THE Fraser Institute’s 2025 Annual Survey of Mining Companies, a global dipstick of investor sentiments towards mining jurisdictions, has once again highlighted South Africa’s mineral potential. But it also demonstrated the urgent and critical need for a pragmatic, attractive regulatory environment to unlock untapped mineral resources.
Perceptions of the country’s mineral regulations as measured in the Fraser Survey are at an all-time low as the mining sector awaits the revised version of the Mineral Resources Development Bill, which was gazetted in May 2025 and did not, in its original form, encourage or sustain the growth and investment that the mining industry needs to realise its full potential to stimulate the economy, to create employment and to fulfil its social mandate.
The survey has shown the number of respondents who are familiar with South Africa was well above the cutoff threshold compared to past surveys, which means the results are a closer reflection to realities and lived experiences of those working in South Africa.
The Fraser survey remains the global reference of investor sentiment and confidence in investing in mining jurisdictions. While the quality of the rankings may be questioned – in terms of number of respondents and resulting authenticity of the rankings – investor perceptions from the latest survey towards South Africa cannot be discounted. The survey results reflect the realities for Minerals Council’s members who account for 90% of South Africa’s annual mineral production by value.
South Africa, with more than a century of mining history, is a country rich in mineral resources, with the world’s largest known deposits of platinum group metals, chrome, manganese and vanadium as well as sizeable gold, iron ore, coal and industrial mineral deposits. The Northern Cape is considered highly prospective for minerals needed for the global energy transition and technological advancement.
South Africa has regularly ranked in the second and third quartiles in the survey’s assessment of mineral potential under the assumption of optimal policy practices in a mining jurisdiction, meaning that if South Africa had policies attractive to mining investment it would be a global competitor for exploration and mine development.
As a country, South Africa is not attracting exploration expenditure to ensure long-term sustainability of its mining sector and to locate itself in the global supply chain for critical minerals.
The lifeblood of mining is exploration. Without it our mining sector has no future. In South Africa, real exploration expenditure was R738m in 2025 (R781m in 2024), down from a peak of R6.2bn in 2006, according to Stats SA data. This is deeply troubling for our sector and it needs urgent attention.
The Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources (DMPR) and the Industrial Development Corporation have set up a R400m exploration fund and Anglo American is contributing R600m more to it. This is a step in the right direction but South Africa needs approximately R12bn annually to unlock global exploration interest and capital, and this should be done through sensible laws.
For more than a decade, the perception of South Africa’s policy environment in the Fraser surveys has been overwhelmingly negative, rarely rising out of the bottom quartile of global mining jurisdictions in the past 15 years, underscoring why the mining sector’s economic contribution has shrunk over that time. In 2010, mining’s contribution to GDP was 8.6%, falling to 6.2% in 2025.
In 2025, South Africa ranked 64 out of 68 jurisdictions when assessed on its policies, underscoring the regulatory uncertainty created by the first iteration of the MRD Bill, which was quickly corrected by the department to remove the requirement for onerous black economic empowerment requirements in prospecting applications.
The unfavourable first draft has been the subject of extensive engagements between the Minerals Council and the DMPR, which is expected to release the revised Bill in coming weeks, with high expectations that the inputs and suggestions made by the industry to make the final Act conducive to attracting and retaining investment were incorporated.
However, the urgent need for policy coherence and a one-stop-shop to manage the mineral rights application process between departments, including those of mineral resources, water and sanitation, forestry, fisheries and environment, and agriculture is essential to expedite the granting of exploration and mining rights.
Cadastre
The long-awaited mining cadastre, which has been piloted in the Western Cape, is equally essential to streamline mineral right applications, removing corruption and introducing transparency of mineral right ownership and locations to bring South Africa to international standards of mineral right management systems to attract investments, particularly in exploration.
South Africa’s performance in the mineral attractiveness and policy perception indices, which are weighted 60:40 respectively in the combined Overall Investment Attractiveness Index, means the country remains poorly ranked as a mining jurisdiction.
It is ranked 10th out of 14 African countries in the Investment Attractiveness Index, which is topped once again by Botswana.
As the world scrambles for supplies of critical minerals, the slow pace of structural reform and execution of pragmatic interventions to make South Africa investible in an increasingly competitive and uncertain global economy cannot be stressed enough. Our economic growth continues to be hobbled by policy incoherence and a lack of urgency, increasing unemployment and a regression of social development, exacerbating the indignity of poverty.
It is only through bold and determined actions that South Africa will secure its role in the critical minerals supply chain and position the country for industrialisation and infrastructure development we need for economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation. South Africa has the minerals, but it does not have the correct policies to realise our mineral potential.
Mzila Mthenjane is CEO of Minerals Council South Africa
