African countries should add value to raw material, ANC says

The ANC wants African countries to enter an agreement that all mined minerals are processed locally. It says the export of raw minerals robs the entire African continent of its true economic and employment potential.

As part of its plan to get South Africans into jobs, the priority of its 2024 election manifesto, the ANC says it wants only finished products to be exported.

The governing party wants to create a corridor that will see major mining countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Zimbabwe and SA agree to beneficiate minerals within the local economies.

“Our overall attitude towards beneficiation, first, is pan-African in its outlook, and this is the point that I think must not be lost,” said Zuko Godlimpi, ANC national executive committee member and deputy chair of its economic transformation subcommittee. “The export of African minerals robs the continent of its industrial potential and its job-creating potential.”

The proposed plan would not be haphazard and would not disrupt the economy, he said.

“We are going to delay — in a systematic way, without disrupting the supply chain and value chains overall — the arrival of South African minerals into global markets by improving local value addition, beneficiation and even manufacturing of final goods.

“But some of the market products that we intend competing are produced using minerals that are not just concentrated in SA only; some of them are in the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) region.”

The DRC, which is the world’s third-largest copper producer and the top producer of cobalt, a key component in electric car batteries, is already having discussions around exporting only finished products instead of raw material. President Felix Tshisekedi, who began his second term in January, has said his administration would ensure the country’s natural resources and minerals work for and benefit Congolese people.

Godlimpi said discussions were taking place with Sadc countries to create what he called a beneficiation corridor in the region.

“One of the discussions is we are going to have to anchor our industrial and beneficiation strategy is a co-operative framework that can be bought into by other African countries. As you are aware, the DRC is discussing beneficiation and countries like Zimbabwe are discussing beneficiation and industrialisation,” he said.

“We want to build a beneficiation corridor across Sadc so that the beneficiation value chain must start off in the DRC, come down to Zimbabwe and SA might actually be the station where the final good is produced. So it’s a comprehensive approach that we are thinking about.”

There was a disjuncture in policy alignment because the SA government issued mining licences but little was done to put conditions in place that would see locals benefiting more from the mined products, he said.

“Take a simple example, the state has a monopoly over SA minerals because it issues licences, but the conditionalities that go into issuing licences are not related to an industrial strategy. So that’s one of the things that we’re getting into.

“We want to have a conversation that says when you’re issuing a mining licence, you’ve got to attach to it licensing conditions that feed into this industrial and beneficiation strategy.”

If the country could get this part right, the government would be able to create more jobs, he said.

“From a jobs output point of view, once we get it right, once there is an increasing number of factories that are built in SA, on the basis of beneficiation and manufacturing, we will hit jobs that are beyond the 2.5-million that we wrote in the manifesto, just in the mining and manufacturing sector.

“We’ll hit above 2.5-million over a period of seven to 10 years, because we’re not talking about just one cycle. The five-year cycle is to set in motion the policy mechanism and start with some of them, but in a seven and 10-year, medium-term period, we’re convinced that we will get it right.”

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