MINES minister Gwede Mantashe has set a new delivery date for South Africa’s much-delayed minerals cadastre, saying today it would be unveiled as early as “this week”.
Responding to questions on Talk Radio 702, Mantashe said: “The DG (director-general Jacob Mbele) will announce it this week. The work will start almost immediately”. Miningmx has approached Mbele for comment.
The Minerals Council declined to comment.
Mantashe has set several deadlines for the cadastre. In October, he said the supplier appointed to implement the technology would be announced by the end of that month.
An effectively running cadastre is critical in attracting new investment to South Africa. The current software, known as SAMRAD (South African Mineral Resources Administration), is dysfunctional and, owing to a lack of transparency, vulnerable to manipulation.
According to a report by the Daily Maverick this week, the department of mineral resources and energy (DMRE) did not approve any new applications in the 2023/24 financial year, ended March 2024.
A DMRE official subsequently told 702 that one reason no applications were approved is the time taken for applicants to complete environmental impact assessments. But several thousands applications from the previous year had been approved, he said.
A large number of applications for mining permits, especially for coal in Mpumalanga, had also choked up the current cadastre, the official said.
Said Mantashe on Thursday: “I want to use 2024 as a year to clear backlogs. We had a 5,000 backlog and that was reduced to 3,000”.
Mantashe agreed the new cadastre had been unnecessarily delayed, but he declined to blame the State IT Agency (SITA) which was tasked with auditing his department’s plan for a cadastre. “I can’t blame Sita,” he said. “Sita is auditing the process; it is their responsbility and they have now approved a system.”
He added that DMRE had visited Botswana and Namibia to “see how they used their cadastre system”, adding he was confident South Africa’s version “will run”.
Announcing the cadastre is only the beginning of the job for the DMRE. It has to train employees to operate it efficiently.
Speaking to Miningmx last year, Errol Smart, CEO of junior miner Orion Minerals and chairperson of the Junior and Emerging Miners Leadership Forum said: “It’s all fine and well to have a cadastre, but you’ll have to make sure that you have trained staff and that there are desktops and laptops and servers and reliable operators.”
Other complications loom, some of them legal.
SAMRAD’s deficiencies may have led to duplicate rights being issued on the same properties. For this reason, mining experts are concerned about possible legal challenges once the new system has been implemented.
