Panellists and delegates.

Welcome to this session which is focusing on strategies to accelerate the integration of women in the mining industry.

We are all of course aware of the famous liberation slogan that our foremothers directed at Verwoerd: “When you hit a woman you hit a rock”. And we also know the great slogan of decolonisation from the lips of Kwame Nkrumah: “seek ye first the political kingdom and all else will follow.”

Both of these slogans I present today for subversive reinterpretation, or at least as markers of what is insufficient in our progress to date, particularly in the mining industry, and what therefore remains to be contested and achieved.

First, I must point out: when we as women challenged Verwoerd with that slogan of defiance, we were making—understandably, given the temper of the times—a purely political point. We were a rock, metaphorically speaking. We were in those days a hunted people and our mothers were hardly able to set up houses against forced removals, let alone set up and own businesses including mines against economic disempowerment. So the political emphasis was entirely correct in its place.

And yet we also know now that the political kingdom can come and pass into reality while the economic kingdom remains painfully elusive. That is the harsh lesson of twenty years of South African political freedom: today we now realise plainly that economic freedom can chronically lag, as is the case with the empowerment of women in mining, then, that we need to change.

Virginia Wolf said for most of history anonymous was a woman however she has achieved much not for praise but to better the world. On Saturday our President stated that we have made great strides in improving the status of women in our country. Today, women account for more than half of our country’s active consumers at 53% in this industry we have moved from women representing less than 1% of the workforce pre-MPRDA introduction and today they represent just over 10%.

In 2010 we jointly amended the mining charter threshold and emphasised demographic targets and this presents a new and realistic that requires this new rock of a woman.

We need then, new rocks and new freedoms. The rocks that we need to break today are not the prison rocks, of limestone, that Madiba broke on Robben Island, and over which he shed tears and because of which he damaged his eyes. Those were real rocks. Nor were they the metaphorical rocks I have already mentioned: rocks that our mothers presented to Verwoerd.

The rocks now up for breaking are new and economic ones, such as the chunk of gold still gripped by the rock it had sprung from, which our very own Patrice Motsepe, some years ago, presented to Charlize Theron, soon after she had snagged an Oscar.

How then can we find more mundane and less Hollywood forms of gold, in everyday lives our of toiling women who, despite some strides, remain on the periphery?

Indeed it is one of the ironies of the position of women in our country today, that the very act of rising is at the same time an act of falling. By which I mean the very fact that a woman inherits a role can seem to invalidate or devalue the role. Nothing could be more perverse, or more bitterly amusing. When Malcolm X asked rhetorically, what is a black person with a Phd? He knew that this was still “a nigger.”

In a similar way, a woman who gets a significant deployment is still a woman, even to the extent that the deployment can even be called a demotion. We are accustomed to this: the fact of progress devalues the milestone.

We need to take this, then, in a light-hearted spirit. We need to remember, as one poet put it, that to live is to build a ship and a harbour at the same time: and to finish the harbour long after the ship has gone down.

We need, in other words, to keep our focus and the fundamental issue of economic freedom and transformation as we move forward, even while others seek to present progress as reversal. We need to remain all-rock-all-the-time.

We must ask uncomfortable questions: is there a South African woman CEO of a major mining house, since 1994, save for Cynthia Carrol who has since left Anglo American? Is it frankly not a disgrace that the mining majors have failed such an important transformation test?

Daphne Mashile-Nkosi, you are a trailblazer in that you are an executive chairperson of Kgalagadi Resources, an emerging mining company, where you are involved in day to day operations.

Is this perhaps not what we should all be striving for if we are to realise the dreams of the mining charter and of the women of 1956. Is it not about time that women are given their rightful place in the sun considering the fact that the mining industry played no small part in the institutionalisation of all forms of despicable discrimination of women?

Is it not about time that we move to a situation where women do not just buy and own shares and satisfied at being portfolio investors? Does this mean women, to put it bluntly, are not having the capability and capacity to own and operate these assets?

We do have sprinkling of success of technical women who have been given serious responsibilities in the industry. However, this is still like a curate’s egg. What about the women pipeline at various schools of mining engineering? Are we training and building a cadre of successful mining engineers and managers capable of running complex operations involving a number of sites and shafts covering different geographies?

Is organised labour doing enough to agitate for fundamental transformation of the mining industry? I am sure Faith will share some insights with us in the same way as Noleen and Virginia will do this afternoon.
Accordingly I would like to invite our panelists this afternoon to share their perspectives with us.

The panelist are:

    Ms Daphne Mashile Nkosi, Kalagadi Resources (case study)
    Ms Faith Letlala, Secretary of Women Structure, National Union of Mineworkers
    Representative, Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Invited)
    Ms Noleen Pauls, Chair, Women in Mining South Africa
    Ms Virginia Tyobeka, Head of Human Resources, Kumba Iron Ore.