JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – South Africa has moved past the point of job creation and needed to move into creating “job creators”, surface gold-mining company DRDGold CEO Niël Pretorius said on Thursday.

Speaking at the company’s first-quarter results presentation, he said that social capital has become the responsibility of every South African to ensure the future of the next generation.

“If you think that you can just manage your own little group of people, then I think you are deluded, because in South Africa, the job is just simply too big for government. They do not have the resources, the people, or the skills to adequately cover the entire country,” Pretorius said, adding that it was up to corporate companies to create “little pockets of stability and excellence”.

He indicated that, should this not be accomplished, the country would produce another generation incapable of providing employment to other citizens.

Pretorius pointed to DRDGold’s own initiatives wherein affordable skills development programmes, which “go beyond mining”, were available to communities surrounding the group’s Ergo operations.

DRDGold’s college, in Gauteng, offered courses for, besides others, aspiring electricians, autoelectricians, technicians and small business owners.

A three-year part-time entrepreneurship course was also offered, covering the full spectrum of owning and running a small business.

Further, the company had established a satellite facility at the college offering extra classes for matric maths and science students, and hoped to extend this to accountancy.