South Africa has been blessed with a wonderful manganese endowment, but is not doing as well as it should in using that endowment to best effect for the good of the South African people.

The country is putting this national patrimony at risk by not marketing it as imaginatively as it could at a time when demand is unlikely to be as high as it has been in the past.

There is no point in providing too much of it and to increase the risk of reducing what is already low value to no value.

Fears of this unfortunate manganese outcome were first expressed decades ago, when the deconsolidation of South Africa’s manganese mining industry began to manifest itself.

Readers of Mining Weekly may recall our report of some years back about applications for mining licences from large, established mining companies, with well-organised marketing departments and in-depth marketing insights, being deliberately rejected, while licence applications from far smaller newcomers, with far less market insight and far fewer marketing personnel, were being eagerly endorsed.

The outcome was the emergence of many more separate manganese mining operations, all needing rail agreements of the take-or-pay kind, and many being content to deploy less certain marketing experience in distant and often complex marketing situations.

The upshot has been more volume meeting initially vibrant demand, but, in the current climate, too much manganese chasing too little demand and prices, as a result, falling through the floor.

One would have expected that iron-ore, manganese’s kindred metal, would have suffered as bad a fate, but this has not been the case, even though deconsolidation has also been considerable in iron-ore.

Even though both iron-ore and manganese ore are overwhelmingly targeted at steelmaking, the difference seems to be that marketing in the iron-ore space is more imaginative.

Bloomberg reported from Singapore last week that one iron-ore company has, for example, developed a mobile app to help it sell its ore, while others have opted to sell directly from the ports of the buying countries – and in the currency of those countries – as opposed to forcing dollar deals down customers’ throats and putting them at potential currency risk.

Moderate iron-ore tonnages are being app-marketed from ports, with portside iron-ore availability facilitating the blending of different varieties of the ore to customer requirements.

The biggest pursuit must not be volume, but value. Mining companies that face the prospect of giving away a national patrimony for a pittance must desist and opt rather to put workforces on training courses to avoid overproducing.

We must not part with the family silver at a loss. State-run take-or-pay protagonists must be made to accept force majeure declarations when market realities present threats to sustainability.

South Africa Inc needs to sit down and work things out imaginatively and innovatively for the common good, and apply it widely during sharp downturns.

As they say, when the going gets tough, the tough need to get going.