JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Resistance to the nationalisation of South Africa’s mining industry is escalating with increasing audibility.

The Chamber of Mines of South Africa CEO Bheki Sibiya, who has for some time kept his powder relatively dry, now says: “I want to say to you that this is a battle not to be lost.”

As South Africa’s Constitution expressly prohibits the seizure of mines without compensation, Sibiya declares to Mining Weekly Online that, if need be, the Chamber will go all out to oppose any amendment to the Constitution that is not in mining’s best interests.

“I won’t hesitate to take this matter to the Constitutional Court,” Sibiya adds.

He was speaking in the wake of Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) chairperson Bobby Godsell saying that nationalisation was not only a “bad idea”, but that the debate around it is eroding policy certainty, business confidence and resulting in a deferment of investment across the South African business landscape.

At the same time, Ayanda Bam, one of South Africa’s few black mining entrepreneurs who owns 100% of his mining operations, made it clear from a public platform in Johannesburg this week that he is against relinquishing the ownership of his mining operations to nationalisation.

Sibiya tells Mining Weekly Online that next week the Chamber will seek a “signal” from South Africa’s Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe, himself a former mineworker and labour union stalwart, at its upcoming strategic planning session, and reveals that it will also be working with South Africa’s banks to discuss how the African National Congress Youth League’s (ANCYL’s) repeated nationalisation demands should be addressed.

He is also associating the Chamber with the stands against mine nationalisation by both BLSA and Business Unity South Africa (Busa), the latter warning that the tone of the public discourse on the nationalisation of land, banks and the mining industry was “weakening” South Africa’s ability to attract direct investment.

The Chamber is also at the vanguard of the empirical regional mine-nationalisation research study that is being undertaken under the auspices of Mining Industry Associations of Southern Africa.

All parties are very cognisant of the need to deal simultaneously with the issue of 51% of South African youth between the ages of 18 and 25 being unemployed owing to structural mismatches in the labour market, caused by traditional high-employment sectors no longer providing high levels of employment, including mining, in which there has been under-investment in the last decade.

While both the government and the ANC continue to emphasise that nationalisation is not official policy, the debate is being dominated by the ANCYL, which is using it to galvanise support around key succession battles ahead of the ANC’s 2012 National Conference.

In the interim, the ANC is conducting a “research project” to examine “Forms of State Intervention in the Economy”, including mine nationalisation, which is expected to be finalised during the second half of 2011.

BLSA says that it intends entering the debate in a “responsible way” by placing detailed information and arguments into the public domain, in particular seeking to interrogate the ANCYL’s five perceived benefits of nationalisation, which are that a transfer of ownership would lead to more taxes and jobs, better wages, better spatial development and greater political and economic sovereignty.

In the movie documentary, Mining for Change, Bam recalls on film how his Kuyasa Mining company entered into a lease agreement in a small area owned by BHP Billiton to become the first wholly owned black miner to sell coal into the open market.

“The important thing about it was that we owned 100% of our own operation. We managed it. We took all the decisions. We marketed our own coal. Whatever problems and opportunities that came out of that, they were ours,” adds Bam on film.

In this week’s CoalTrans presentation, he spoke of the importance of “running a decent business, paying people properly and making sure that the company is sound".

“We don’t see black people with decent mining companies, where they are able to say, yes, we should do that, and, no, maybe we shouldn’t do that. That’s still lacking, and that’s what we would see as being real progress,” he added at question time.