The South African mining industry is not on its last legs, Manganese Metal Company chairperson and Zimplats and Impala Platinum nonexecutive director Bernard Swanepoel has insisted.

Speaking at the Fall of Ground Action Plan (FoGAP) 2025 Annual Day of Learning conference, in Kempton Park, on March 28, the former Harmony Gold CEO was bullish about the future of the domestic mining industry, despite reports outlining persisting decline – particularly in the gold and platinum group metal (PGM) mining sectors.

The decline is perhaps illustrated by falling employment figures in the sector, with Minerals Council South Africa having reported on March 26 that formal sector employment in the mining industry declined by 3 180 workers quarter-on-quarter to 468 898 in the fourth quarter of 2024. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of declining employment in the mining sector.

Data from Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) also shows that mining production shrank by 2.7% year-on-year in January following a 2.4% decline in December 2024. 

Stats SA reported that iron-ore was the largest negative contributor, retreating by 15.1%, while coal, PGMs and chromium ore also performed poorly. Combined, these commodities make up more than 65% of the mining basket.

Gold mining, although it has shown a slight uptick in production over the past few months, has been on a steep decline of more than 80% over the past 35 years, with a workforce that has shrunk from more than 500 000 in 1988 to just 94 000 in 2023.

According to the World Gold Council, South Africa’s gold mining industry now ranks twelfth largest in the world, whereas it was at number one 35 years ago.

Nonetheless, Swanepoel insisted that painting a picture of decline with these figures is “nonsense”.

“This is not a country where mining is about to die. I lived through the days of the [so-called] ‘sunset industry of gold mining’. Ask Harmony Gold how ‘sunset’ it was. 30 years ago, the gold mining industry was [called] a ‘sunset industry’. Today, we talk that nonsense about PGMs. Absolute nonsense. That narrative serves no purpose. That's not what our people want to hear,” he asserted.

In August last year, newswire Reuters reported that South Africa’s PGMs industry was in “terminal” and “irreversible” decline, mostly owing to PGM producers struggling against low prices and demand decline caused largely by the rise of battery electric vehicles.

Swanepoel did say the mining industry needed to show resilience and learn from its mistakes if it was to recover, however.

“Resilience is acknowledging that we had to [step] back, but not [give] up,” he said.

He added that dwelling on past failures and mistakes was counterproductive.

“We must maintain a positive outlook. Dwelling on the past, dwelling on the last incident, the last fatality where we failed again doesn't help us, other than to learn from that,” he said.

In this light, he praised the industry for making significant progress in terms of safety, recalling the early days of his career when there would be more than 100 FoG-related fatalities a year. In 2024, only 42 fatalities were recorded in total, with 13 of them attributed to FoG incidents.

“You guys are doing phenomenal work making our industry safer. We're not done, but let's just think of how far we we've come,” Swanepoel said.