Cape Town – South Africa Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan on Tuesday urged mining companies in Africa to empower the youth and re-skill their workers to counter the adverse effects of technology, while ensuring that they mined commodities sustainably.
Gordhan said technology in mining, especially the advent and subsequent takeover by robots and artificial intelligence, was threatening to wipe out at least five million jobs in the industry in the next few years. He urged miners to provide "responsive and responsible leadership" in a bid to contribute to national development and ensure that they added value to their products.
"We are no longer in an environment where we can extract and export. I would argue that what we require is a very different kind of paradigm for mining in the 21st century. Sustainability is as important as the bottom line for companies," Gordhan said.
"There should also be a great deal of examination of opportunities in Africa. This is the continent that is going to produce the new form of middle class. It is going to create a new centre of demand and future of global growth, very much like the kind of growth that China and India and others have created."
Gordhan was speaking at law firm ENSAfrica's VIP luncheon meeting with industry leaders on the sidelines of the 2017 Mining Indaba in Cape Town.
He said communities were now aware that globalisation had not benefited 99 percent of society, adding that a renewed social contract between government, business, labour and society was needed to create "new forms of partnerships" to benefit the majority.
Gordhan said it was "concerning" though that there were miners who were still implicated in acts of illicit financial flows, base erosion and tax avoidance, saying that mining companies had a greater responsibility to comply with government laws and regulations.
He commended companies who were setting up empowerment funds aimed at filling the junior-mining niche funding gap and opening up opportunities for young entrepreneurs to emerge in the industry and to create jobs.
Gordhan also assured investors that South Africa was a good investment destination with a robust economic system, saying that 90 percent of government's R2 trillion debt was in rand terms and only 10 percent in foreign currency.