MINING WOES
Policy certainty is the only card SA has left to play to ‘woo foreign funders’
A Deloitte analyst warns that SA has one card to play — policy perception — to attract investment
SA’s ageing mines and lack of major new minerals means the only lever the government has to attract new mining investment is regulatory certainty. SA’s mining sector has nearly halved the number of jobs in the past 30 years and the gold and platinum sectors are in trouble, shedding thousands more jobs as shafts become deeper, productivity drops, grades shrink and costs outpace prices. "SA’s mineral potential is no longer what we thought it was. A lot of our industry is old and difficult and getting to the margin. The only other lever you have to play with is policy perception to attract foreign investment," said Deloitte resources leader Andrew Lane. SA did not perform well in the Fraser Institute’s latest policy perception index. It scored 42.7 points, ranking the country 81st out of 91 jurisdictions monitored. In 2013, it ranked 78 out of 112. Mining Charter Regulatory uncertainty has been a feature of the local mining industry since 2012, when amendments to the Mineral and Petrol...
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