At the start of a year, especially one like 2026, the pressure is always to look forward. Forward towards growth. Forward towards opportunity. Forward towards fixing what is broken. But I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that forward momentum without reflection is not progress. It is acceleration without steering. The older I get, the […]
Ending the Year Hopeful, Grounded, and With Zero BS As the year draws to a close, it’s worth pausing, not to gloss over the difficulties, but to recognise the progress that did happen, often despite them. I find myself less interested in grand conclusions and more reflective about the people and moments that made the […]
The Week Gold Wouldn’t Leave the Headlines, and Why That Matters Far Beyond Gold Gold has been everywhere this week. Not just in the price charts, which seem to reset back to “normal” every few months, but in company results, dealmaking, exploration announcements, and investor conversations that stretch far beyond bullion itself. Even Crypto has […]
If You Felt the Earth Shift This Week…That Was South Africa Shifting Gears. Every now and then, the news lines up in a way that tells a deeper story, not because the events are related by design, but because the world is moving in a direction that drags us with it. This past week was […]
Can Africa Reset the Talent Equation? There’s a statistic that caught my eye recently: nearly 40% of STEM graduates across nine countries are unaware of what modern mining truly entails. And yet, the same survey tells us that 90 %+ of those engineers would consider mining if they believed the sector had a meaningful role […]
Reflections on my conversation with Dr Mteto Nyati at the Resources for Africa Johannesburg Indaba 2025 I didn’t expect a conversation about Eskom to become the most-watched video on the Johannesburg Indaba archive. Yet, it has…and that alone tells us something. In a country overflowing with discussions about the G20, geopolitics, critical minerals, junior miners, […]
When ESG first emerged in the early 2000s, it was not a political cudgel or a moral theatre piece. It started inside institutional investment as a simple, practical recognition that non-financial risks (environment, social externalities, and governance failures) ultimately end up as financial risks. Investors sought a way to value what balance sheets were not […]
Every person, every company, and every country tells itself a story. That story explains where we’ve been, who we are, and why we act the way we do. The same facts, told differently, can be a story of resilience or a story of resentment. The difference lies not in what happened, but in how we […]
Why South Africa’s 3–5% Dream Is Bullsh*t Until We Unblock The Plumbing A few months ago, in this very newsletter (Edition #7: Stop Digging and Start Building), I wrote about a possible roadmap to get South Africa to 3–5% GDP growth. I laid out what we’d need: investment, beneficiation, infrastructure, skills, and above all, political […]
My re-introduction to Mining Engineering at Wits & the Irony of AI’s Misleading Governance ‘Facts’ Last Friday morning, I had one of those truly humbling experiences. Instead of just ‘lecturing’ to the 3rd-Year Mining Engineering students at the University of the Witwatersrand , I found myself relearning some fundamental lessons. The context, as always, mattered. […]
