Mining Weekly reports that Mineral Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe has warned that the SA mining industry must carry out skills development to prepare itself and its employees for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).  

Automated mining activities were no longer scarce and the 4IR was coming, he pointed out on Monday at a colloquium hosted by Unisa in partnership with the minerals technology and beneficiation council Mintek.  Mantashe highlighted that, while the 4IR was destroying old jobs, it was also creating new jobs and the country’s mines had to develop new skills as a result.  “The more we improve technology in the mining industry, the safer the industry is.  Technology must be part of finding solutions to many of these [mining] problems,” Mantashe exhorted.  Regarding the Mining Charter, he observed that it was “part of the broader South African transformation agenda. … The Mining Charter was but one tool that was drafted to guide us in the transformation of this society.”  Transformation was not about replacing white faces with black faces, but about real economic empowerment, the minister noted.  He cautioned that economic growth without broad transformation would only sustain previous patterns of inequality, while transformation without growth would be narrow and unsustainable.

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