By Tricia Sibbons, Director, Action for Southern Africa (ACT SA)
CAJ News – At the Joburg Indaba 2025, two senior Anglo American executives made public remarks that, taken together, reveal a disturbing narrative of corporate amnesia, deflection, and disregard for the social contract that underpins all industry in South Africa.
Setting the scene from the Anglo perspective, CEO Duncan Wanblad announced that “a generation of minerals exploration had been lost in South Africa owing to unsupportive policy for exploration in the last 20-odd years.” He described South Africa as “under-explored,” lamenting what he framed as a deficit of policy certainty and a political environment too volatile for capital.
With apparent lack of awareness of South Africa’s complex history, Anglo South Africa Chairperson Nolitha Fakude decried the burdens of navigating “five or six different government departments … which requires a lot of tenacity.”
Although these are familiar corporate complaints about bureaucracy, for communities living under the shadow of mining giants, these remarks demand scrutiny and certainly not concession.
Erasing Corporate History
Wanblad’s framing, that exploration vanished because of policy, is startling for its audacity and for its selective memory. The very policies he now casts as obstacles were, in fact, the instruments that once shielded Anglo American from predatory takeover, stabilised its operations, and preserved shareholder value.
Barely a year ago, the South African government and labour unions stepped in to block a hostile proposal by BHP to take control of Anglo American, a move that some dismissed abroad as “political interference.” That intervention, however, was a decisive assertion of sovereign oversight over a company built on South African soil and labour. Policy, in that instant, saved Anglo.
Beyond that, Anglo has benefited from extensions of mining rights, infrastructure guarantees, tax concessions, and critical relief for energy supply during the Eskom crisis. These supports, far from being “unsupportive,” have underpinned Anglo’s continued viability in a challenging environment.
So when Wanblad accuses policy for stifling exploration, one must ask: which policy? The safety and environmental mandates? The Mining Charter’s empowerment provisions? The rules that modestly constrain foreign appropriation? If those are “unsupportive,” then what Anglo truly demands is a surrendering of South African policy to corporate dictatorship.
However, despite Wanblad’s promises about keeping Anglo’s footprint in the country, Anglo American has been steadily retreating for a number of years from South Africa.
Since 2021, Anglo’s presence in and contribution to the South African economy has been in steady decline:
- 2021 – $4,049 million (tax and royalties) / $1,813 million wages and benefits paid. [Link]
- 2022 – $2,053 million (tax and royalties) / $ 1,681 million wages and benefits paid. [Link]
- 2023 – $1,210 million (tax and royalties) / $1,628 million wages and benefits paid. [Link]
- 2024 – $891 million (tax and royalties) / $1,560 million wages and benefits paid. [Link]
For a corporation to extract from a country and then blame that country for the void it leaves, is a problematic analysis on the part of Anglo’s management.
Punching Down
Anglo South Africa Chairperson Nolitha Fakude’s invocation of the burdens of dealing with multiple government departments — “you have to navigate five or six different government departments, which requires a lot of tenacity” — reveals much about what Anglo sees as the proper orientation to oversight.
Anglo has immense legal, financial, scientific, and political resources at its disposal, therefore navigating red tape is a trivial expense for its institutional bandwidth.
Meanwhile, communities living under mining operations suffer from polluted air, diverted and poisoned water supply, and land displacements. They struggle to secure even a single meeting, a single permit, or a single rehabilitation fund. People who are at the mercy of mining companies, experience inequality, lack of water, and no jobs – they do not have the luxury of facing five government departments to secure their future.
The truth is that many communities lack agency and Anglo’s elite benefit from that silence. What is different from pre-1994 is that Anglo operates within a state where everyone is supposed to play their part for a better life for all.
Bureaucracy in mining is a safeguard and each department – Minerals, Environment, Water, Trade and so on – exists to cross-check, to protect, and to prevent abuse in any sector.
To criticise policy that is designed to never repeat the atrocities of the past, is a threat to the human rights of those who are in a worse-off or less powerful position.
Fakude’s narrative of “tenacity” is dissonant when juxtaposed with 8 worker deaths recorded in South Africa by Anglo in the past five years which accounts for two-thirds of its global fatality toll in that period. Such comments reveal an amnesia about what Anglo took from South Africa pre-1994 to become the giant it was, compared to the tenacity that communities have to find thirty years later in order just to survive, to seek justice, and to demand fairness and accountability.
Indeed, Wanblad is right that “a generation has been lost”, and with those missed prospects goes ethical mining, ecological preservation, community engagement, equitable and inclusive growth, and the potential for civil society to contribute meaningfully. Yet, Anglo’s executives portray themselves as victims of a state that once saved them from their own misjudgements.
Anglo American are also selling off prized South African asset De Beers to the Botswanan, Namibian and Angolan governments.
More concerningly, Anglo’s broken promises to South Africa come at a time when the government is seeking industry support to realise its Critical Minerals Strategy of becoming a global resources powerhouse.
In Anglo’s merger with Teck Resources, it reiterated its commitment to South Africa, but we live in a world where analysis is also driven by history and if Anglo’s recent history is anything to go by, it is unlikely that South Africa will see these promises fully realised.
The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is arguably one of the most advanced and sophisticated documents ever created in the project of civilization, precisely because of the advancement of frameworks such as third generation rights. That includes self-determination, environmental laws, humanitarian assistance, right to peace, rights of linguistic and cultural communities, sustainable development and rights of future generations.
The paradox of the post-apartheid era is that those with the most resources still hold outsized leverage, and use constitutional tools most effectively, often to slow or dilute the very transformations the Constitution was designed to advance.
That dynamic helps explain the current groundswell for structural change: land reform, fairer distribution of wealth, living wages, and dignified work. It reflects a basic reality, that people on the lowest rungs of the economy cannot fully exercise civic and political rights while standing on precarious social ground.
A capable, democratic state therefore has a duty to pursue targeted, affirmative measures to secure substantive equality for communities historically pushed to the periphery.
Confronting and repairing the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, whilst building a cohesive national community, and driving equitable and inclusive development that yields real social justice and broad-based prosperity, is a very, very difficult balancing act.
And that is why we have policy to guide us. So that we don’t have to rely on the ethics, or lack thereof, of mining giants.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tricia-sibbons-she-her-19666810/details/experience/
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