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.