Strategic energy and resource investments can drive South Africa’s economic growth

Africa stands uniquely positioned as an under-explored reservoir of these critical minerals. South Africa, in particular, has the opportunity to transform this untapped potential into sustainable industries that can simultaneously drive economic growth, create jobs, and contribute to global climate change goals.

In light of these evolving dynamics, we anticipate that our budget may begin to reflect some of the strategic investments necessary to position ourselves for the opportunities ahead. These could potentially include:

• Continued support for the logistics reforms which have already started taking shape. These could include capital investments, investments in logistics infrastructure and supporting the additional role of the private sector.
• Continued support to attract mergers and acquisition activities in the exploration industry and investment into grassroots exploration through the implementation of the South Africa online cadastral system and increasing the capacity of the departments involved in exploration and mining license administration.
• Continued support for initiatives aimed at the security of mining and related infrastructure, and reducing the impacts of unregulated activities, such as illegal mining.
• Investment to enable access to base geological data for South Africa, through state-funded mapping, geophysics and a centrally accessible store of public domain exploration data.
• Additional budget for the fund already established to support the ‘missing middle’ between early exploration equity and feasibility study supported bank or debt financing for mining developments.
• Investment or financing of initiatives aimed at reducing our carbon emissions while maintaining energy security for large industries.
• Investment in country or regional integration infrastructure that supports energy security and advances mineral development, focusing on integrated solutions across transmission infrastructure, and renewables, as well as regional cooperation to unlock mineral investment opportunities, including ports, roads, rail and borders.
• Investment in skills, particularly in post-matric education to equip our people to support the mining and metals companies of the future.

The National Budget Speech will be a difficult balancing act as always, but we hope to see investment into the mineral resources and energy sector, which has the potential to be a long-term and sustainable growth engine and is a sector where South Africa still has significant competitive advantages.