Are cabals victimising black-owned mining companies?

Are some JSE-listed mining houses being run as a mafia-like “rainbow cabals”? Perhaps this proves the point that it is not always what you know, but who you know.

Why does our minister of mines – knowingly – allow competent black-owned and operated mining companies to be victimised?

Is our minister of mines providing political “top cover” for unscrupulous mining houses? Certain companies have been awarded mines in return for luxury apartments in Dubai for a certain minister.

Who else is part of this cabal? Why does a major insurance institution, as a large shareholder in some mining houses, allow this to happen at a time it is wooing black clients?

Has the mining house in question told its foreign investors it is applying “selective sabotage” against black mining
companies? Speaking of community empowerment before an election is a ploy to gain votes. In fact, the
government has failed this particular community.

The community has derived very little to no benefit from the mining there. Perhaps this is because some tribal elders have been “bought”.

In one instance a vehicle was gifted to a chief who cannot even drive.

The rot goes deeper: how can employees at a mine own in excess of 50 houses in Rustenburg and one of the largest collections of Mustang supercars in South Africa?

Black-owned and operated mining companies in the Rustenburg area are proof the empowerment rhetoric is just
empty words.

Words to placate communities are empty words voiced by our politicians as their interests in the mineral extraction industry are of more value to them than supporting the communities that voted for them.

And these interests reach into the highest office of the land.

What is happening in certain areas of the mining sector makes the current focus on state capture appear minuscule.

But no one talks about this as it is private investors’ money. Massive loans are given to selected operators and never
serviced, while the opposite happens with black operators.

Yet they all work as subcontractors to the same listed mining house. When black operators employ manpower, it ought to take six to eight weeks to ready them for their tasks.

While the workers are being readied for their tasks, the subcontractor must pay their costs and salaries.

Fair enough? Well, it isn’t as the obligatory Covid test results can take up to two weeks!

This has a snowball effect on the cashflow of the black subcontractor. Typically, a mining house subcontracts a miner and provides the equipment and the subcontractor mines on behalf of the mining house.

To ensure the subcontractor is unable to fulfil his contractual obligations, the mining house has the equipment “removed” when work is stopped.

And this happens under the nose of the mine’s security company. Whereas the invoices of other subcontractors are rapidly paid, some wait 90 days. The drain on cashflow is intended to break the miners.

But rest assured, this is not a white-black thing. It is a “rainbow cabal” that has mining houses and selected ministers and their cadres eating at its table.

Perhaps we need a commission of inquiry to focus on the capture of JSE-listed entities and their top cover politicians?

-Mashaba is a political advisor