South Africa needs to pretend it is starting again at the bottom end of the mineral resources value curve and create a vision for exploration.

Without exploration, it is just a matter of time before the mining lights go out.

A close study needs to be done on Section 12J of the Income Tax Act to see whether the tax incentives provided by it are sufficient.

If not, the country needs to look at how a country like Peru is dealing with the problem. The tempo of mineral exploration is building up in Peru, and in Chile there is an integrated effort that takes in big, small and State-owned mineral resources enterprises.

The Council for Geosciences needs to remap the country using modern technology and the work done by the geologists of the 1900s needs to be revisited.

There is consensus that South Africa remains significantly underexplored. The lack of an exploration culture stems from this country’s huge gold, platinum and manganese endowment.

The endowment was so substantial that engineers, rather than geologists, were given the upper hand.

Now that needs to be reversed and geologists must be allowed to take pole position in the implementation of the latest technology.

There are so many reports of big mining companies walking away from prospects on the grounds that the prospects were too low grade and too small.

Then along came new technology to show that they were not low grade and not too small.

A case in point is AK6, in Botswana. As Botswana Diamonds MD James Campbell points out, this was originally discarded as an area of 2.5 ha and a grade of 2.5 carats per hundred tonnes (cpht) – only for new technology, decades later, to turn that into 10 ha and 25 cpht.

Today, it is the Karowe diamond mine, owned by Lucara, which recently discovered the world’s largest diamond in the previously discarded prospect area.

South Africa’s exploration surface has hardly been scratched, according to De Beers Consolidated Mines (DBCM) CEO Philip Barton, who is anxious to turn the prospects on his book to account.

It is a shame that the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) has seen fit to deny DBCM a chance to boost the South African economy.

The fact that DBCM has submitted 54 prospecting licence applications to the DMR over two years is testament to the fact that, 150 years after the discovery of diamonds, South Africa remains highly prospective.

The fact that the DMR is denying DBCM the opportunity to turn these to account is a serious retardation of the growth potential of the struggling South African economy.

The DMR must be forced to relent for the good of the graduates leaving university with qualifications that will be directed elsewhere if the mining industry continues to stutter on account of a poor legislative environment.