SOUTH AFRICAN Deputy President and new African National Congress (ANC) president Cyril Ramaphosa drew striking parallels between the renewal of the ANC and the tale of the rebirth of eagles when delivering the keynote address at the ANC Northern Cape conference in May last year.

According to this tale, when an eagle reaches a certain advanced age, it becomes weakened as its claws lose the flexibility to grab prey, its beak becomes bent and its wings become heavy and stick to its chest, making flight difficult.

The eagle is left with only two options: die or go through a very painful process of rebirth, which requires a retreat to its nest on a mountain top.

The rebirthing process is difficult: the eagle will knock off its beak and grow a new one, pluck out its claws so that sharp, new ones can grow and pluck out its feathers so fresh ones can take root. Thus renewed, the eagle can take its ‘flight of rebirth’.

Like the ANC, the South African mining industry is in urgent need of a ‘flight of rebirth’. It is buckled and bent and made up of weakened growth prospects, with none of the cut and thrust of rival mining jurisdictions like Australia and Canada.

What is needed is regulatory policy that incentivises a ‘flight of rebirth’ led by junior mining companies.

They must be assisted by the State-owned Council for Geoscience, which needs to provide updated mapping; the State-owned mineral research organisation Mintek must turn its attention to the needs of small mining companies; and Section 12J of the Income Tax Act must be put to the test to see if it offers sufficient incentivisation.

Dr John Bristow expresses the conviction that there are smaller deposits that can be developed and wants enabling policy to create real ownership opportunities for black mining entrepreneurs.

He sees South Africa’s “geological and minerals jewel box” as being underexplored and is confident that many midtier deposits can be found.
He points out that Australia has 600 listed companies in exploration, development and mining worldwide, with good access to information and capital.

Most of these smaller companies, he notes, find and develop small and midtier deposits, leading to the development of new ownership, mines and employment across the globe.
But the absence of juniors of note in the group of 22 mining companies listed on the JSE needs fixing.

Consulting exploration geologist Allan Saad, who formerly represented the now defunct 23-member Foreign Investors Mining Association, is highly critical of a simple prospecting applica- tion costing half-a-million rands and blames the complexity of the application system.

The long and the short of it is that greenfield exploration projects are there and can set South African mining on that ‘flight of rebirth’.