JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The new Mining Charter is the flawed outcome of inadequate consultation with communities, the board of the Bench Marks Foundation said on Tuesday, when it warned that the document is poised to worsen stakeholder relations.
 
Bench Marks executive director John Capel condemned the new charter as a weakened piece of legislation that would result in more protest action.

“It’s as dangerous to South Africa as an abandoned mine shaft,” Capel said.

The foundation, chaired by Right Reverend Dr Jo Seoka, accused the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) of being entirely disingenuous in its claim that it had consulted.

“It boggles the mind that the DMR believes that speaking to a small number of chiefs in one mining area is representative of the views of mining-affected communities in South Africa,” Capel stated in a release to Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly Online.

He described the DMR’s "arrogant and high-handed" treatment of its own constituency as “mind-blowing”, and attacked the extension of the definition of a ‘black person’ to include naturalised Africans, Coloureds or Indians as a “thinly veiled attempt to promote the Guptarisation of the mining industry”.
 
Given that most communities were poverty-stricken, it was also an absurdity to expect them to buy their 8% shareholdings, especially in the absence of guidance on how these shareholdings would be implemented, represented and monitored, save that they would be held in trust by the charter’s newly created Mining Transformation and Development Agency.

The new charter’s approach to mineworker housing was also criticised for being seriously deficient.