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.