Zwane’s actions show he’s a praise-singer

South Africa's minister of mineral resources, Mosebenzi Zwane. File picture: Mike Hutchings

South Africa's minister of mineral resources, Mosebenzi Zwane. File picture: Mike Hutchings

Published Oct 14, 2016

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Mineral Resources Minister Mosebenzi Zwane does not have an exceptionally stellar record in government, writes Dineo Faku.

As South Africa battled with the fallout of the National Prosecuting Authority’s (NPA) decision to serve Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan with a summons to appear in court on fraud charges, Mosebenzi Zwane, the Mineral Resources Minister, was mumbling some concerns about the attacks on the government and President Jacob Zuma by some stakeholders in the mining sector.

Twenty-four hours after NPA national director Shaun Abrahams called a press conference to announce Gordhan, former SA Revenue Service senior officials Ivan Pillay and Oupa Magashule would face fraud charges, Zwane said he wanted to convene a high-level meeting with the sector to discuss this, and issues on health and safety.

Zwane does not have an exceptionally stellar record in government. He lost the little shred of credibility he had when he called for a probe into banks after they closed the accounts of the politically linked Gupta family.

The Guptas are what he is notoriously known to have a soft spot for from his time as an MEC in the Free State.

To be fair to Zwane, mining was always going to prove a daunting task to oversee. He just did not come across as a person with the required persona to deal with one of the most notorious industries in South Africa.

Mining helped build the South African economy on the back of cheap labour when diamonds on the banks of the Orange River were discovered in 1867.

Fast forward to 2016 when risk averse investors prefer to plough their monies far away from a sector that is reeling under growing uncertainty.

Delegates at the Joburg Indaba on mining last week questioned how the sector had made serious blunders like acquiring massive debt during the good times.

Undue influence

Fund managers highlighted the undue influence of politics on the country’s mining and how non-mining shares, including the likes of Pick n Pay, were being more favourably viewed, because mining had been unstable in South Africa over the past three years.

One of the speakers, former finance minister Trevor Manuel, called on Zwane’s department to clean up its act. He pointed to the Elandsfontein phosphate mine on the southern edge of the Langebaan Lagoon, 120km north of Cape Town, to show just how inconsistent the law was being applied.

Describing the entire ecosystem around Langebaan Lagoon as “environmentally sensitive”, he asked how the mine was granted a permit to operate when there’s no water licence agreement in place. Manuel said the government had to step up to the plate to root out corruption and address critical issues like policy uncertainty. And so when the indaba highlighted growing disdain for Zuma’s leadership, it also pronounced on Zwane’s stewardship of the industry.

That AngloGold Ashanti chairman Sipho Pityana received a standing ovation from delegates after describing how Zuma’s lack of moral integrity had ­impacted on the country’s credibility, showed just how much the gulf had widened between the government and business.

When Pityana described Zuma as a “sponsor-in-chief of corruption”, he was also saying only Gordhan stood between the country and the precipice.

The only good news from the indaba was the absence of a likelihood of a strike in the platinum belt this year, as the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) said it was confident of the progress it had made on wage talks. Amcu president Joseph Mathunjwa said the talks were at a critical stage.

Chris Griffith, the chief executive at Anglo American Platinum, said both the company and the union were close to each other, so the country is likely to be spared another drawn out strike.

This time, the negotiations between Amcu, Amplats, Impala Platinum and Lonmin have been carried out far more diplomatically than they were back then, even though the union has retained its double digit demand for the basic salaries of the lowest paid worker to increase to R12 500 a month.

Zwane is not so worried about what all this means for the future. He acknowledges that 2016 has been a particularly difficult year with accidents and fatalities at mines. But his biggest anger is not the union rivalry in the industry that has already cost lives. It is the mining bosses that have taken a view on Zuma.

So for now, while South Africa worries about the state of governance and the economy in the country, Zwane wants to know why the industry hates Zuma so much when he himself has nothing but love for the president.

And for that he wants the mining bosses to come to his office and explain themselves. The rest of their worries, such as the mining charter, will probably be tackled at a later date. But such should be expected from a man, who like his co-operative governance and traditional affairs counterpart, was plucked from the obscurity of a little town to do nothing but defend Zuma and the Guptas.

* Dineo Faku is a Business Report journalist.

* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.

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