Joel Mafenya, who bills himself as the owner of South Africa’s only wholly Black-owned gold mine, has set his sights on mining minister Gwede Mantashe, whom he says has “done more to destroy the mining economy than anyone”.
This week, Mafenya scored a legal blow against Mantashe when the high court suspended the government’s decision to “cancel” Mafenya’s mining right over the Floxifor Gold Mine.
Mantashe had argued this was necessary, in part, because of deficiencies in Floxifor’s “social and labour plan” – but the court has now suspended that decision.
Mafenya is furious that he had to go to the court. “This Floxifor case is a naked example of how the ANC government has killed this country by collapsing the economy. And during the worst years when the Guptas were stealing everything, Mantashe was chair of that party,” he tells Currency. “There is still a dark cloud hanging over him.”
Mafenya argues that even as the ANC has paid lip service – and ploughed millions – into programmes designed to foster Black industrialists, it has asphyxiated Black entrepreneurs who have tried to make their own way.
The decision to withdraw his mining right, Mafenya believes, is retribution for embarrassing the government in 2021, when he wrote to President Cyril Ramaphosa asking him to send in the army to protect mines from attacks by zama zamas. “This exposed how poor a job the police were doing, and how little the government is doing to protect legitimate businesses,” he says.
Floxifor’s success has always been anything but certain. First opened in 1903, it had various owners who all struggled to make it work. Then, in 2011, Mafenya bought it out of liquidation from Canadian-listed company New Dawn Mining.
This, he says, was a “significant milestone in the country’s ongoing journey towards economic justice”, creating the first gold and diamond mine wholly owned by a Black South African.
Though Mafenya says he has since invested more than R90m of his own money into restarting the mine, he has either had atrocious luck or been the subject of a concerted sabotage effort.
Floxifor has been beset by just about every obstacle you could imagine: arson, ruthless mining mafia outfits trying to hijack the mine, widespread vandalism, and unscrupulous contractors trying to rip Mafenya off.
In September 2021, Floxifor made headlines when it came under attack three times in the space of a month. In the last incident, more than 20 thugs, armed with R1 rifles, invading the mine and set fire to it. That was when Mafenya wrote to Ramaphosa, telling him that the police “refuse to attend to the incident” and “I need immediate military deployment” to protect the mine.
He made no friends, however, by voicing the suspicion that the saboteurs were a group of corrupt officials, trying to drive him out of business so they could lay claim to the mining licence.
In the end, Ramaphosa provided no assistance. So Mafenya soldiered on, pouring more money into rebuilding the mine in the face of what he calls “illegal mining operators”.
Gwede steps in
Finally, on October 23 last year, Mafenya received a notice that said Mantashe had “decided to cancel your converted mining right”, which was only due to lapse in 2040.
A year earlier, he’d got a similar notice from Mantashe’s department, accusing Floxifor of not having implemented a “social and labour plan”, not reporting on its environmental management, and failing to “exercise the mining right”.
But Mafenya said he’d remedied all this, submitting the reports he needed to. While Floxifor had been on ice for many years, he said in his court papers that “the mine is now operational – a monumental achievement given [its] history”.
If Mantashe’s decision stood, he argued in court, not only would the 40 employees be out of work, but the 140 members of the nearby community who rely on the mine indirectly would also lose their income.
“Almost all of the members of the community, either directly or indirectly, rely upon the mine for their livelihoods. Wages either paid via the mine, or earned as a consequence of its operations, simply cannot be paid should the mine close,” he said.
And if it closed, he said, Floxifor would become a target for the proliferation of zama zamas, who have taken over many of the country’s 6,000 abandoned gold mines – as happened, notoriously, in Stilfontein, where 78 people died.
Now that the court has come down in Mafenya’s favour, suspending Mantashe’s decision pending a full review of what happened, Floxifor has a stay of execution. But it still leaves Mafenya grappling with much uncertainty.
“This is nothing less than an unjustified mine grab. Gwede Mantashe thinks he’s a law unto himself, but the ballpoint pen he uses to sign these orders is contaminated. So I’m going to fight this to the end,” he says.
Mafenya says he has spent R2m in legal fees to fight Mantashe in this case – money that could have been better used to create jobs in the economy. This is indicative of the lack of economic sensibility in the wider government, he argues.
“It is so ironic that one reason he gave for cancelling the licence is that I haven’t built enough houses for the community. But surely it’s the job of the government to build houses? Again, they’re blaming businesses for their failure.”
Sign up to Currency’s weekly newsletters to receive your own bulletin of weekday news and weekend treats. Register here.
