South Africa’s mining legislation is undergoing a major overhaul with the gazetting of a 108-page draft Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Bill by Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe on 20 May 2025. The Bill is open for public comment until 13 August 2025 and promises to reshape how the country manages its vast mineral wealth.

The proposed legislation seeks to cut red tape and accelerate regulatory approvals by aligning mining rights and environmental permits with existing laws such as the National Environmental Management Act and the National Water Act. This integration is expected to reduce processing delays and enhance investor confidence at a time when global competition for mineral investment is fierce.

Critically, the Bill introduces a dedicated framework for artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), offering a licensing regime designed to formalise and support this often-marginalised sector. It also bolsters enforcement capacity to curb illegal mining, which has plagued the industry and communities alike.

Other key features include new provisions for beneficiation—encouraging companies to process raw minerals domestically—as well as strengthened Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) mechanisms and clarification on ownership rights, particularly regarding chrome and platinum group metals.

The legislation also dovetails with South Africa’s new Critical Minerals and Metals Strategy, placing strategic resources like manganese, iron ore, and platinum at the centre of future industrial policy.

While the Bill is likely to spark debate—especially around expanded powers for government oversight and the new Section 11 change-of-control provisions—it represents the most ambitious mining law reform since the early 2000s.

Stakeholders are urged to study the draft and submit comments via the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy’s website. This is a pivotal moment not just for compliance, but for shaping the future trajectory of South Africa’s mining economy.

Not long ago, Social and Labour Plans (SLPs) made the news for all the wrong reasons. Failed commitments, delayed clinics, blocked roads. They stood at the frontline of South Africa’s mining tension—visible, contested, and sometimes violently enforced. These days, that spotlight has faded. But the conditions that justified SLPs in the first place—inequality, unemployment, unrest—haven’t gone anywhere. If anything, they’ve deepened.

Part of the silence stems from the mining industry’s fragile footing. According to Statistics South Africa, mining production declined 3.2% in 2023. Rail disruptions, water shortages, and power blackouts continue to choke supply chains. Export revenues have taken a knock. Gold, once the cornerstone of the economy, now lingers on life support—Sibanye-Stillwater is scaling back, and only Harmony has shown short-term gains. Many mines have shifted into survival mode, where even essential social investments begin to look optional.

Yet there’s another side to this. Perhaps this drop in pressure is also a reprieve. A moment of breathing space. With less media heat and fewer compliance deadlines forcing box-ticking behavior, companies now have room to recalibrate. Instead of rushing through templates to avoid penalties, they can rethink their social footprint—strategically, locally, and in dialogue with real community needs.

The Department of Mineral Resources and Energy (DMRE), for its part, is stretched thin. Oversight is reactive, enforcement inconsistent. Without visible accountability, communities have grown disillusioned. Promises are met with skepticism; silence, with resignation. Many now respond not with court filings, but with road blockades and cable theft—a signal not just of anger, but of lost trust.

Meanwhile, public discourse has shifted. Load shedding, green hydrogen, and the politics of just transition now dominate the conversation. SLPs—grounded in the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA)—feel like relics of a different decade. Some companies have even rebranded their efforts under ESG to align with global investor narratives, sidelining the legal obligations they still carry under South African law.

But this reframing hasn’t changed the lived reality on the ground. South Africa’s lower-bound poverty headcount rose in 2023 to over 18.2 million people—more than 30% of the population. In traditional mining towns like Emalahleni, Burgersfort, and Postmasburg, the mines remain the only real anchor—yet they are shedding jobs, not creating them.

What’s at stake here isn’t just reputational damage or regulatory fines. It’s the social license to operate—the informal contract between a company and the communities that host its operations. Once broken, that contract is hard to rebuild. And when communities see haul trucks moving but no schools being built, they don’t wait for consultation—they act.

This is not an appeal for charity. It’s a call for strategic realism. SLPs, properly deployed, are risk mitigation tools. They de-escalate tension, attract local talent, and create buffers against shutdowns. They build trust in places where the state has all but vanished. In short, they make business sense—if treated as a core input, not an afterthought.

The irony is that the current quiet may be the perfect time to act. With less political noise and fewer compliance flashpoints, forward-looking mining firms can use this moment to reset—less noise, more strategy; fewer tick boxes, more impact.

If SLPs are off the front page, it doesn’t mean they’ve done their job. It may simply mean we stopped asking whether they could.

As of 2025, the Employment Equity Amendment Act is law. The Department of Labour has drawn its line in the sand—57.5% Black representation at the board level in mining, 86.7% by the time you reach skilled technical work. Disability targets have doubled. For many mining houses already grappling with inflation, FX exposure, tightening margins, and crumbling logistics, this isn’t just a policy update. It’s an operational tremor.

But here’s what matters more than the targets themselves: The court cases challenging sections of the Act—especially around constitutionality and the limits of ministerial power—may determine whether this tremor becomes an earthquake.

The legal battlefield centers on whether the Minister of Labour can unilaterally set sectoral targets that, in practice, become rigid quotas—and whether such top-down engineering crosses the line into racial discrimination in reverse.

It’s not a left-vs-right, green-vs-blue issue anymore. It’s about governance, clarity, and operational certainty.

Most mines—especially those that export—are walking a delicate ESG tightrope. You’re balancing EU-aligned human rights due diligence with local procurement targets. You’re training more women in core skills, but facing shortages in critical trades. You’re rewriting SLPs and SDPs to show alignment—and suddenly, the goalposts move. Again.

If these court cases succeed, they could force the state to consult more deeply, legislate more transparently, and refrain from sectoral engineering via regulation without parliamentary review. In a rule-of-law-based democracy, that’s not red tape—that’s backbone.

The mining sector is often vilified for dragging its feet on transformation. Sometimes justly. But in truth, many operators are already exceeding targets in junior and middle management. The real pain points lie in skills pipelines, contractor oversight, and rural education ecosystems—not in unwillingness.

Blanket top-down enforcement without regard for real-world constraints risks alienating exactly those players trying to do the right thing. It risks weaponising compliance certificates as political tools. And it risks further disconnection between the state’s ambitions and the sector’s operational realities.

Regardless of which side of the political spectrum you fall on, here’s the unifying principle: Good policy must be challengeable. It must be defendable on both moral and constitutional grounds. If the courts uphold the minister’s powers, we live with the result. But if they don’t, the mining sector must use that breathing room not to relax, but to lead.

We have a moment—right now—to rethink transformation as a system, not a scorecard. And we should use it.