Rather than focusing narrowly on minerals beneficiation, South African policymakers have been urged to pay much closer attention to reigniting and expanding the market for the country’s already extensive mining-linked manufacturing base by reviving and accelerating exploration and mine development activity.

Speaking at the Joburg Indaba, Southern Palladium executive chairperson Roger Baxter highlighted the extensive industrial capability and capacity that had already taken shape around the country’s mining sector, describing the Gauteng city of Ekurhuleni, for instance, as a “mining supplier park”.

“One of South Africa's biggest exports over the last ten years has actually been mining technologies and services to the rest of Africa, because the industry hasn't grown domestically,” the former Minerals Council South Africa CEO said.

“A lot of local companies at the mining supply level have exported their skills into the African continent and around the world.

“There's not a single part of the world where mining is taking place globally, whether it's Latin America, North America, Australia, or Africa, where South Africans are not involved in some way or another,” Baxter said, while also pointing to the academic, research and services capabilities that remained intact despite the lacklustre domestic mining performance.

“If we had a growing mining industry, all those other components that add value would all be growing too,” Baxter said, while stressing that such growth had to begin with exploration.

Exploration, however, continued to be weighed down by policy uncertainty, administrative delays, lack of a functional mining cadastre and insufficient visibility of the resource potential, given that only 20% of the country had been mapped at a geophysical level.

“If that pre-competitive information was done for 80% of the country, and you were able to give much shorter timelines to allow the venture capital-funded junior exploration companies to come and invest in the country, it would be a massive boost to the pipeline.”

Kearney partner Prashaen Reddy agreed that scaling up exploration would be foundational to growing mining’s contribution to the economy, as well as to stimulating industrialisation, including through beneficiation where it made commercial sense.

Reddy also argued that, for mining to play a catalytic role in rebuilding South Africa’s industrial base, it should play to its existing strengths, while exploring new areas where South Africa could manufacture the components and technologies needed for both domestic and international mining companies.

He argued that demand for such products could be further stimulated through greater procurement collaboration between the mining and energy clusters.

Eunomix CEO Claude de Baissac called for a back-to-basics approach to growing mining, that did not focus primarily on seeking to “force” a comparative advantage in minerals into a competitive advantage in processing and manufacturing.

“Instead of trying to preserve this or preserve that, let’s rather have the conversation about how you unlock the potential of downstream industries through creating real competitive advantage.

“And you do that not by restricting exports or imposing taxes and quotas … I think the conversation needs to pivot towards a conversation about competitiveness at a manufacturing level and what we can do from a country level perspective, as opposed to putting pressure on mining companies to go down the [beneficiation] route,” De Baissac said.