The key enabler of transparency in applying for prospecting rights and mining rights is a cadastre system. Everyone in the know is insistent that a prospective country like South Africa simply cannot attract exploration investment without a commercially available official geographic information system that identifies geological features within the country.
The Council for Geoscience has urged South Africans to treat exploration as a number-one economic opportunity, but the situation with the broken cadastre system at the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) seems so dire that the most successful cadastre supplier to countries in the Southern African region has walked away from the DMRE’s tender invitation.
This same company is about to provide Botswana with a modern update of its existing cadastre and should be persuaded to take on South Africa’s cadastre reconstruction within a public-private framework. It is a job that simply has to be done.
