Is there morality in mining?

Morality – noun (principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behaviour).

Mining is a trade that makes and breaks nations. Morality is often the differentiator between those two outcomes.

It builds roads, towns, and schools, sometimes it leaves scars that last for generations, not only on the physical environment. I have spent my working life in those contradictory spaces: underground, in boardrooms, on the front line of negotiations with unions and the government, and at the luxury offices of the fund managers in Boston and Cape Town.

That history matters when we ask whether mining has morality; it matters because morality in this industry isn’t an abstract exercise in virtue-signalling. It is more nuanced, messier, than the carefully crafted SENS releases or the PR approved self-congratulatory version in the annual report.

It is a set of hard choices with human, environmental, and economic consequences.

When my Dad lost his job as a carpenter on the Rustenburg mines in 1977, it changed the trajectory of our family’s future. My own life, my career options, and my own view of the world and how mining impacted people were permanently influenced by a moral decision behind that traumatic event.

If there is one simple principle I’ve learned, it is this: morality in mining is not found in a corporate slogan. It is found in the trade-offs between jobs and safety, between national ambition and investor discipline, between short-term community relief and long-term sustainability. People want a ‘moral’ answer that is neat.

It is easy to equate any decision that negatively impacts us as immoral and those that benefit us as moral. The truth is messier: every decision potentially creates winners and losers. Good leaders are judged not by their absence of mistakes but by whether they face those trade-offs openly and accept responsibility for the outcomes.

Let me be frank about my own record.

I grew a company from a single struggling mine into a significant international player, and I made decisions that were unpopular, some strategic, some operational, and some brutally tactical.

There were moments when the boardroom required a cold calculation: cut costs (which often meant retrenching people), consolidate assets, and accept short-term pain to preserve the group’s future. I led bold plays and, yes, contested takeovers that some called ruthless.

History will decide whether those moves were strategic foresight or reckless ambition. I will not hide from either judgment.

People ask: Would I do the same things again? The honest answer is: sometimes yes, sometimes no.

There are choices I would make differently because I have learned more about the social fragility around mines, how a decision that seems rational in a financial model can devastate a single community’s livelihood. Other decisions I would repeat because they preserved jobs at scale or kept an operation alive that would otherwise have ceased to exist, throwing thousands more out of work.

Choosing is an exercise in imperfect information. Moral clarity is rare; moral courage, however, is something you can cultivate. Because leaders will never have perfect information, moral courage is what stands between courageous leaders and those who hide behind cowardly inaction.

We must also name the elephant in the room: regulation and politics. When government policy is inconsistent or captured by patronage, the industry cannot safely invest in the long term. When the law is applied unevenly, or when political expediency trumps rigorous assessment, the moral compass is distorted before a shovel even hits the earth.

We cannot expect companies to be moral heroes while the system rewards short-term gains (whether it is rent-seeking or shareholder returns) and punishes steady, disciplined investment. A moral mining sector needs reliable rules and institutions as much as it needs conscientious executives. Let’s have an honest conversation about policy, regulations, industry practices, and incentives, and how that impacts on ones moral decision-making.

But what of environmental stewardship and the new moral currency of our day: critical minerals? I am not blind to the ethical urgency of climate and the need for more metals.

South Africa sits on resources that the world will need: manganese, chrome, vanadium, and platinum group metals, perhaps more critical minerals than most appreciate. The question isn’t whether we should mine them; it is how we mine them, who benefits, who bears the risk, and who pays to repair the damage afterward.

If we exploit without beneficiation, do we leave value on the table and long-term dependency in our wake? If we refuse to extract at all, others will, and the jobs and tax base will go with them.

That is not a moral escape hatch; it is intellectually lazy to avoid the moral responsibility to make extraction count for the country.

I am frequently accused of being blunt, and yes, perhaps I am, but bluntness and morality are not opposites. Speaking plainly about difficult trade-offs is a moral act when it forces all stakeholders to confront real consequences instead of hiding behind the safety of groupthink and comfortable world views.

I have tried to use all my platforms to champion juniors, to push for exploration, to speak out about corruption, and to insist on competence in leadership, because these are the concrete levers that improve outcomes for shareholders, workers, and communities. We must demand better governance, better training, and better deployment of royalties and taxes, so that the proceeds of mining ultimately fund schools, clinics, and new industries.

So what would a moral mining sector look like in practice? A few propositions:

  1. Transparent trade-offs- Openly share the assumptions behind decisions that affect jobs and communities. Let the debate be informed, not ideological. When it comes to large-scale retrenchments in South Africa, the Section 189 process is built around this concept. Unfortunately, the processes around the SLPs (Social and Labour Plans) are not as effective.
  2. Rigorous accountability– If a company benefits from public resources, there must be clear, enforced obligations for rehabilitation and community upliftment. Similarly, the taxes and, especially, the royalties and levies collected from the mines should be used to the benefit of those impacted by the mine. Capital allocation should not be the exclusive domain of shareholders and the well-aligned executives; it should be the basis of all discussions between stakeholders.
  3. Local beneficiation- Collaborate in new ways with competitors, the community, and small businesses in order to capture more value domestically rather than exporting ore and importing all the required inputs. Hot air, empty promises, and unrealistic targets are all that we can expect from a government that is ideologically stuck in the mindset of demanding things into existence.
  4. Practical skills and honest employment strategies- Rewarding Jobs and enabling upskilling, that are not built on transient promises of job security
  5. Stable, enforceable policy- The state must be predictable and fair; mining cannot be moral in a system that is not.

These are not lofty ideals; they are pragmatic checkpoints. They are the difference between being accused of immorality and being held to account for reasonable, defensible choices.

I close off with an appeal.

If you work in mining, on the ground, in policy, in the city, do not make morality an ornament. Make it operational. Bring your trade-offs into the open. Defend your wage increase demand, or your counteroffer, your decision to defund coal mining, your reluctance to implement a transparent cadastral system, or your decision to lay off workers to defend your dividends.

If you are outside the industry, hold it to account, but invite it into constructive conversation rather than reflexive condemnation.

We will not solve these problems by criticising one another from moral pedestals. We will solve them by rolling up our sleeves, naming the hard choices, and designing institutions that distribute both risk and reward fairly.

Is there morality in mining?

Yes, but it is hard-won, imperfect, and collective. The question should not be whether mining can be moral, but whether we are prepared to do the tedious, difficult work required to make it so.

~ Z. B. S