South Africa is in desperate need of economic growth and the sector that can provide that growth, if unfettered, is mining.

Make mining competitive, inclusive and transformative and it will deliver an economic momentum across its many economic linkages and float all boats.

It remains the premium latent driver of economic growth, as has been the case since diamonds were discovered 150 years ago and gold 130 years ago.

Although South Africa has been mining for all these years, amazingly, there is still huge value in the ground that has enormous economic potential, provided investors are prepared to fund its extraction.

But, for investors to fund its extraction, there has to be an enabling legislative framework to foster discovery and development.

That enabling environment is badly absent currently and, to restore it, the Chamber of Mines is taking government to court.

We saw court action on Thursday and Friday of last week and we will see more on the 13th and 14th of next month.

Lurking in the background of all this are the credit ratings agencies. Up to now, the High Court has looked fair in its rulings on cases brought by individual mining houses, which has been credit ratings positive.

Should the High Court come up with more fair rulings, it is bound to give the country a credit ratings breather.

This country has to do everything in its power to avoid any further credit ratings downgrades, as these will plunge the country into prohibitive cost territory.

The irony is that South Africa’s problems are overwhelmingly self-inflicted. A case in point is the way South Africans allowed China to usurp its former ferrochrome dominance.

Last week’s Chromium Conference served as a sober reminder of the pre-eminent position in ferrochrome that this country carelessly tossed away.

Largely to blame is the shocking performance of State power utility Eskom. As a State enterprise, Eskom should have been properly managed in the interests of the value that proper electricity management can provide at the country’s many modern ferrochrome production facilities.

Instead, Eskom was allowed to dispense its gross inefficiencies in the form of sharply rising power tariffs that have placed ferrochrome leadership into the lap of China, which, ironically, has no chrome of its own.

China is now happily eating what was South Africa’s ferrochrome lunch, using raw South African chrome ore.

In the process, South Africa is losing out on both the extra jobs that taking chrome to ferrochrome provides, as well as the very important higher foreign exchange that it generates, compared with the export of raw chromite.

We have become experts at bringing about our own economic losses.