Cabinet Sells Communities to the Wolves


The decision by Minister Gwede Mantashe and the Cabinet to withdraw the MPRDA Amendment Bill from the Parliamentary process and to simultaneously water down the provisions of the Mining Charter, appears once again to signal a decisive move by the current government to favour business and profits at the expense of some of the most marginalised and impoverished South Africans.

This announcement comes ironically at a time when South Africans have been following the Zondo commission into the corporate capture of the state. While the commission appears to be considering a particularly rabid type of corporate capture of the state, the announcement by Cabinet on Thursday, brings to the fore an ideological capture of the state by corporate interests.

In its essence, the cabinet decision to set aside the current MPRDA Amendment process, is not so much a victory for policy certainty as it is a smashing down of the popular will and rational thought.
Over the course of the last 6 years that the Bill has been floating between Parliament and the Provinces, Civil society organisations like MACUA and the Coalition on the MPRDA, which includes organisations such as Centre for Applied Legal Studies, Benchmarks Foundation and ActionAid South Africa among others, have worked tirelessly to shift the debate within the mining sector.

Their collective efforts have been so successful that more and more provinces were refusing to sign off on the Bill, because they wanted more rights for communities and for greater protection of the environment to be included in the amendments.

The Eastern Cape Legislature went so far as to include in their mandate, the proposal to include a concept that mining interests are dead set against, namely Free Prior and Informed Consent for any community faced with the threat of Mining on their land.

The idea that communities must have a greater say in the issues that affect them, is a central theme of our Constitution, and has been affirmed by the Constitutional court in numerous judgements, yet the current MPRDA does not recognise communities as stakeholders who have the right to land and dignity.


Instead the Cabinet decision has condemned communities like those in Dingleton in the Northern Cape, to forced evictions and loss of land and well-being. The current law only requires that Anglo American give the community 21 working days’ notice before they start mining in and around their community and homes. Anglo has cut their water and electricity supply and have started blasting highly dangerous explosives meters away from the homes of those who chose to remain.
The ugly apartheid-like forced evictions of the Dingleton community is repeated in many similar communities across the country and the Xolobeni case before the Pretoria North High Court is set to expose the unconstitutional nature of the current MPRDA. In any event, the Coalition on the MPRDA are determined to challenge the constitutionality of the MPRDA in court especially after the Gauteng North High Court recently affirmed that mining affected communities are interested and affected stakeholders that must be included in consultations and negotiations on matters that affect them.

So not only does the Cabinet decision condemn South African citizens to be victims of the bullying tactics of large Transnational corporations, they are also not providing a lasting solution to a problem that has plagued South Africa for over 150 years, namely the exclusion of people and their rights as a consideration when engaging in mining activities.


The decision by the Cabinet furthermore ignores a wealth of evidence that has been placed at its disposal. None more so than the Motlanthe report of the High-Level Panel on the Assessment of Key Legislation and the Acceleration of Fundamental Change (HLP). Among the many useful and rational recommendations in the HLP with regards to compensation the HLP recommends that; “The MPRDA must be amended to ensure that both revenues from mining-related activities and opportunities generated by such mining activity are shared in an equitable and transparent manner among people whose land rights are directly affected.”

The recent report by the South African Human Rights Commissions; National Hearing on the Underlying Socio-economic Challenges of Mining-affected Communities in South Africa called on government to remedy some of the fundamental short comings in the current legislation.

Other evidence collected by civil society organisations have shown clear evidence of a systemic model of inequality which appears to be built into the legislative environment around mining. Dr. Aninka Claasens of UCT, in a recent working paper which forms part of a forthcoming MISTRA publication on Traditional Leadership and Customs in a Constitutional Democracy, due to launch early next year, is unequivocal that the “law has been used to entrench structural inequality in post-apartheid South Africa.

Thus, it is a sad indictment on our government that they have not remained level headed at the wheel but have bowed to the pressure from big corporates and panicked at the helm. The fruits of this short-sighted denial of popular sentiment, backed by empirical evidence, will come back to haunt us.

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