Minister of Mineral
Resources Gwede Mantashe will host key roleplayers in the mining industry this
weekend for the long-awaited Mining Summit.
The summit, held in Boksburg,
will see the Department of Mineral Resources meeting with mining companies,
unions and community groups to engage on the revised Mining Charter, ahead of
its adoption as policy.
In June, Mantashe
told reporters the summit would not be an opportunity to add anything new or present
broad changes to the latest version of the charter, but to fine-tune
it.
"If you bring something critical,
we will listen," he said at the time.
For years, the draft policy has been
under pressure from companies, labour and mining communities to incentivise
transformation in the sector without harming profits, or excessively penalising
companies for incidences that affect their transformation shareholding.
In the revised charter, Broad-Based
Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) objectives and conditions remain part of
mining license rights. Mining rights have 30 years secured for the holder and a
target 30% transformation ownership remains from the previous charter.
While the latest version of the charter
does not have the same "once empowered, always empowered" approach as
previous versions, Mantashe says it provides significant protection from
penalties to companies where empowerment partners exist.
While the Minerals Council of South
Africa (formerly the Chamber of Mines) has said it supports a 30% black
ownership target on new mining rights, it added in a statement that it did not
support the free carried interest of 5% allocated to labour and communities.
"Given South Africa’s mature
mining sector, a 10% total free carried interest on new mining rights will
materially undermine investment, by pushing up investment hurdle rates and
ensuring that many potentially new projects become unviable," said the
council in a submission released in June.
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READ: Gwede’s charter gets the thumbs down
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM)
spokesperson Luvhuwani Mammburu told Fin24 on Friday that the union was
holding its own summit in Johannesburg on Friday, where delegates would
formulate the union’s mandate and forward this to the department’s summit on
Saturday.
"We will take our position ahead
of going into the summit at our own engagement taking place today.
"We have not taken a decision yet
and we are still going to make our own position clear at this gathering and
then we will submit that the department’s summit," said Mammburu.
The Association of Mineworkers and
Construction Union (AMCU) has called for more pronounced community
representation in the Mining Charter, and asked that the charter enable
more beneficiation within the mining sector.
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