| |
SA should develop African charter
David McKay
Posted: Tue, 20 Sep 2005
[miningmx.com] -- HUMAN Rights Watch, the organisation that lifted the veil on AngloGold Ashanti’s activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), said South Africa should reinvent its mining charter for Africa, this time imposing corporate governance standards.
“There is huge potential for South African mining to take a leadership position,” said Anneke van Woudenberg, a Human Rights Watch spokesperson.
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch published a report, authored by Van Woudenberg, detailing two payments totalling about $9,000 made by AngloGold Ashanti officials to the Nationalist and Integrationist Group, a local party with a presence near AngloGold Ashanti’s mining prospect in north-east DRC.
Bobby Godsell, AngloGold Ashanti CEO, conceded at the time that the group had “messed up”. Van Woudenberg described the local political party with which AngloGold
Ashanti had consorted as an “incredibly murderous group”.
“The mining charter [on empowerment legislation] was a good document,” said Van Woudenberg. “Why can’t South Africa esablish a charter across the continent?,” she said. Woudenberg was speaking in a round table discussion with Godsell and Energem executive chairman, Brian Menell, at the SAMDA Global Mining Conference.
Human Rights Watch has leapt on the affair with AngloGold Ashanti owing to the high profile of the gold producer, even though the problem of consorting with local warlords in the DRC is a wider phenomenon.
Godsell said artisanal mining operations in the DRC were “a huge problem” environmentally – recovered gold is extracted using mercury – and because it fed organised crime. “Artisanal gold is stolen gold and gold sold to criminal warlords,” he said. Reflecting on actions by his employees to pay bribes, Godsell said the company erred in returning its representatives too early to the
troubled region.
But Van Woudenberg said the problem created by gold mining in political unstable and undeveloped regions was much wider.
“There is a difference between head office policies of corporate governance and on the ground practice,” Van Woudenberg said. Human Rights Watch was not opposed to commerce, but was interested in protecting human rights, she said.
“We need rules of the game,” said Godsell. He suggested developing strong village and town government in order to stop a culture of paying bribes. “The problem starts with the payer of the bribe,” he said.
| |
3% 
