Minerals Council says government ignored its input on MPRDA bill

The Minerals Council South Africa says the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources went ahead with its draft MPRDA amendment bill without taking the industry's input into account, despite two engagement sessions held in the run-up to the gazettal.

Council chief executive Mzila Mthenjane said the sessions were “very high level” and gave the industry no access to the underlying legislative text before it was published. “We did have engagements with the department, but we cannot see where our inputs were taken into consideration,” he said.

The prospecting rights fight

The Council's central recommendation was that new empowerment shareholding requirements should not apply to prospecting rights, on the basis that exploration is already the highest-risk, lowest-return part of the mining value chain and does not need an additional regulatory burden layered on top. That recommendation does not appear in the bill as gazetted.

“Exploration is the highest risk part of the mineral value chain and imposes an unnecessary burden on prospectors,” Mthenjane said. Mining lawyer Lili Nupen of NSDV was blunter about the broader amendment package, asking simply: “Why do we need to go and change dramatically what we currently have?”

Why it matters

Prospecting is where South Africa's mining pipeline has struggled most. The country's share of global exploration spending has collapsed over the past two decades, and industry figures argue that adding empowerment compliance costs at the prospecting stage — before a project has even proven it is viable — will deter exactly the junior and mid-tier explorers the critical minerals strategy is meant to attract.

The episode also highlights a recurring pattern in South African mining policy: government consultation processes that industry says produce little visible change in the final legislative text, feeding distrust that has previously ended in court.

What happens next

With the bill in its public comment window, the Council was expected to lodge a formal written submission pressing again for the prospecting rights exemption, while bracing for the possibility that the empowerment provisions survive largely unchanged into the version eventually tabled in Parliament.

Sources

• Miningmx: Minerals Council blindsided by Govt's MPRDA bill, 27 May 2025

Photo: The Union Buildings in Pretoria, seat of the South African government. Ruby D-Brown, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.