South Africa Must Defend Its Sovereign Wealth, Before It’s All Sold to the Highest Bidder

 

When Anglo American Plc announced its plan to merge with Canada’s Teck Resources and relocate its holding structure to Vancouver, it was not merely another corporate transaction. It was a seismic act of capital flight, the slow-motion exit of one of South Africa’s most historically powerful corporations, taking with it a century’s worth of accumulated wealth, expertise, and control over our national mineral assets.

As economist DumaGqubule outlines in his recently released report, The Anglo–Teck Merger: A Global Power Play, this deal is not about efficiency or synergy; it is about jurisdiction. It is about where wealth will be controlled, where taxes will be paid, and where accountability will end. It is a reminder that, despite our constitutional commitment to economic sovereignty, South Africa still lacks the institutional and legislative backbone to protect its sovereign mineral wealth from transnational looting disguised as “global investment.”

While Canada has built an entire regulatory system to protect its own resource base from foreign capture, South Africa continues to let its most strategic assets slip quietly through the cracks of bureaucratic inertia and corporate manipulation.

If this merger proceeds unchallenged, Anglo will have achieved what colonial capital set out to do a century ago: to extract the wealth of the African continent while keeping the profits offshore, beyond the reach of democratic accountability.

The Disguised Exit of a Mining Empire

At its peak, Anglo American controlled half of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, half of the world’s historic gold stock, and, effectively, half of South Africa’s economy. It built its empire through a system of racial exploitation, cheap black labour, and state-sanctioned dispossession. Today, it seeks to leave the country through the very same channels it built, opaque corporate networks, regulatory capture, and elite political complicity.

A Sovereign Wealth System Without Sovereignty

The irony is bitter. South Africa’s Constitution declares that mineral resources are the common heritage of all its people, held by the state as a custodian for future generations. Yet, in practice, the institutions tasked with enforcing this principle have become facilitators of corporate evasion.

The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources (DMPR), which should be the guardian of national resources, has become a technical administrator of private rights. Its regulatory approach remains reactive, not strategic, governed by permits and paperwork, not by policy vision or sovereign purpose.

The Public Investment Corporation, which should act as a lever of national interest in corporate governance, functions as a passive investor, behaving more like a private asset manager than a custodian of public wealth.

And Parliament, which has the constitutional authority to demand oversight and accountability from both, has yet to debate the single most consequential corporate restructuring in recent South African history.

If this merger were taking place in Canada, none of this would be possible.

Canada’s Model: How a Democracy Protects Its Wealth

In Canada, all foreign investments are subject to rigorous review under the Investment Canada Act (ICA), a law designed to ensure that no acquisition undermines the country’s economic, environmental, or national security interests.

Under the ICA:

• Every major transaction involving foreign control of a Canadian company must undergo a “net benefit review.”
• This review assesses the deal’s likely impact on employment, resource development, productivity, technological advancement, competition, and compatibility with national policies.
• If there is any risk that a transaction may threaten national security or economic sovereignty, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry has the authority to block it.

The law also mandates interdepartmental consultation, involving Canada’s Ministries of Finance, Natural Resources, Environment, and even Defence, depending on the asset in question. Decisions are made transparently, with public rationale and political accountability.

In fact, it was this very system that blocked Glencore’s 2023 attempt to acquire Teck Resources, after public outcry and government review determined that the deal was not in Canada’s national interest. The Canadian Prime Minister himself declared that “critical minerals are strategic assets, not just commodities,” signalling that mining decisions are matters of national security and global power.

Contrast that with South Africa, where Anglo’s merger with Teck, a transaction that will determine the control of billions of rands in mineral value, is proceeding without parliamentary debate, without regulatory scrutiny, and without any assessment of its national implications.

 

The Consequence of Lax Governance: Capital Flight as Policy

For decades, South Africa has treated mining policy as a technical question of licensing and royalties rather than a strategic question of sovereignty and nation-building. We built a Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) that decentralised administrative discretion but never articulated a coherent national ownership framework.

We allowed the liberalisation of capital accounts in the late 1990s, a move designed and lobbied for by Anglo and its peers, which made it perfectly legal for companies to list offshore, repatriate profits, and avoid reinvestment obligations.

And we failed to build a sovereign wealth mechanism, akin to Botswana’s Pula Fund or Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, that could transform finite mineral wealth into intergenerational public capital.

The result? The very corporations that profited most from our natural endowment now claim the right to decide where their “home” will be , while the state, the people, and the land they leave behind bear the externalities of their extraction.

Critics often accuse campaigns like ours of being “anti-investment” or “anti-business.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
We are pro-accountability, pro-transparency, and pro-sovereignty.

A sovereign state has the right, and the obligation, to ensure that the extraction of its natural wealth serves the long-term prosperity of its people, not the short-term profits of a global elite.

This does not necessarily mean nationalisation. It means national strategy, one that balances investor participation with social responsibility and ensures that profits generated in South Africa contribute to the public good.

The lesson from Canada is simple: you can be open to global investment without being open to exploitation.
Their regulatory framework is not anti-market, it is pro-democracy. It insists that private capital must align with public purpose, and that no corporate transaction can take place without proving its net benefit to the nation.

Why should South Africans accept less?

Without such measures, South Africa will continue to suffer from the same pattern that has defined our economic history: the extraction of value without accountability, and the export of wealth without restitution.

 

Anglo’s move to Canada is not the end of its South African story; it is the final chapter in a century-long cycle of accumulation and evasion.
This is a company that built its empire through colonial apartheid exploitative labour and land laws, and now seeks to dissolve its obligations through the machinery of global finance.

What is at stake is not just a merger. It is the meaning of sovereignty.
It is whether South Africa will continue to be a site of extraction for others’ benefit, or whether it will finally become the steward of its own future.

Canada protects its minerals because it understands that resource control is power.
If South Africa fails to learn that lesson, we will discover, too late, that the real “critical mineral” we lost was not copper, platinum, or gold, but sovereignty itself.