Mantashe rattles minerals sabre

Mineral & petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe has scoffed at US President Donald Trump’s threat that the US will withdraw aid to the SA economy, saying SA could leverage its minerals in kind.

Mantashe delivered an opening address at the 2025 Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town on Monday. His remarks come after Trump said the US federal government would withhold aid funding to SA, claiming the government was “confiscating land”.

“Africa needs to accept its advantage and take charge of the growing demand. I have ministers in my cabinet who always worry about geopolitics, with this imminent threat that because we passed an expropriation act, Trump will withhold funding to SA.

“I said

Africa. Lets ’let’s withhold not immobilise minerals from the US. If they don’t give us money, let us not give them minerals. But the reality is they take our minerals but say they are withholding funding. No, we have minerals in the continent and therefore we have something. We are not beggars,” the minister said to applause.

The annual mining industry event is traditionally opened by the president but the presidency announced on Sunday evening that Mantashe would lead the government delegation at the event on Ramaphosa’s behalf.

The Expropriation Act, which Ramaphosa signed into law last month, makes no provision for confiscation of land. Still, on Sunday Trump posted on his social media networking site Truth Social that SA was confiscating land and “treating certain classes of people very badly”.

“A massive human rights violation, at a minimum, is happening for all to see. The US won’t stand for it. We will act. Also, I will cut off all future funding to South Africa until a full investigation of the situation has been completed,” Trump said.

Mantashe said SA, along with the continent, should be unapologetic about leveraging its mineral resources on the world stage to negotiate its own desired outcome, even when engaging global superpowers.

“If, as a continent, we are frightened, we fear everything, we are going to collapse and we will collapse with minerals at our doorstep. So my appeal is that Africa is the world’s richest mining jurisdiction and that issue is an issue that we must internalise as a continent [and] use to our advantage,” he said.

He pointed out that China built its chrome industry from resources it imported from African suppliers but had a bigger industry of finished goods than any market in Africa.

“We export raw commodities, China stockpiles raw commodities and we continue mining. At this point, as is the case currently, China just floods the market with chrome and the price of chrome goes down, our chrome mining companies say they can barely survive, but they are the biggest producers and it is on their production that the price of chrome is suppressed by China.”

The presidency released a statement to put the public at ease over Trump’s remarks, stressing SA was “a constitutional democracy deeply rooted in the rule of law, justice and equality”. “The SA government has not confiscated any land. The recently adopted Expropriation Act is not a confiscation instrument but a constitutionally mandated legal process that ensures public access to land in an equitable and just manner as guided by the constitution.”

The presidency said it looked forward to engaging the Trump administration over its land reform policy and issues of bilateral interest, adding there was no significant funding provided to SA by the US outside the US President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief aid.

SA’s long-awaited new online mining licence system should be up and running by midyear, opening the way for a liftoff in mining exploration and eventually the development of new mines.

The Minerals Council SA said on Monday that the department of mineral and petroleum resources had assured the industry it was on track to have the new mining cadastral system up and running by the middle of this year.

“We do expect an efficient, modern, transparent system to manage mineral rights and exploration licence applications,” Minerals Council CEO Mzila Mthenjane told journalists before the opening of the Investing in African Mining Indaba, in Cape Town.

The Minerals Council is also in talks with the department about the review of mining regulations that the department has said it is undertaking. The industry is particularly keen to see a review of the social and labour plans that mining companies have to commit to as conditions of their mining licences — companies are keen to continue to invest, but would like to be able to collaborate with each other so that they can pool resources to invest in larger projects in mining areas to meet community needs, the council said.

The department finally chose the PMG Consortium in February last year to install a new mining cadastral system after more than a decade of delays that constrained new mining exploration and caused huge backlogs in applications for mining licences.

Minerals and petroleum resources minister Gwede Mantashe promised in July last year that the new system would be complete by June this year.

A number of countries in Africa, including Nigeria and Botswana, successfully implemented online cadastral systems to apply for, and register, mining and exploration licences in recent years, opening their mining industries up for investment. By contrast SA’s mining department has been running on archaic manual systems since its efforts to modernise the old SAMRAD (digital) system failed in 2011.

SA has lagged other mineralrich countries by far in mining exploration over the past two decades, with exploration spending falling from a peak of more than R6bn in 2006 to only R1bn in recent years, rising to R1.2bn in the latest year. This is still hardly 1% of global exploration spend, well below Mantashe’s 5% target.

The dearth of exploration has meant few new mines have been identified or developed in SA in recent years at a time when global demand for critical minerals is climbing. SA’s mining industry is languishing.

But the Minerals Council’s latest “Facts and Figures” publication shows mining remains a crucial contributor to exports, growth and jobs in SA, accounting for 6% of GDP and 45% of SA’s goods exports — which rises to 50%-60% if processed and beneficiated minerals products are included. It employs 471,000 people, accounting for 4.5% of total formal employment, with an annual wage bill of almost R190bn.

Minerals Council chief economist Hugo Pienaar said the mining industry’s share of GDP had been relatively stable over the past 30 years, but that was largely a price story — in real volume terms the industry had declined. “The industry has been bailed [out] by commodity prices but this is a massive opportunity lost,” he said, noting that if the industry could get back to previous volumes, it could hugely increase exports and employment.

Last year saw improvements in the electricity and logistics constraints that have weighed on the industry, with load-shedding halted for more than 300 days and Transnet stabilising and marginally increasing rail volumes. But mining industry output did not increase as expected in response to the end of load-shedding, reflecting all the other constraints weighing on production.

Pienaar said chrome was the one commodity that shot the lights out during a difficult year for SA’s mining sector, increasing output, exports and employment. More than half of SA’s chrome exports go out via the Port of Maputo, indicating how important the Mozambican port is for particular SA export commodities.

MINING EXPLORATION SPENDING FELL FROM A PEAK OF MORE THAN R6BN IN 2006 TO ONLY R1BN IN RECENT YEARS, RISING TO R1.2BN