[miningmx.com] — SO much for industrialisation and the services economy. South Africa should have stuck to mining – gold mining in particular.
While the country diversified into easy-come, easy-go industries such as tourism (so that airport syndicates can rob them before they spend money in the economy), manufacturing (one example: South African taxpayers cough up R30bn/year to have Germans and Japanese build cars here) and banking (I for one want to switch out of Saswitch) we’ve allowed gold production to slide to its lowest level since the 1922 strike.
The Chinese now mine more gold than we do, but we switch off power to the mines first.
Madness.
As I write this, an ounce of gold is quoted at $1 009. By the time you read this it could be much, much higher. And if the US rescues another bank in the meantime, it’s anybody’s guess.
That I feel it necessary to point out the price of our most precious commodity (leave platinum to the catalytic converters – nobody’s ever written a song or poem about exhausts) is in itself an indictment of how South Africa lost its way.
A few decades ago the gold price was watched as eagerly as the rand is now. Sadly, we’ve turned from a nation of gold bugs into currency bugs. As if paper and plastic are as good as gold. You can’t default on gold – gold isn’t sub-prime.
The last time gold had it this good was in the early Eighties and at the time the US dollar gold price translated to not more than a grand an ounce. Today it’s R8,000 and, who knows, tomorrow it could be R9,000/oz thanks to a depreciating currency and a rampant gold price.
Think about it: You may have been disappointed to receive a Krugerrand for your 21st birthday instead of mom’s old car, but you may soon be able to buy a brand new Tata with one.
The streets up North aren’t exactly paved with gold (there’d be fewer potholes then), but we are still sitting on a gold mine in Egoli.
Some have protested about mining the old dumps – such as the one underneath the Top Star drive-in in old Jo’burg – for heritage’s sake. Nostalgia isn’t the spirit of Gauteng: if things go on the way they are it may soon be viable and advisable to relocate everyone on the West Rand and turn it into an open cast mine from Roodepoort to Westonaria.
Here’s why: During the 1998 Asian currency crisis the South Korean government asked the people to hand over all their chains and earrings and the ingots they were keeping under their beds to shore up the won. Now with the rand again being shafted how long before we’re going to be asked the same?
And then there’s the spectre of the United States running out of funds bailing out their banks and mortgage holders and being forced to open up Fort Knox to pay for the mess they’ve created.
Whichever way you look at it, the window of opportunity to make the most of the new gold rush could be shut soon. South Africans can’t hold physical gold and it’s nothing less than a travesty perpetrated on citizens. We have no choice. It’s time to grab a shovel and start digging.
