More needs to be done to improve employment diversity, corporate transparency and community involvement in the mining industry, despite substantial gains over the past two decades, mining executives said at the Investing in African Mining Indaba on Tuesday.
Four executives in a panel discussion on Tuesday, “Are we leading the right way to future proof African mining,” said big strides had been made compared with when they had started out in mining, more than two decades ago.
Sinead Kaufman, the CEO Minerals, Rio Tinto, said 20 years ago when she started out in mining there were so few people who she could look up to and say: “I would like to be you one day,” but this had changed substantially since then.
For instance, in Richards Bay, where the group owns the Richards Bay Minerals rare earth mine, some 55% of the team were women and there were no expatriates working at the mine, she said.
Mining companies needed to balance their short-term goals with their long-term goals, as it could take 10-20 years to begin working on an ore body from the first time since it was proposed, while shareholders typically require shorter term goals. Getting this balance wrong, such as only focusing on the short term goals. will impact profitability and also result in reputational damage, said Kaufman.
Minerals Council CEO Mzila Mthenjane said 30 years ago in South Africa the law barred women from mining, but the level of gender inclusivity on mines had increased from zero to between 15% and 18% since then, and these figures were rising all the time.
With Africa’s diverse cultures and more than 50 countries, mining industry leaders of the future would need to learn to lead across these boundaries, so as to forge closer collaboration, he said.
He said leadership was a privilege, but it came with great responsibility and accountability. For him, sustainability was about the ability to constantly change. “As a leader you have to say where the star is…” he said.
Marie-Chantal Kaninda, the president of Glencore DRC, said they operate according to the same corporate values and principles, in every market where the group operates, there are no special policies for different countries, even though the policies and people differ in every African country.
It was impossible to operate a mine and ignore the communities around it, she said.
Kaninda said one of the reasons for the great surge in transparency in mining was the onus on mining companies to report publicly on their operations, and the proliferation of social media meant that “if I lie I will be caught.” She said it was important for mining companies to acknowledge that the world has changed and has become much more transparent. A! And new technology had also increased the transparency of data in mining.
In addition, some African countries have also improved the transparency of their mining sectors and the related data, such as the DRC, where mining contracts were now being made public, something that would have been unheard of two years ago, she said.
Mining companies now operate in an environment where “access to information is expected,” but there have also been setbacks in transparency in some African countries, due to “political reversions,” said Kaninda.
Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) executive director Mark Robinson said proper engagement with communities around mines was not yet happening in many African countries, and too often this engagement only began when the mine started production, when it should have started at the exploration phase.
He said it was important not only that communities benefit from nearby mining operations, but that there were also mechanisms in place to ensure that those benefits were equitably distributed within the communities.
The delegates said the planning by governments on their mining industries needed to move beyond one political term, and needed to be extended to 20 to 30 years, which was the average life of a mine, to help ensure the mine’s sustainability as well as that of the communities surrounding it.
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