Why is reform that promotes revenue transparency in mining languishing?
A lack of beneficial ownership transparency is a key threat to sustainability within the sector, as is an increase in human rights violations that tends to occur with secret owners
The latest data from the just-released Worldwide Governance Indicators report confirms that with some exceptions, resource-rich countries face major corruption challenges. This report further elucidates the enormous costs of corruption in terms of socioeconomic decline, undermining of democratic institutions, levels of violence and barriers to energy transition and environmental protection.
All these “wicked” problems are present in the SA mining sector — so how do we address wicked problems? “Wicked” in this context does not mean “evil”, although we could forgive a moral judgment from anyone who experiences the extreme poverty in mining communities who have had hundreds of millions of rand stolen from them. Rather, “wicked” means problems that cannot be solved once and for all as might be the case in a problem that the natural sciences set out to solve...
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