With a back-drop of overall mining disinvestment and shrinking labour employment in the South African mining industry, the African Critical Mining Summit was launched to the media this week at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.
Critical Minerals are seen as a sector of mining that holds much potential for future mining exploration and development in South Africa and there is a growing hopefulness that this will be part of the solution to turn the mining industry around.
The sector has seen many large mining groups in the country looking to develop new mines elsewhere and this has led to a large number of jobs being lost, with 7000 jobs lost in the last quarter (Q2) alone and the industry has a number of hurdles that will need to be overcome to see growth again.
What it’s all About
The purpose of the African Critical Minerals Summit, is to unlock the pursuit of Africa’s vast mineral wealth in terms of the critical minerals and part of this process will be the essential mapping of mineral commodities across the African continent.
There has been a shift of focus from the general ores and scarce metal mining that has dominated mining in the past to more strategic minerals that are required for the low-carbon economy developments, Ai data centre and infrastructure developments and for the medical and military developments. These are becoming critical to future growth to Africa and to world developments.
Critical Minerals – Critical or Strategic?
There is a need for discussions around what is strategic to Africa and what is critical to Africa. The distinction being what does Africa require for development within the continent to grow its own economy and what is critical to the rest of the world that will need Africa to supply for their own developments.
An example given by Professor Nikki Wagner, of the university of Johannesburg, is that of manganese mining. “Over 70% of the world’s manganese is currently sourced from mining in South Africa”, She states. Do we use manganese in South Africa and benefit from it locally, or do we simply mine and export it? Manganese is critical globally, she says, without it you will not have a steel industry and so it is a critical mineral for the steel producers but what is it to the local economy?
Beneficiation Must Be More Than Talk
The beneficiation of minerals in Africa has been a long debated topic but not much development has been achieved. Partly because Africa has failed to build stable energy supply and partly because there are administration hurdles that must be overcome.
A key issue is the mining Cadastral system that has been promised by the minister of minerals, Gwede Mantashe for a while. This is bound to be s central topic at the African Critical Minerals Summit running from 2-3 December 2024 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg.
The Cadastral system is s central database of mineral rights and exploration rights that is supposed to bring transparency and accountability to the department’s allocation of mining and exploration licenses. Without this it is going to be most difficult for the industry to move forward comments Professor Nikki Wagner.
The Mining and mineral sector has to start creating an entire eco-system that will need support from the government and private companies to ensure that we start not only identifying what minerals we have and which are strategic going forward, bust also start developing the infrastructure that will utilise these resources to create down-stream developments and benefits in terms of economic growth, job creation and skills development
Hopefully these and other key topics for mineral extraction and developments, will not only gain talk time on the stage of the African Critical Minerals Summit, but will also lead to real and meaningful developments and decisions being taken that will support the growth of this vital sector.
