Greed is the Real Threat to South Africa’s Mining Future

While the public is treated to displays of economic patriotism and talk of investor confidence, a much darker truth lies buried beneath South Africa’s mineral wealth, one more corrosive than acid mine drainage or declining commodity prices. It is a truth masked by three-course dinners, glossy stakeholder reports, and an unholy alliance between corporate mining giants and political elites. That truth is greed. Greed is not just a moral failing; it is the most significant and immediate risk facing South Africa’s mining sector today.

The Elite Consensus: Feeding at the Table While the Country Starves

In the past weeks, we’ve seen an almost farcical performance play out. At the very moment when mining-affected communities are calling for justice, transparency, and accountability, the Minerals Council of South Africa, with the full support of the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources (DMPR), hosts a high-profile dinner in Cape Town, inviting selected stakeholders to wine and dine, ostensibly in the name of “engagement.” Among the invitees were representatives from MACUA, who instead of being heard, were subjected to violence and intimidation for daring to present the painful truth: that the vast majority of South Africans continue to receive nothing but crumbs while the state and its mining benefactors gorge themselves on our collective inheritance.

When MACUA delivered a symbolic bag of crumbs to Minister Gwede Mantashe, a simple, honest gesture to reflect the insult that this dinner represented to millions of excluded and impoverished people, they were physically assaulted by members of the Department. It wasn’t just an attack on MACUA; it was an attack on every mining-affected community that dares to speak truth to power. It proved yet again how violently allergic this political-industrial complex is to accountability.

Parliament’s Kool-Aid Moment: Swallowing the Propaganda

Just a day before the dinner, Members of Parliament sat glassy-eyed as the Minerals Council delivered a thin, self-congratulatory report full of vague figures and inflated promises. Not a single committee member challenged them on their role in the catastrophic failures of Social and Labour Plans (SLPs) or their ongoing legal campaigns to weaken transformation. Parliament, instead of upholding its mandate to serve the people, appeared to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid directly from the Council’s golden chalice.

One must ask: how did we arrive at a place where a central stakeholder can present unverified claims, after decades of documented failures and looting, and not be subjected to scrutiny?

The answer lies in the dangerous intimacy between the state and mining capital. It is not a relationship of accountability; it is one of mutual convenience and shared economic interest, one where the governing elite and mining tycoons play on the same team. And the referee? Nowhere to be found.

The Myth of Mining’s Volatility

The Minerals Council continues to frame the sector as one beleaguered by global forces, volatility in commodity prices, regulatory uncertainty, and rising operational costs. But this narrative is as hollow as the promises buried in abandoned SLPs.

Let’s look at the facts: in 1980, the mining sector recorded R5 billion in profits. By 2023, that figure stood at a staggering R270 billion, a 4900% increase. Over the same period, employment in the sector dropped from over 760,000 to under 480,000. This is not a sector under siege. It is a sector that has perfected the art of value extraction while shedding labour and responsibility.

This obscene accumulation of wealth has not trickled down to communities. Instead, it has been siphoned upward to boardrooms, shareholders, and politicians. The narrative of volatility is a smokescreen, one designed to justify the deregulation of transformation, the dilution of community rights, and the unrelenting pursuit of profit at any social cost.

*The State’s Role: From Regulator to Co-Conspirator*

The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources no longer acts as a watchdog. The Director-General himself admitted that his department relies on the Minerals Council to supply the very data that is presented to Parliament, data that is neither independently verified nor grounded in lived community experience. In effect, the fox is writing the report card for the henhouse.

Even the draft Mineral Resources Development Amendment Bill (MRDA Bill) reflects this collusion. It fails to codify community ownership, omits Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), and preserves unchecked ministerial discretion while doing nothing to enforce transformative obligations. These are not oversights; they are design features. The DMPR has served up a legal framework tailor-made for mining elites, and the Minerals Council is pretending to be disappointed with it. It’s a performance designed to fool the public while embedding corporate interests even deeper into law.

*Selling Out the Future for a Seat at the Table*

It would be one thing if this betrayal were accidental, the result of poor consultation or policy confusion. But it’s not. It is the direct outcome of a deeply ingrained belief among political and economic elites, that the poor are undeserving, expendable, and inconvenient.

Today’s mining barons may wear tailored suits instead of pith helmets, but their worldview is unchanged from the colonialists who first carved up this land. They still believe that South Africa’s mineral wealth belongs to them. They still believe that the masses, the very people who bear the social and environmental costs of mining, should accept their lot in silence.

They do not engage with communities; they stage dinners.
They do not respond to evidence; they issue denials.
They do not care about justice; they care about control.

A System Built on Crumbs

The bag of crumbs handed to Minister Mantashe was not just a symbol of exclusion, it was a symbol of what this entire system has become. A system where:

• More than 70% of community SLP projects never materialise.
• Youth unemployment in mining areas exceeds 80%.
• Water sources are poisoned without consequence.
• The DMPR recycles mining PR as policy fact.
• And Parliament, blinded by proximity to power, fails to ask a single hard question.

In this system, violence is not just physical. It is structural, economic, political, and often legal. The recent assault I suffered is just one expression of a broader culture of suppression, where those who call out the theft are punished while those who loot are rewarded with greater influence.

Toward a Politics of Dignity and Redistribution

The greatest risk to the mining sector is not uncertainty or protest or regulation. It is greed the greed that has hijacked our mineral wealth for the benefit of the few. It is this greed that is corroding public trust, undermining democracy, and rendering the promises of 1994 meaningless for millions of South Africans.

MACUA  and Communities will not be silenced. We must continue to expose the lies, challenge the complicity, and demand that communities, not capital, sit at the centre of mining reform. We must call on all South Africans to join them in rejecting this extractive order and building a new one rooted in dignity, justice, and shared prosperity.

If Parliament will not act, then the people must. If the DMPR will not regulate, then we must resist. And if the Minerals Council continues to peddle fiction, then we must meet their propaganda with truth.

Greed is not just a moral failure; it is a national emergency.

And we must confront it now, before there is nothing left to fight for but the crumbs.