DMRE says cadastre on track, with 2,800 mining applications finally approved in 2023 

South Africa’s implementation of a mining cadastre, seen as crucial for encouraging exploration and attracting investment, remains on track – even if the process has been slower than the industry had hoped for.

Tseliso Maqubela, the deputy director-general for petroleum and regulation at the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), told the Junior Mining Indaba in Johannesburg that the SLA (senior-level agreement) had been signed on Monday, paving the way for the system to be established.

“We have taken the time that is normally taken by other countries,” Maqubela told the conference, which is organised by Resources for Africa.

Maqubela noted that in Botswana — which has a much smaller mining sector than South Africa’s — it took 13 months from procurement to the site going live.

The DMRE announced the preferred bidder for the cadastre at the end of January after years of needless delays cost the mining sector billions of rand in lost investments.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Dept of Mineral Resources and Energy announces mining cadastre provider

The main partner in the PMG consortium that won the bid is Canadian-based Geotech, which is widely seen as first-class in the field.

“The Canadians are very tough negotiators,” Maqubela said.

A functional mining cadastral system is an online portal that displays a country’s mineral and other forms of natural wealth in a way that is accessible to the public. It can serve the dual function of showing the state of play of mining activities while allowing companies armed with this knowledge to apply for various kinds of exploration or mining rights.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Explainer: A mining cadastre and public transparency

In short, it provides transparency around the application process and speeds it up.

South Africa’s lack of a transparent cadastre and the DMRE’s reliance on its useless Samrad system for applications explain the backlog in applications, which has thwarted investment and exploration.

On that front, Maqubela said 2,900 applications had been processed in the last financial year which ended 31 March. He did not provide an update on how many had been approved or the current size of the backlog.

Speaking on the sidelines of the conference, he told Daily Maverick that the backlog grows daily so it is hard to give a specific number on any given day.

But he acknowledged to the conference — as Daily Maverick has previously reported — that much of the backlog stems from Mpumalanga, where lots of poorly crafted applications are made for mining permits amid a suspicious scramble for coal.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Mining permits point to shady Mpumalanga scramble for coal

“The bulk of those applications that we get are mining permits in Mpumalanga. So when we talk about backlog, we are talking about Mpumalanga. Because it is two-thirds of what we have as backlog,” Maqubela said.

“And there is no chance that those mining permits will be approved because they apply on somebody else’s land... So this is the work that we have to perform and we are hoping that the cadastre will help us.”

The applications backlog has been under the spotlight since it emerged more than three years ago that it had reached over 5,000.

Daily Maverick reported in January this year that in a December parliamentary response, Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said that none of the 2,525 mining licence applications received up to that point in the 2023/24 financial year had been processed.

Read more in Daily Maverick: EXCLUSIVE — Mantashe reigns as the minister of no new mining as DMRE lacks admin capacity

The DMRE subsequently changed its story more than once, but at least applications are now getting processed.

Meanwhile, the cadastre seems to be on track and the wheels have not come off.

“It’s positive that the DMRE wants to get things done. There’s improvement — it’s just been too slow,” Errol Smart, CEO of Orion Minerals, which is focused on a copper project in the Northern Cape, told Daily Maverick. DM