Loaded for Bear: SA’s mining cadastre will take at least a year to be up and running

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses delegates on the opening day of the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town, 5 February 2024. (Photo: Dwayne Senior / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

By Ed Stoddard

5 Feb 2024

The provider for South Africa’s mining cadastre has been selected. Now the hard work begins.

The PMG consortium, which will be responsible for providing South Africa with a functional mining cadastre, will have its work cut out for it.

Hugo Pienaar, chief economist at the Minerals Council, told a press briefing at the Cape Town Mining Indaba that “the first 12 months is the design phase. This is not going to happen in 2024”.

loaded for bear South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses delegates on the opening day of the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town on Monday, 5 February 2024. (Photo: Dwayne Senior / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The lack of a proper cadastre – an online portal that provides the public with a detailed picture of a country’s geological wealth and the state of play of operations and mining rights – is the main cause of a backlog of mining applications that now stands at around 3,000.

Minerals Council CEO Mzila Mthenjane told Daily Maverick that the council had offered technical assistance to help the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE) address this challenge while the cadastre is being developed.

“We’ve offered as the Minerals Council, in the same way that the private sector is offering its capabilities to help with Transnet and Eskom and crime, to provide assistance with this. But we need to be invited in to understand what the situation is and to work with the DMRE to provide it with the capacity to address that backlog.”

Minerals and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said in prepared remarks to the Indaba that the implementation of the new licensing system “will take place over a period of time, as it requires migration of existing data from the old to the new system.”

On that front, the minister said the process will be done one province at a time and that migration to the new system is to be completed within 12 months.

That’s welcome news, but the road to the migration may be littered with potholes.

In Mpumalanga, for example, there are horror stories of piles of paper scattered around the DMRE offices. If there is any truth to these anecdotes, trying to make sense of that mess will be an arduous task, to say the least.

A functional cadastre should shine a light of transparency on to this murky state of affairs, and that will probably not be welcomed by some.

There are suspicions that the Mpumalanga branch and other DMRE provincial offices are tainted by corruption, which thrives without transparency.

The DMRE’s Samrad system – which is currently used for mining applications – is effectively dysfunctional, and that raises other challenges.

How do you migrate data from a system that doesn’t work? And can the data be trusted?

Because of Samrad’s meltdown, much of the processing of applications is apparently being done manually – hence the reports of documents strewn around offices.

How do you migrate a manual process to a digital one? There may quite literally be a paper trail, but that’s not something that lends itself easily to digitisation.

Then there is the scale of the backlog. Mantashe recently said it stood at around 3,000 applications, but is that indeed the case? Given how incapable the DMRE is, does it honestly have a handle on the situation?

Regardless of the exact number, the costs are real and huge. The Minerals Council estimates that the applications backlog is delaying R30-billion in investment.

South Africa’s share of global exploration expenditure has fallen to below 1%, from more than 5% two decades ago.

“The mining industry needs a vibrant exploration sector to replace the ounces and tonnes of the nation’s minerals mined each year,” the Minerals Council noted recently.

Mining is a long-term game. From the time a mineral deposit is discovered, it can take years before a boardroom will commit the investment to build a mine. And a mine takes years to build.

At least the cadastre ball is now rolling and the main partner in the consortium, Canada-based Pacific GeoTech Systems, is a serious player.

The Minerals Council describes it as “a globally recognised and respected company that has provided digital land resource management and permitting systems for Canadian provincial governments for more than two decades.”

But Mpumalanga is not Manitoba, as Pacific GeoTech is about to discover. DM

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