With global investment in Africa’s mining sector having dipped in recent years, industry players, governments and communities must work together to restore investor confidence in a region with massive mineral potential.
One of the clearest messages from this year’s Investing in African Mining Indaba was that Africa’s mining challenge is no longer about resource availability but rather about execution.
While the continent has abundant reserves, capital follows certainty, aligned infrastructure and credible partners – which form the pillars of effective execution. What stood out for us particularly at the Indaba is that mining strategies that are disconnected from infrastructure realities are becoming unviable. Where energy, rail, ports and industrial zones are aligned, mining and beneficiation follow. Where they are not, value continues to leak offshore.
This is the context in which we understand our role as BME, a division of the Omnia Group. Through our growing presence in Africa – where we supply high-quality, precision blasting and metallurgical solutions – we help to enable this critical alignment. We do this by combining technical capability, local presence and long-term partnerships that support sustainable mining outcomes across the continent.
BME’s evolving role
We believe mining in Africa is moving away from a volume-driven growth model to one focused on quality, resilience and integrated value chains. By offering the same high level of blast quality anywhere in Africa, we help customers drive down production unit costs with our customised solutions. Strong supply chains – ensuring streamlined mining operations – are also a vital aspect of the relationships we have built as a strategic partner to our African mining customers.
Our embracing of new technology applications, including artificial intelligence, means that we are driving more collaboration with technology companies. This is positioning the company to support customers’ efforts to better control and monitor their blasting and mineral processing activities.
Customers’ strategic partnerships with BME also contribute to their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals, enabling mining houses to meet greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets and to ensure the safety of communities’ water supplies.
Partnering for success
This year’s Mining Indaba once again reinforced for us that successful mining in Africa increasingly depends on the quality of technology providers and supply partners. This applies at all points in a project’s lifecycle. In so many of the discussions in which we participated, the message was the same: poorly structured or purely transactional partnerships are a source of risk.
On the other hand, carefully chosen long-term partnerships with the right companies offer miners a competitive advantage. As this message becomes more effectively adopted, it moves the industry away from short-term, asset-centric thinking towards integrated, outcome-driven collaboration.
Another takeaway was that, rather than focusing on individual disciplines, many of the discussions centred on how mining majors are managing overall execution risk. Mining companies are backing partners, technologies and operating models that improve predictability, reliability and cost control. This is certainly borne out by our experience in Africa, where our steady growth has been based on how we consistently deliver these benefits.
Generating shared value
It was clear from most of the Indaba speakers and sessions that the diversity, complexity and expanse of Africa’s mineral wealth requires better collaboration from all parties. There is general acceptance that the sector is expected to mine the continent’s resources responsibly, and to manage them equitably and sustainably. This in turn will protect the interests of the continent so that it derives maximum benefit and value from what is rightfully its own.
South Africa’s Minister of Minerals and Petroleum Resources, Gwede Mantashe, spoke during the Indaba about licencing bottlenecks and the slow pace of finalising the new mining cadastre. These delays were clearly impacting on investment and mining activity in the country. Infrastructure gaps in energy and logistics are further inhibiting the mining and exploration sector in the country, which is so critical for the growth and development of the overall mining environment.
Investors are choosing to channel their investment dollars into jurisdictions that can align resources with power, logistics and regulatory certainty. Until it establishes a reliable cadastre, for instance, South Africa will continue to lose investment to West and East Africa, whose regulatory frameworks and infrastructure are seeing significant improvement. Countries like Namibia and Botswana are also increasingly seen as stable, well-governed options for mining investors.
Stronger together
Alongside its deal-making focus, the Mining Indaba also serves as a platform for industry stakeholders to share perspectives on policy developments, capital allocation and the future direction of mining. This much is evident from the depth and maturity of discussions over recent years. The scale and diversity of participation – from governments and financiers to major miners and technology providers – have entrenched its role as the place where Africa’s mining narrative is set.
This year, the ‘Stronger Together’ theme of the Indaba was a clarion call to miners, financiers and governments that partnerships are no longer optional – they matter far more than before and are a commercial and social imperative.
For companies operating across the mining value chain, the conference is valuable not just to understand what is happening today, but where capital and policy are moving next.
