Critical minerals need more than legal certainty. They need a fair balance sheet

Legal certainty matters for mining, but the central question is often left unasked: certainty for whom, on whose terms and at whose cost?

Christina Pretorius of Denys, which represents mining investors, is right that no country can build a sustainable mining economy on administrative dysfunction, contradictory rules, opaque licensing systems and institutions unable to make lawful, timely decisions. Yet South Africa’s mining debate has for more than a century focused mainly on the certainty capital requires: secure mineral rights, predictable regulation, uninterrupted production and returns that can be calculated within acceptable risk.

The people living on the land rarely receive the same certainty. They need confidence that their water will remain drinkable, their homes and land rights will not be sacrificed, and consultation will involve more than being called into a hall after the key decisions have already been made. They also need Social and Labour Plan commitments to become real obligations, not words on paper. When a mine closes, communities need to know who will rehabilitate the land, secure the shafts, manage the tailings and account for the social and economic damage left behind.

That changes the issue from regulatory certainty alone to bargaining power, distribution and the terms on which South Africa converts finite mineral wealth into private profit and public revenue. Minerals are not an ordinary commodity. They are inherited natural wealth, described in the article as society’s family silver, and once extracted and sold they are gone forever.

The basic test, therefore, cannot simply be whether an investor is willing to put money into a project. It must be whether the country and its people are genuinely wealthier after the mineral is extracted than they would have been if it had remained underground. The conventional mining balance sheet struggles with that test because companies carefully record capital costs, wages, electricity, transport, taxes, royalties and shareholder returns, while broader social and environmental costs remain insufficiently accounted for.