MINING INDABA
bo
go
le
CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
ge
ng
S e n ts
h o, C
Si
E O of
mb
a M
Olebogeng Sentsho, CEO of Simba Mgodi Mining
Incubation Fund and the 2019 winner of the
Leaders of Tomorrow competition at the Investing
in African Mining Indaba discusses some of the
challenges and opportunities in African mining.
Olebogeng, what is your view of the African Mining industry
in 2020?
There is a lot of mining potential in Africa. A lot is happening
in the copper belt of Zambia and the DRC, and there are also
amazing developments producing large amounts of tin. In my
view the copper belt will be the next hot spot in African mining.
But I’m also keeping an eye on Ghana. What is interesting about
Ghana is that because of the surge in gold sales, its banking
sector has matured and is starting to take off.
This proves the ripple effects of mining. Mining is a catalyst
for building an economy. I’m also very excited about the
developments a little further north. I’m optimistic; it’s not a rosy
picture yet, but it’s certainly a glowing one.
What challenges is the mining industry in Africa likely to face?
African mining is going to suffer because we still insist on
sending people underground. The labour force is going to remain
the Achilles heel of the African mining industry until mines decide
they no longer want to put people’s lives at risk. The minute we
make a decision to say: let’s get people out from down there; let’s
develop somewhere else where they’ll be safe – the sector will
grow. As it stands, I believe the fact that a wage dispute can carry
on for five months, cripple an industry and almost completely
obliterate a town – Rustenburg in South Africa was on shut down
for five months – is not how things should be done. I think we
need to start having very serious conversations with labour to
say, “how do we get them all out and safe?”
Extraction should never be a job creator. Beneficiation is a job
creator. So, let’s now shift to where the actual employment is
and where those long-term employment opportunities are. For
me, if we could just deal with the labour issue and we could deal
with the transfer pricing issue, I think that the sector will start
renewing itself.
What would you say makes the African mining different from
the rest of the world?
What people don’t know about small scale miners is that they
are experts at what they do. If you sit with them for a whole
day, they will take you through the entire production process
of whatever mineral. There are steps in there that you may not
know from the books, simply because they’ve taken the time
to study exactly what it is that they are doing, and they’ve
taken the time to absorb it. And so generous are they with their
knowledge that they will sit you down and school you. For me,
you find that nowhere else in the world, where someone will sit
you down, someone with nothing to give but knowledge, and is
willing to share it with you.
We get the privilege of being able to camp out when we’re
exploring and prospecting, so we are sleeping out in those
www. africanmining.co.za
African Mining Publication
jungles. It’s beautiful and its fun and the people are generous.
And you get so much of an education because you realise what
the mineral actually means to the people who live in that area.
You realise that the story extends beyond money – the story is a
legacy and is part of who they are and who they want to become.
You realise that African culture and mining is intertwined.
What can mining companies do better in 2020 to improve the
general mining environment?
It cannot be that mining companies are still buying products
from the Americas, Europe and Asia and ignoring the fact that
they need to be creating backward linkages to the countries
where they are mining. Host governments need mining
companies to create linkages and grow the economies where
they are. This issue of having all the inputs manufactured
somewhere else retards our mineral economy.
If our mineral economy was allowed to thrive, we’d have much
more local content. We’d also have far more young businesses
growing up in the mining industry, gaining their experiences in
the mining industry and becoming industrialists in the mining
industry. That’s not happening because mines choose to close
themselves in. We can’t even create proper economic clusters,
because we don’t have those factories to support those clusters.
I am convinced that the first thing they need to start addressing
is to allow African businesses to do business with them on a real
level. For me that is pivotal.
We need to see more women in the boardroom and more
women of colour. There are too few of them. What I feel is
happening is that most mining companies are forgetting that
they are in Africa. You cannot be mining on the African continent
and not speaking to Africans who understand the economy.
How supportive is the African mining industry of women?
They are trying very hard, but unfortunately, mining is a
traditionally masculine industry. It’s masculine because we
haven’t yet developed the technology to prioritise skill over
strength. Once this technology is developed, it won’t matter
if you are a man or a woman in mining, everybody will be
able to do everything. Once we change that dynamic with the
technology, I think then we’ll level the playing fields. Africa is
still very patriarchal, so you’ll find that its progression towards
supporting women in mining is going to be slow, but we can
help that type of thing along by allowing women to take on
leadership roles. I think that once we start recognising the
innate capability of women to lead in the industry, we won’t
need to support them anymore.
Which minerals are you watching in 2020?
We need to watch those battery minerals very closely because
big things are going to happen in that space, and we don’t want
African Mining
African Mining January 2020
29