Bernard Swanepoel, the former Harmony Gold CEO who now spends his time running mining conferences through his outfit Resources 4 Africa, is an optimist if nothing else. One of his regular events is the Junior Indaba in Johannesburg. The fact that this conference keeps on going is testimony to signs of life – or at least interest – in the junior mining space in South Africa.
“Eventually, if you are to sustain your mining industry and your mining industry jobs, you must discover and develop new mines. Today’s mining graduates will be 40 in about 18 years,” Miller told the conference. “So how many mines will still be operating in South Africa in 18 years? In 2040, in other words? How many mining jobs will there be?
Other foreign measures and domestic data sets paint the same bleak picture. And exploration is a high-risk business dominated by junior companies that depend on venture capital. “Why would you go into mining now in South Africa? It’s a completely policy-driven problem,” James Lorimer, the DA’s shadow minister for mineral resources, toldThis is reflected, for example, in listed companies. The conference heard that the Toronto Stock Exchange had 1,600 small-cap mining companies or juniors, while 600 are listed on the Sydney Stock Exchange. The JSE has 12 – barely above single digits.
Steenkampskraal Holdings chairman Trevor Blench said a mining right for the project was granted in 2010, but the region – Namaqualand – is remote and dry, so the company explored for underwater sources and hit pay dirt. An application for a water-use licence was then made to the Department of Water Affairs in 2012.