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The effort to put South Africa’s mining industry back on a sustainable growth path is lacking one key ingredient: a shared belief in what the sector could and should deliver. According to Roger Dixon, corporate consultant at SRK Consulting, a fundamental stumbling block to the sector’s progress is that stakeholders simply do not agree on what they want to achieve.
“Industry stakeholders such as mining companies, government, unions, communities and civil society NGOs are deeply divided and suspicious of each other,” said Dixon. “This really provides no basis on which to forge a sustainable future.”
He noted that a useful recent definition of sustainability focused on the “shared belief” that tomorrow will be better than today.
“Such a shared belief appears to be elusive in our industry today, as the recent conflict around the prospect of mining at Xolobeni in the Eastern Cape clearly indicates,” he said. “This is despite the fact that the corporate world has long espoused sustainability as a central tenet in mining project development.”
Addressing the current impasse will mean confronting the challenge that the mining sector’s assets are finite – and are hence in themselves unsustainable. The required sustainability can only be achieved on the strength of concurrent economic development that the mining activity can enable and foster – and which can be carried forward after a mine has closed.