CAPE TOWN (miningweekly.com) – JSE- and NYSE-listed gold mining company Sibanye was going all out to win the hearts and minds of all of its employees, its CEO Neal Froneman said on Wednesday.

Froneman, who was taking part in a panel discussion at the Investing In African Mining Indaba, together with Exxaro CEO Sipho Nkosi and Ivanhoe Capital executive chairperson Robert Friedland, said it was essential that the mining industry changed the way it did things.

He singled out the migrant labour system of the mining industry as being clearly unsustainable and said the company was working on finding ways to get workers home more frequently.

Nkosi said business needed to start to be a little less timid and more vociferous.

“We mustn’t just talk in the corner but go and confront the issues as they are,” he said during the panel discussion.

Though conceding that right now the South African investment climate was cloudy, and optimistic Friedland said probably in a year from now the situation would be very different.

The challenge was to attract capital when commodity prices were down and the problem for government was to keep the playing field level.

But there were advantages of mining in South Africa, which had  a strong judicial system, world-class infrastructure and tremendous geological potential for all minerals.

Ivanhoe has a stated ambition of making its Flatreef platinum project in South Africa’s Limpopo province a model twenty-first-century operation.

Notwithstanding the controversies of the moment, with the rand weakening from R8 to R11 to the dollar, South Africa could not be a more attractive place to invest currently.

“There’s lots of grounds for optimism and there’s certainly no ground for panic,” Friedland said.

Nkosi said that while South Africa’s current investment climate was very tough, he was sure that the investment sun would shine again in the future.

“We need to go through this pain so that align things,” he added.

Froneman said the perception around strikes was of great concern to potential investors and called for a process of strike ballots.

“Right now we have strike issues where a small minority takes out a majority on a strike and it’s not in the workers’ interests,” he said, adding that the Labour Relations Act was in need of reform.