Minerals Council losing confidence in Govt’s mining cadastre

THE Minerals Council South Africa on Wednesday expressed concerns about the country’s new minerals cadastre which is being rolled out by the government.“The longer it takes to be delivered, the less confident we become in terms of what the final product will look like,” said Mzila Mthenjane, CEO of the Minerals Council. “And unfortunately, the longer it takes, the more speculation we hear in terms of why it is not being delivered on time.”Mines minister Gwede Mantashe delayed the implementation of a mining and exploration rights application and management system to October last year. It was only the latest of a series of overshoots dating from 2024 when Government appointed a consortium led by Canada’s Pacific GeoTech Systems to design a new cadastre.It was intended to replace SAMRAD – the South African Mineral Resources Administration System – which has been found to be suboptimal in that it lacks transparency and cannot tackle the complex demands of minerals rights ownership.The new cadastre is being implemented in the Western Cape province on a trial basis but the Minerals Council’s requests to post questions to Government while demonstrating the system live have been ignored.“We’ve asked the DMPR (department of minerals and petroleum resources) to come and present to the Minerals Council an update on progress with the implementation of the cadastre,” said Mthenjane. “The last demonstration we saw was when it was being given to Parliament, but that did not give us an opportunity to be interactive in terms of asking questions.“So we continue to ask the DMPR to come and engage directly with us, so that we can get a real understanding of the nature and the success they report in terms of where it has been implemented in the Western Cape.“That will give us a good basis to understand what the potential challenges may be when they roll out the cadastre in the more complex mining regions,” he said.The post Minerals Council losing confidence in Govt’s mining cadastre appeared first on Miningmx.Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Mining.com