage of coltan, and it is, in fact, found in many countries around the world. The author’s own research suggests an “informed estimate” that Central Africa has about 9% of the world’s total and the DR Congo has about 7-8% of global reserves. Nest also believes that for much of the 2000s, the DR Congo may have produced around 20% of the world’s total, but historically the largest producer has been Australia.

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